The Big War Story the Media Is Ignoring
The mainstream media is full of stories these days about the decline and fall of the Bush administration and its catastrophic Iraq war policy, but you’re not likely to read the other big story: How the mainstream media abrogated its responsibilities in the wake of 9/11 and is deeply complicitous in the mess America finds itself in today.
As a reporter and editor who traveled the globe for three decades before retiring a few weeks before the terror attacks, I have a unique perspective on the MSM’s manifold failures, which I attribute to two things:
* A retreat from good old-fashioned reporting. You know, sussing out the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How of every story that used to be drilled into journalists from Day One.
* The consolidation of the MSM into the hands of a few corporations more interested in good profits than good journalism. You know, we can’t really go after the Bush administration because that might drive away advertisers and otherwise hurt our bottom line.
These factors are so obvious that they should be beyond question, but there have only recently been a spate of articles that take the MSM to task.
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33 Responses to “The Big War Story the Media Is Ignoring”
You might find this discussion of the role of economics on news interesting.
Robert:
Thank you! Very interesting.
This discussion of economics and news you might find interesting.
According to this model, corporate control by itself does NOT imply bad news – in fact state control is probably worse. What does matter is the demand patterns of consumers.
OOPS sorry the double post – my browser didn’t refresh correctly
Robert:
Insofar as “worsts” are concerned, state control is indeed far less preferable to corporate control.
The trouble with the latter is that there has been a sea change in the last decade and many of the family-run media companies that benevolently oversaw the editorial side of their papers have given way to or been merged into mega-corporations where the bottom line reigns supreme.
The abdication of its responsibility by the MSM in many countries is quite a common phenomenon that has become more glaring since the early 1990s. It became so revolting/sickening in India that I withdrew from MSM in 1993 after enjoying my stint as a free journalist for more than two decades.
I am now more of a journalist ‘in exile’ and have opted to eke out a living as a journalism teacher and editing books and transcripts. This ‘exile’ period has given me a great opportunity to learn about the world from other perspectives. And I don’t regret it. In fact I have begun to enjoy it.
But I firmly believe that it is a matter of time before the saner elements in the media would put ‘routine/professional’ journalism back on the rails.
I wonder when the media is going to own up to their own failure and helping in the run up to war. When average americans, like myself, could see this was not right before Shock and Awe, the media was all rah rah with the Bushies.
I feel the media is almost as guilty as the Bushies and are responsible for the deaths of over 3,000 soldiers and the horrors that the Iraqi people now suffer with. They owe, all of them, both apologies.
Even now, many are still drinking the White House kool aid. Many are still wanting to side with and believe in the Bush spin.
Robert: Excellent article, thanks.
Shaun: The point though, which was well elucidated in the article that Robert linked to, is that when these mega corporations are competing for shares of a heterogeneous market, the best of all possible outcomes will result as long as conscientious readers will take their news from an aggregate of sources.
So in the case of the buildup to the Iraq war, the problem lies in the audience preconceptions. If these megacorporations were all slanting toward a pro-war stance, it’s because the audience was homogeneous in having that bias.
Now, one potential criticism of the thesis here is that there’s a feedback effect; the homogenecity of bias in the media (which according to the thesis is due to the bias in the audience), also causes the bias in the audience to increase. So, by catering to the preferences of the audience and not questioning the WMD strongly enough, the readers came to believe that the existence of WMD was beyond question.
So purists will then say that the journalists shouldn’t behave as corporate interests and should seek the truth even if it doesn’t play well with the audience. The problem is that this is that it ignores human nature. It’s easy to say that the entrance of people like Rupert Murdoch, or the conglomerations like Time Warner, Disney/ABC, etc, have caused this overemphasis on the bottom line. But the truth is that the bottom line was always important; the difference is that in the past, a more homogeneous audience was more aligned with the interest in pure news without entertainment or partisanship (and actually, as the article noted, in the more distant past our US news sources were probably even more slanted than they are now), so that media corporation owners could exact a profit by providing a more straight news source. We ourselves have caused the debasing of journalism by voting for infotainment and affirmation of our preconcieved biases instead of hard news.
CStanley:
In deference to your well-reasoned arguments, you’ve analyzed the situation to the point that the crux of my post has been suffocated.
It’s real simple, at least to me: My belief is that journalists’ allegiance should not be to Wall Street or Proctor & Gamble or George Walker Bush. That allegiance should be to that elusive commodity known as “truth.” This requires hewing to the most fundamental aspect of reporting — WWWWWH (Who, What, Where, When, Why and How) — and many journalists simply suspended belief and did not do so.
If I didn’t make it clear in my post, that was shameful, especially when what the White House and Pentagon were saying obviously came into conflict with the situation on the ground in Iraq.
No, I think you did make your point clear, Shaun, and I didn’t mean to deprive it of oxygen.
It’s just that there’s also a separate point, that media companies still have to survive in an atmosphere of capitalism and that the interests of profit making are only in conflict with the purer interests of the fundamentals of journalism if the market demands junk news. A demand for junk food allows Hostess to sell a lot of twinkies, but thankfully we still have enough consumers demanding real food that our supermarkets aren’t completely full of trans fat laden snack foods. And likewise, there are still some consumers of news who seek the unvarnished facts, and hopefully they’ll show themselves to be a great enough market share to influence the corporate news providers to give us what we crave. In the meantime, though, we can on most issues arrive at something pretty close to truth by combining right slanted news with left slanted news.
CStanley:
Agreed to almost all. I’m not confident that readers and viewers can arrive at something pretty close to the truth by combining right- and left-slanted news given that the crux of my argument pertaining the war coverage is that the MSM — left, right and center — wasn’t even reporting the news.
CStanley:
And a further thought: The Pulitzer Prizes for Journalism are announced at 3pm EDT today.
I’ll note from the jump that these prizes most often go to liberal-leaning big city newspapers, but let’s see how many stories are awarded Pulitzers because they merely parroted the official line. My guess is zero.
And where pray tell may we find some of this left slanted news? Might be some feeble attempts currently, but in 2002-2003?
Don’t make me laugh.
I agree that with corporate media, bad product will correct the market.
Thats why the news dinosaurs become less relevant as more people turn to the Internet for information.
Rating slide trend analysis bears this out.
The issue of the Iraq War runup was a unique one that somewhat crossed party lines IMO, and that’s why there wasn’t the diversity in media coverage. There was simply not a strong antiwar or war skeptic contingency in the public or the media in 2002-03, and not just because of 9/11 aftershock. Don’t forget that Clinton had been pretty bellicose toward Iraq throughout the 90s and he and many other mainstream Democrats felt that Saddam was a threat or a problem even without an al Qaeda connection (this is actually where I think Hillary will have difficulty explaining her war authorization vote because unlike other Dem candidates she can’t say she was fooled by Bush because that would be the same as saying that her husband’s administration told similar ‘lies’ about Saddam’s capabilities). I’d say this phenomena of homogenicity of opinion about Iraq at that time is mainly the product of an intelligence community that also had a strong bias to believe the worst about Saddam.
What I’m getting at here is that we couldn’t count on partisan bias to lead to skepticism with regard to the war because people on both sides of the partisan divide were similarly biased. And even those who were skeptical about WMD were afraid to believe that Hans Blik was really on to something because the consequences if they were wrong were likely to be more grave than the consequences if they were right but refrained from digging into it. Who would have wanted to have been in the position of delaying action against Saddam and then having him hand off a nuke? There are plenty of people with perfect 20:20 hindsight saying they were doubtful about the WMD but the truth is that most people were blindsided by Saddam’s bluff and the few who weren’t didn’t seem to have had the courage of conviction to try to convince others to be more skeptical.
I think what Shaun means is that the NEWS is sacred, while COMMENT/OPINION is free.
Unfortunately, in the past decade editors, with few honourable exceptions, have not been too cautious in retaining this dividing line which is so important for the freedom of the press.
Earlier the newspapers made sure that the readers would know exactly on which page the news would appear and on which page the comment.
Whenever the hard news is allowed to be peppered with comments, there would obviously be a slant.
Another worrying aspect for an old journalist like me is that the READER, who was until about a decade and a half ago was very important and respected, has now become an ordinary consumer and a newspaper has become just another product.
The bottom line used to be the credibility of the journalist/media and a wonderful invisible relationship that blossomed between the reader and the media.
With few honourable exceptions, now the attitude is take it or leave it.
The media/journalists understand when the reader is being taken for a ride. But I think many also suffer inside by doing this either under duress or for survival.
The media has seen its ups and downs…so it is a cyclical order. I am waiting for the day when the saner element regains control of the media organisations.
CStanley:
Absolutely. That is a huge point that flows directly from the “rally around the flag” emotionalism/patriotism that followed 9/11. I now that I certainly felt it.
But as I tell college journalism classes, forget about going to work for a newspaper or network unless you have an insatiable curiosity. That quality failed all but a very few MSM reporters and editors when it mattered most.
Actually, most people were blindsided by stove-piped and cherry-picked intellegence, otherwise known as lies and propaganda.
Thats what happened to me.
And thats what pisses me off so bad and why I am the way I am.
Other people seem to have a greater capacity to enjoy being played for fools.
About 31% at this point.
There is an egg and chicken element to this story.
The media are only reacting to public demant/opinion, but the public’s opinion and tastes are formed by the media.
The press and other media used to be considered to have a public service responsibility in the sense of providing information, regardless of how that information played to the crowd. Defining its role in market terms changes the definition of what the media are supposed to be.
The goals were never fully achieved, but at least we knew what the goals were.
The current chicken and egg cycle of arguments started IMO when the media changed its main role from providing information to making a profit.
Of course, they need a profit to exist, but their difficulties today are, to a great extent, self induced When they abandoned their traditional role, they helped to produce the public that is abandondoning them now.
Swaaraj,
I think you’re point is very valid and that those lines have become much too blurred. But still, even when reporting news, individuals and organizations can’t always overcome their personal bias. It’s much easier said than done to report straight facts because one still has to choose which facts are important and choose how to put the facts in context. Take the example given in the article linked to by Robert Bell; if unemployment goes up by 0.2%, one media source which has a bias toward optimism would report that it only went up by this small amount, and then they’d quote from an economist who has a rosy outlook and shows how this bodes well for economic growth. Another news source which is pessimistic will report that the jobless rate is all the way up to 6.4% (instead of reporting that the rate of increase is slowing). All of this, plus the way headlines are framed, creates a leading conclusion in the readers’ minds even if it wasn’t thought of as an opinion piece at all by the writer or editor.
About the market and the media:
There is sometimes the presumption that the markets will produce quality product through competition. In the US, we don’t have a free market system, because the markets (corporations) are themselves active participants in government via campaign contributions and lobbying. The markets and government have become partners rather than separate actors.
The corporations have a strong interest in promoting a pro-business administration and, this played a role in their sheep-like behavior in the run up to the war, IMO.
[...] From The Moderate Voice [...]
doma,
I don’t have the stats on hand, but I’m doubtful that most of the campaign contributions from media bigwigs have gone to Republicans. I think it’s a myth that all corporations support the GOP, even though like most myths it’s based on some fact (that certain sectors of the corporate world do align with the Republican party, but not that all of them do).
And it’s not as though the media has been supportive of Bush in other ways or that they routinely gave him a pass. Really the failure to play devil’s advocate in regard to Iraq in 02-03 was more of an anomaly than a trend of general support for Bush.
CS-
Corporations are by definition supportive of pro-business administrations. Bush’s election was greeted with joy, and that happened not too long before the war. At that time, I suspect supporting Bush was part of the motivation for supporting the war.
Had the war been proposed last year, the outcome might have been different,
No single statement can encompass all the complexities of the road that led to today.
I am pointing out that the intermingling of corporate interests and government policy can deprive the public of vital information and the quality products everyone touts.
Every rule has exceptions and qualifiers. One can only present one important aspect at a time.
Welcome back Snarky, Snark says:
The 8:00PM time slot at MSNBC was filled with Phil Donahue doing his Liberal type show. The network removed him because of his stance, he was decidely anti-war, and replaced him with more centrist to conservative hosts. They even tried rich white boy affirmative reaction Tucker, who fails in all attempts. Only when Olberman filled the slot did the ratings approach even the Donahue numbers. Olberman continues to increase his numbers, these two were the only true Liberals in the last six years. Even Michael Savage was allowed an attemt to behave himself, but he failed way before the Imus circus.
Yes, doma, I agree that every rule has exceptions but what I was saying is that you haven’t really even supported the existence of the rule here, You are stating it as an axiom, but there is not enough actual difference in our two major parties IMO to make it axiomatic that one party is ‘pro-business’ while the other is not. The Bush administration could certainly be described as pro-business for certain industries (defense, oil, etc) but not more so across the board than recent Democratic administrations have been. Plus, corporations often hedge their bets by contributing to both sides.
And this site shows that Time Warner and Viacom were both among the top donors to Kerry’s campaign, so those are some pretty big exceptions if the rule really is that all corporate interests lean toward the GOP.
CS-
This argument is being drowned by blowing smoke all over it. It’s possible to cast doubt on any propostion at all by pointing to contradictions and exceptions.This is the methodology of the creationists when they talk about evolution.
This is not about the GOP, per se. IMO Murdoch doesn’t give a hoot which party is in office, as long as he can profit from the relationship. If FOX can’t profit one way, it will profit another: by playing to a base that wants to be always on the attack. I’m quite sure, that if Murdoch could find a way to exploit both bases, he would.
I am going back in time, to the events as they were then. Clinton was pretty much pro-business himself, but the election of an unknown Democrat was definitely seen as a threat. I was there, and I listened to the market reporters, as they threw in liitle asides about their worries re the next administration. In the last elections, again, these little asides of worry about things like the minimum wage,in what should have been straightforward reporting on market perofrmance, became apparent.
And then there was the K street project.
Fast forward to today. Both parties have been corrupted by campaign donations from corporations. It was sickening to see how donations and lobbyists started to crawl to the Dem side of the aisle when that side began to look more powerful.
My view is simply that when the media abondon their role as providers of a public service in order to focus on profits, they both create a dumb audience and doom themselves to the consequences of dealing with one.
When mass media and other corporations become part of the governement, we get both bad markets and bad governement.
We all lose in the process.
domajot,
I mostly agree with you. Certainly I agree about Murdoch in that he’ll exploit whichever side he can, and that Wall Street abhors change more than anything (more than a particular ideology).
And believe me, I’m not saying that journalists should abandon principle, but I do feel that the principle itself can never be implemented satisfactorily and so the only solution is for readers to be taught a high level of critical reading skills. And those skills can be brought to bear in an environment of polarized media sources just as well as they can in an environment of homogeneous mild bias.
cs said:
“skills can be brought to bear in
an environment of polarized media sources just as well as they can in an environment of homogeneous mild bias.”
—————
I disagree totally on a two wrongs don’t make a right basis.
Two different opinions add to knowledge. Two different lying and screaming voices make for chaos.
You can object to mild bias. In order to object to a screaming bias, you have to shout as well.
End of civil discourse.
domajot,
The thing is that most cases of bias, even blatant screaming bias, aren’t due to people lying (referring to your ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’ statement). If this was what was occurring then I’d agree with you that listening to two sides lying would not advance discovery of the truth. But generally what each side does is cherry pick facts and then pepper the reporting of these facts with emotionally loaded descriptors. So, by listening to each side doing this you really can arrive at something pretty close to the truth IMO.
And when one side screams, I don’t agree that the other has to scream back. They generally do, and it’s human to react that way, but it can be avoided.
On both counts: annoying, yes; impossible, no.
I notice that no one is mentioning one of the things really crippling actual news coverage in favor of the same old arguments about media bias. The original point was how the drive for corporate profits acceptable to Wall Street isn’t compatible with good journalism. News organizations do the same thing that many other corporations do in order to maximize profits. They minimize people. How many overseas bureaus have been shut down? If a chain has papers in over a dozen cities scattered across the country how well does it cover the interests of any one of those cities in Washington? And yes, it is questionable whether management is willing to take chances by criticizing the powers-that-be, especially if that management is not someone who came from the news side and views it as a newspaper first, not just a profit making corporation like any other corporation.
> The issue of the Iraq War runup
> was a unique one that somewhat
> crossed party lines IMO, and that’s
> why there wasn’t the diversity in
> media coverage.
Of course. Hussein was a threat to the rest of the region. He had had WMDs and used WMDs in the past. He had continued to play games with everyone, making it even more reasonable to suspect he had continued WMD work. It’s no surprise that even many Democrats supported the decision to go to war.
One of the best, most cynical critics of the war with whom I’ve exchanged quite a few words spoke for many liberals who quickly have become strongly anti-war (or anti-occupation if you wish to be more precise). They hated the decision to go to war would would accept it as a dirty job that had to be done, on one condition:
“Just show us the WMDs.”
Then he, like so many liberals, would have accepted the decision to go to war, given the known threat Hussein already had demonstrated himself to be.
And that obviously was true of the liberals in the media.
Well, sadly, we haven’t been shown the WMDs, have we?
Dont know about theis war, very bad, so can democracies be hyjacked by special interest groups, good question no?
Dont know about theis war, very bad, so can democracies be hyjacked by special interest groups, good question no?