Herding Sheep

I was posting a long reply to a comment over at Electric City Weblog (“All of You Voted For Me), and when I clicked “submit”, the connection was interrupted, and so the world now suffers. All that I wrote was lost.

Here’s the comment that set me off – in true blog form, it is written by “anonymous”, probably someone fearing “the man” – the boss knowing that he is blogging during work hours:

You know what is amusing is that Fox news is always accused of “lying” but I can’t think of it being involved in the sort of big whoppers that other major news organizations have been guilty of.

All news organizations make mistakes, that’s just part of the nature of the beast, when you are putting together a lot of information on deadline. But Fox hasn’t had anything close to the Dan Rather fiasco, or fiascos at other media outlets.

The New York Times had the reporter who was making up stories for months and months, Jason Blair. The Times still hasn’t lived down the famous Walter Duranty, I think his name was, who covered the Soviet Union in the 30s and 40s, and it was later discovered that he was sugarcoating and making up things up in order to make Stalin’s Soviet Union look a lot better than it really was. He won a Pulitzer, and many feel the Times should return the award for the phony reporting.

CNN had the Tailwind scandal and the situation where it admitted going soft on Saddam in order to keep reporters in Iraq.

NBC claimed GM trucks had unsafe gas tanks, and in the course of its investigation, it turned out that they rigged the tanks with explosives to make them look more dangerous than they really were.

The Washington Post’s Janet Cook won a Pulitzer for her reporting on an impoverished young boy, and then later admitted she made the whole story up.

The New Republic has had several writers who were discovered to simply be making up stories out of whole cloth. (One of them was the basis for a pretty good movie…Shattered Glass I think was the name)

Now, an impartial observer might say that Fox is the only news organization that doesn’t lie. Only a hyperpartisan would say that, compared to others, Fox is a lying news source.

I suggested to Anon that the right wing, in addition to not being able to handle nuance, was susceptible to anecdote as well. Every word that he wrote might be true, and yet mean squat. All those isolated incidents tell us nothing about the news gathering process. Who are the people who give us news? Who do they work for?

Most news gathering organizations are public corporations mostly owned by the investing class. Their most influential people within are their management and boards of directors. There are very few “liberals” among them. The boards especially are an interlocking set of corporate moguls and retired military officers and politicians (collecting service rewards). (NPR and PBS, supposedly independent of this structure, are heavily funded by the same people in the form of grants. In addition, conservative politicians watchdog them and create a stink should they step out of line.)

The public interface with news organizations are individual reporters and talking heads. But behind the reporters are authority structures, and they are subject to largely unwritten rules of behavior regarding what is a viable story, what is not. They have flexibility, but for the most part they live in their boundaries. If one were to ask any of them about their perceived independence, the answer would be “No one tells me what to report and write. No one!” This leads to the overall impression on the right wing that the media is comprised of liberals working for themselves.

And there is considerable leeway within the system. Abu Ghraib was exposed (and then covered up). Torture has been exposed, though we only saw the tip of a massive iceberg. (It is now covered up again.) But for the most part, reporters cover conventional stories in a conventional manner – they collect news from government and corporate authorities, reword it, and pass it on to us as original reporting.

The vetting system for advancement within news organizations is very similar to the system for advancement in our school systems: In our schools (outside of those seeking purely scientific careers), people are graded on how well they comply and submit to authority and internalize our propaganda system. Those that don’t do so well are given bad grades, and these days are drugged into compliance. ADHD they call it – inability to conform.

In American news coverage, there are times when the velvet glove is removed, and the steel fist is apparent to everyone in the business. When the decision was made to invade Iraq, all of our news organizations went into compliance mode. There was no debate about the legitimacy of the objective or the motives of the officials carrying it out. It was no different when Clinton attacked Serbia in 1999, or when we invaded Vietnam in the 1960’s, Korea in the 1950’s.

(Interesting footnote: In 1998, Clinton was set to launch rocket attacks on Iraq. His Secretaries of State and Defense, Albright and Cohen, attended a town meeting in Dayton, Ohio, that had been infiltrated with protesters. It was supposed to be a propaganda rally, like a two-minute hate, but instead, Cohen and Albright were jeered and heckled and sat stone faced while being confronted with actual tough questions. This was unacceptable, of course. Later the Clinton Administration remarked that CNN had “dropped the ball.”)

So the media is largely a monolith controlled by the investing class but submissive to government control. Why on earth do we get the babble about it being “liberal”? I suspect that the ownership of these organizations like that perception, as it masks their role and identity. I have asked conservatives repeatedly to explain to me why the most conservative organizations in the country allow a liberal slant on the news. I am yet to get an answer.

What we get is anecdote. Yes, most reporters are probably left-leaning, but living as they do in the shadow of power, they are severely constrained in what they can report. They have to internalize this authority structure, and so aggrandize their motives and pass out numerous awards to one another for high-skilled job performance. But they are nothing more than the American version of Soviet commissars.

What is really fascinating is to watch how government officials manage the media. They control them by allowing or denying access to information and the people in power. At the same time, they lavish praise on them for the wonderful work they are doing. Obama at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner was very forthright in talking about how he is so often displeased by some coverage he is receiving, but how he recognizes that reporters are just doing their job.

I just — I want to end by saying a few words about the men and women in this room whose job it is to inform the public and pursue the truth. You know, we meet tonight at a moment of extraordinary challenge for this nation and for the world, but it’s also a time of real hardship for the field of journalism. And like so many other businesses in this global age, you’ve seen sweeping changes and technology and communications that lead to a sense of uncertainty and anxiety about what the future will hold.
Across the country, there are extraordinary, hardworking journalists who have lost their jobs in recent days, recent weeks, recent months. And I know that each newspaper and media outlet is wrestling with how to respond to these changes, and some are struggling simply to stay open. And it won’t be easy. Not every ending will be a happy one.

But it’s also true that your ultimate success as an industry is essential to the success of our democracy. It’s what makes this thing work. You know, Thomas Jefferson once said that if he had the choice between a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, he would not hesitate to choose the latter.

Clearly, Thomas Jefferson never had cable news to contend with — (laughter) — but his central point remains: A government without newspapers, a government without a tough and vibrant media of all sorts, is not an option for the United States of America. (Applause.)

So I may not — I may not agree with everything you write or report. I may even complain, or more likely Gibbs will complain, from time to time about how you do your jobs, but I do so with the knowledge that when you are at your best, then you help me be at my best. You help all of us who serve at the pleasure of the American people do our jobs better by holding us accountable, by demanding honesty, by preventing us from taking shortcuts and falling into easy political games that people are so desperately weary of.

And that kind of reporting is worth preserving — not just for your sake, but for the public’s. We count on you to help us make sense of a complex world and tell the stories of our lives the way they happen, and we look for you for truth, even if it’s always an approximation, even if — (laughter.)

He’s only been in office a few months, and he has already adopted the tone and pitch.