Category: Journalism

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.

Disabused …

Craw: The thin-walled expanded portion of the alimentary tract, used for the storage of food prior to digestion, that is found in of a bird or insect

I must have an expansive craw that is as big as the bladder of an elephant. Yesterday two statements lodged. Explosive dislodging is in order.

From David Crisp at Billings Blog, writing about a post by Professor Rob Natelson at Electric City Weblog: :

I am not as far to the left as Mr. Natelson is to the right, but I admit that I saw elements of what looked like fascism to me in the Bush administration. We invaded countries that hadn’t attacked us; we then ran the conquered countries with an almost seamless marriage of corporate, military and governmental interests. We suspended, without admitting it, habeas corpus. We adopted torture for the first time in American history. We taunted prisoners’ religious and cultural beliefs. We ignored and insulted allies. It’s the closest thing to fascism I have ever seen in America.

American journalists need to be focused and attentive, but there is more to it than that. They also have to wear blinders, and steadily focus only on acceptable subject matter. Otherwise, they move on to a new profession, say, house painting.

The most important part of the job of the American journalist is not to know certain things, and most of them are very good at their jobs. Crisp is one I have always thought saw those things he was not supposed to see. I thought of him as a man with a good eye and a flare for a pithy phase.

Yesterday I shed my illusions. Crisp noticed things under Bush that he hadn’t seen before:

We invaded countries that hadn’t attacked us…

Just in my lifetime: Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Serbia, Bosnia. Afghanistan. All before Bush. I’ll shorten the list by not mentioning those countries we attacked without full scale invasion.

we then ran the conquered countries with an almost seamless marriage of corporate, military and governmental interests.

This strains credulity. I’ll limit my scope to one small area where we have run the affairs of other countries with that seamless marriage: The Western Hemisphere. Every single country, including Canada, who we harassed and invaded on several occasions in our early history. It’s been going on since the days when John Quincy Adams said that Cuba would fall into our hands like “ripe fruit”.

We taunted prisoners’ religious and cultural beliefs.

OK – I’ll give him this one. This is an area where I suspect Crisp may be right – in the past, the U.S. has not been racist nor has it picked out any one religion or culture for special humiliation. We’ve been indifferent as to whether the target of our animus was white or black or Hispanic, Christian or Muslim or Hindu. We go after everybody.

Finally,

We adopted torture for the first time in American history.

Crisp’s blog, like mine, is not widely read. Were it, there’d be guffaws and explosive snot rockets from Panama City to Khartoum, Hanoi to Athens. It’s a long way from here to tiger cages, and none of those poor Vietnamese schmucks who were dropped from helicopters after interrogation lived to tell their story.

Yes, Mr. Crisp, the U.S. does not torture. Never did before, doesn’t now, and won’t continue to do so in the coming decades. I’ve got a bridge in my backyard … give it to you for a song ….

The saddest part of this is not just one lonely editor in Billings – it is the entire Democratic Party who thinks that Obama has cleaned up our act. All the tricorders have now been turned off. All is calm on the starship. We’re not curious anymore.

Enough. Here’s the other insect caught in my craw: “Just a Citizen” writing at Electric City Weblog:

Not sure the age of empires is over. They may look different but still be an empire.

This might actually be insightful and observant. JAC might see something that none on the right or the housebroken left can see. The United States is an empire. However, read further:

Think what the cultural Nation of Islam might look like in 40 years, given current demographic trends in Europe and N. America.

‘Nuff said.

Journalists: You lead, we’ll follow

An entry at MetaFilter provides the following quote, but does not give its source:

“The reason many people worry that the written form is dying, and the reason most writers consider online publication second-rate, is that no journal has yet succeeded in marrying the editorial rigors of print to the freedoms of the internet.”

It then links to a new online literary magazine, the Wag’s Revue. It looks interesting, and I hope it satisfies the gist of the quote leading us there.

Those words capture some small part of truth. Another field, journalism, has long endeavored to install professional rigor on the business of collecting news. They are serious people. However, they have largely failed. And more so than any other profession that I’m aware of, journalism seems on the far edges of fogginess about itself, almost completely lacking self-awareness. They give out more awards to one another than Carter’s famous pills.

At the same time, they fail to do the one thing we hired them for: To report to us what powerful people are doing. The reason is obvious: They must answer to those powerful people, and not us. As a result, most news, even in the vaunted print media, is a distraction.

Many people have noted how shallow TV news coverage is, how they operate like pack animals and pounce on trivialities instead of important stories. There’s a reason for that – it’s like squeezing a balloon – the air goes to the place where there is least resistance. Bush/Cheney et al … desk murders, torture, illegal invasions, wiretapping all of us and all of the news media … don’t go there. OJ? All over it! The New York Times used a woman who appeared to be no more than a CIA plant – Judith Miller – as their lead reporting on the attack on Iraq. They sat on the wiretapping story in 2004 – a story that probably would have changed the outcome of the election that year. Not only are they not reporting to us, they seem in league with the powerful.

News reporters chose not to challenge Bush on Iraq. (Better said: They knew better.) They brought in the generals, fired Phil Donohue, and before that Bill Maher (who are not journalists but who are willing to say things that might be true). They didn’t question the motives of the leaders. Instead, they repeated lies. They failed us, utterly and miserably.

On some level, they know this. That’s why they have awards for door stops. They do what most of us do in response to anxiety-causing problems in their lives … compensatory behavior. Award banquets.

That’s broad-brushing, I know. There are many people of integrity in the business. Probably most of them. The paradox is this: How do they put that integrity into print or on air? The answer is that mostly, they can’t. So they dance around the the edges of power, mostly looking outward, and intuitively understanding their own failures. They affirm! their integrity to one another. Pass the salt, please, and the Pulitzer too. I’ll have a Peabody while you’re at it.

I work in a less glamorous profession that is riddled with similar conflicts of interest. Accountants are called upon to audit public corporations, yet those corporations are allowed to hire and fire auditors at will. As a consequence, the early part of this century was littered with accounting scandals like Enron, Global Crossing, and WorldCom. It’s a principle known by all to be true, yet systematically ignored: “conflict of interest”: we cannot serve two masters.

In the case of journalism, they cannot both report on powerful individuals and corporations and yet be owned by them. And when powerful corporations have a stranglehold on government, we have a double-conflict: Not only do we get no reporting on the corporations, but none either when governments are serving the corporate will, as with the Wall Street bailout – perhaps the Iraq invasion itself. Instead, government reporting is reduced to the slavish, drooling White House press corps.

So when I read about the web failing to live up to journalistic standards, of failing to marry the “editorial rigors of print to the freedoms of the internet”, I can only agree. All I can say in response is please, show us the way. You start, you lead. We’ll follow.

Today would be a good day.

Kakistocracy

Jeff Cohen founded the media critic group FAIR, and for a brief while before the Iraq war produced the Phil Donohue Show on MSNBC. That network is a sleek and graceful wood duck among mallards that has recently been hiring liberals, notably Rachel Maddow, to host its commentary shows. Donahue was its highest rated show at the time he was canceled in 2003.

Cohen was inside the belly of the beast during the propaganda campaign before the war, and offers some unique insight. His essay, We Were Silenced by the Drums of War, was written in December of 2006, but it’s always good to revisit. Very few liberals get to see the inside of the propaganda machine as it is operating at full throttle.

It was excruciating to be silenced while myth and misinformation went unchallenged. Military analysts typically appeared unopposed; they were presented as experts, not advocates. But their closeness to the Pentagon often obstructed independent, skeptical analysis.

In November of 2002, UN Weapons inspector Hans Blix was sent back into Iraq after a four year absence (the UN had pulled inspectors out before Clinton’s attack in 1998. Official truth: Saddam kicked them out.). Blix was a voice in the wilderness, one of just a few telling the American public the truth – there were no weapons.

[MSNBC pre-war news show] Countdown: Iraq’s host asked an MSNBC military analyst, “What’s the buzz from the Pentagon about Hans Blix?” The retired colonel declared that Blix was considered “something like the Inspector Clousseau of the weapons of mass destruction inspection program … who will only remember the last thing he was told – and that he’s very malleable.”

Malleable is too nice a word for propagandists, as they know quite well what they are up to. There was even a little time for personal commerce, as General Barry McCaffrey, Clinton’s “drug czar”, said on-air “Thank God for the Abrams tank and Bradley fighting vehicle.” He was on the board of directors for the company making those vehicles. There is no low-bar in this business.

As the war began, CNN news president Eason Jordan admitted that his network’s military analysts were government-approved:

“I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started. I met with important people there and said, for instance, at CNN, here are the generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war. And we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important.”

Others (notably Michael Massing: Now They Tell Us) have noted that media coverage of the lead-up to war, bad as it was, got even worse in November of 2002…

Management favored experts who backed the Bush view – and hired several of them as paid analysts. Networks that normally cherished shouting matches were opting for discussions of harmonious unanimity. This made for dull, predictable TV. It also helped lead our nation to war, based on false premises.

Print journalism was equally guilty, says Massing.

A survey of the coverage in November, December, and January reveals relatively few articles about the debate inside the intelligence community. Those articles that did run tended to appear on the inside pages. Most investigative energy was directed at stories that supported, rather than challenged, the administration’s case.

Says Cohen:

As war neared, MSNBC Suits turned the screws even tighter on “Donahue.” They decreed that if we booked one guest who was anti-war on Iraq, we needed two who were pro-war. If we booked two guests on the left, we needed three on the right. At one staff meeting, a producer proposed booking Michael Moore and was told she’d need three right-wingers for political balance.

I thought about proposing Noam Chomsky as a guest, but our stage couldn’t accommodate the 28 right-wingers we would have needed for balance.

So that’s why Chomsky never makes the news channels! The studios aren’t big enough to hold the necessary right wing counterbalance.

American news coverage is, aside from that of outright despotic countries like North Korea, the worst, the most slavish and groveling on the planet. It is, as Cohen notes elsewhere, a “kakistocracy”, a real word meaning rule by the worst. In American media, there is no punishment for being wrong, so long as you are submissive. You can be bad, slavish, and stupid, but if you toe the line, your face will grace the screen.

Not every weapons expert had been wrong. Take ex-Marine and former UN inspector Scott Ritter. In the last months of 2002, he told any audience or journalist who would hear him that Iraqi WMDs represented no threat to our country. “Send in the inspectors,” urged Ritter. “Don’t send in the Marines.”

It’s telling that in the run-up to the war, no American TV network hired any on-air analysts from among the experts who questioned White House WMD claims. None would hire Ritter.

Said Russian General Alexander Lebed in the wake of the September, 1996 Clinton attack on Iraq,

This is the nature of democracy: You send in the planes and drop the bombs. Then you gather in the journalists and tell them to applaud. We need to study that.

MSNBC now has a lineup that includes the truly thoughtful Rachel Maddow, the entertainer Keith Olbermann, and the hacks Chris Mathews and Ed Schultz. They all qualify as liberals, I suppose, though Mathews is more like a flag in the wind. It’s an interesting experiment they are doing, but I can’t help but wonder – if Obama decides we need to attack Iran, will the network have to fire its entire evening lineup? (Probably they fire just Maddow and Olbermann. Schultz will fall in line, since it will be Obama’s war, and not Bush’s. And Mathews will go with the flow.)

Rachel Maddow Plays Journalist

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Rachel Maddow has run a very good show. It’s not a great show because she doesn’t get great guests, and so keeps a steady flow of softies coming through. That’s not her choice. It seems that when the heavies come through, she asks them hard questions. No Tim Russert, she – she makes her guests uncomfortable. When she has them there, she can’t not do that. She has integrity.

For that reason, they don’t come on. They go to see Larry king or David Gregory or Stephanopoulos or Anderson Cooper – Dick Cheney’s people preferred to be on Russert’s Meet the Press, because they could control the message there.

The analogy I like to draw, as an accountant, is Enron, and its relationship with its auditor, Arthur Anderson and Company. Anderson clearly screwed up, and let Enron get away with things. The question is, why? It’s a myriad of relationships, and the profit motive was involved, but the bottom line was that Anderson had to be strong enough to risk losing a client to be right. They had a couple of knights working for them, but mostly, they failed.

The media assumes the same role as auditor. Like Enron, people in high office, public and private, want to control the people who are supposed to be reporting on them. It helps that large corporations own our media, it also helps that we are star-struck. People like Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert have undeserved reputations for integrity. They are exactly the opposite of that – they are rewarded for sycophancy. But they do it with gravitas, which is the key to their success. I’ll never forget Brokaw talking about how he was called back to work when they “captured Saddam Hussein” – whatever happened there. It was perfect news for a suck-up – a spoon fed story and a chance to be an insider reporting on the activities of powerful people. The interesting thing is that he really thought he was doing important work.

Anyway, Maddow doesn’t play those games. So expect that Colin Powell won’t stop by again, and that most insiders know to stay away from her. She’s got a problem. She thinks she’s a journalist.