|
|
May 31, 2007
"When the Press Fails..." From a New Book by Lance Bennett, Regina Lawrence, and Steven Livingston"In the end, despite the momentary recognition that it somehow blew the [pre-war] story, the mainstream press still seems to have missed the larger possibility that it blew the story precisely because of following its own unwritten but binding reporting principles."Special to PressThink When the Press Fails… by W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston Among the greatest challenges facing the American democracy is the struggle to recover the soul of the American press. Legions of critics and off-duty journalists are searching for answers to why it is so difficult to be independent and get stories straight. Why is it so hard to resist the ever-present spin of those in power? We explore this incapacity of the press to change—even when aware that it is off course—in our new book, When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina (University of Chicago Press). The tragic history of US misadventure in Iraq is matched by the tragedy of the press bowing to the will of an administration taken by its own faith in being able to create reality through the sheer use of power. Ron Suskind famously reported that an official told him: We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will— we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. (131) This stance toward the press violates both reason and civility, as we note in the book: For a nominally conservative administration, the Bush White House embraced a keenly post-modern epistemology. Like so many social constructionists or linguistic relativists, the administration seemed to believe that human engagement with material reality is mediated by social constructs. It is almost as if Karl Rove and George Bush were reading Jean Baudrillard. What is isn’t nearly as important as what is thought to be. Reality is first constructed to fit policy preferences and then reinforced through continuous news management, including pressure and intimidation.(139) Why did so many news organizations buy it? It may be that the administration simply played by rules that journalists could not fathom. Or perhaps being disciplined and punished time and again by administration-led truth squads for raising questions about the national course after 9/11 prompted leading news organizations to simply fall in line and duly reported the outlandish stories of nuclear threats and 9/11 connections manufactured to sell the war. Yet isn’t a free and independent press expected to withstand pressures, even in time of crisis? What may be most disturbing is the recurrence of a breathless insider tone in much of the Iraq story. It was hard to miss the giddiness of reporting and punditry celebrating the Hollywood staging of the Mission Accomplished Moment aboard the carrier Abraham Lincoln. From the beginning, nearly every major news organization helped publicize what they also must have understood to be a campaign to sell the war. The question of course, it why did so many news organizations buy it? That was the topic of Bill Moyers’ powerful, yet oddly unsatisfying PBS program Buying the War. By detailing how reporters for Knight-Ridder were able to muster questions that apparently never occurred to most of the rest of the press, Moyers demolished reporters’ claims that they had no alternative but to buy what the White House was selling them. Moyers’ recap certainly helps us understand why the public, bombarded with endless repetition of mushroom clouds and other fear-laden images bought the link between Saddam and al Qaeda. Yet, the mystery remains why so many in the mainstream press were bamboozled. Moyers participated in an online chat hosted by freepress after Buying the War was aired. He offered a tried-and-true explanation: the media failed to be objective. He also cited the true believers of a loud right wing media, and the insider aspirations of elite news organizations. These are surely reasonable opinions. However, we think that it is precisely what passes for objectivity today that rests at the heart of the problem. The authorities are anything but objective The long, untenable and checkered history of this core journalism norm has left American journalism at the doorstep of government for its very legitimacy. Since objectivity—even when dressed up as balance—is difficult to produce, and tougher to defend, the default option is to seek the views of authorities. In politics, however, authorities are generally anything but objective. Despite this nagging detail, journalists quickly learn that they need to be on the inside to advance their careers. In the end, they may aspire to be recognized, or otherwise share the glow of power of the sources they cover. Only after the press party was over, did journalists wake up to the cries from their readers, and note for the record that the war was badly off script and that they had been spun. Despite rare admissions from editors at the Washington Post and the New York Times that their papers had, in essence missed much of the story on the run-up to war, they also predictably missed much the next big episode of the saga: Abu Ghraib. This was, perhaps, the most significant episode of the whole war in terms of damage to American ideals and credibility. Despite commendable levels of attention devoted by prominent organizations to the spectacle of Abu Ghraib, most of the press fell quickly in line with the administration line that the episode was a regrettable case of low-level abuse. Yet just outside the mainstream, another side of the story revealed an historic national departure from laws and conventions against inhumane treatment and torture. That side of the story was reported in plain sight of the mainstream press by Mark Danner and Seymour Hersh. Missing the will or the capacity to change As a result of the gradual conflation of objectivity with authority, the press is so firmly established inside the process of government that it cannot extricate itself even when it recognizes it has a problem. The continuing public soul-searching and tacit apologizing do not imply the will or the capacity to change. In the end, despite the momentary recognition that it somehow blew the story, the mainstream press still seems to have missed the larger possibility that it blew the story precisely because of following its own unwritten but binding reporting principles. When challenged on these matters, journalists generally invoke those principles, and point, often in frustration, back to government itself. (30) When the press turns to government for cueing its big stories, the response to criticism is often that the government failed to police itself. This seems out of step with the ideal of a watchdog press dedicated to protecting the public interest at precisely those moments when government fails. Yet, as we note in the book, there is an implicit expectation that government, itself (often in the form of an opposition party, or whistle-blowers) will help the press do its job: In one of many public forums about the performance of the media after 9/11, Washington Post reporter Dana Priest was asked by one of the authors why the press did not give more play to the doubts expressed by many experts and former government officials about the Bush administration case for the war. Her revealing answer was that a few pieces did appear, but they produced no public reaction from Democrats in Congress, and, thus, the counter story had little to keep it going. This ingrained dependence of journalists on officials leads to a social coziness. Even when dressed up as access, coziness ends up making the press part of the political process instead of its independent chronicler. Witness the sad spectacle of the White House Correspondents Association reeling from Stephen Colbert’s stinging satire one year to the invitation extended to the inoffensive Rich Little the next. The obsession with insider politics The combination of dependence on high officials and the insider coziness this produces makes it impossible for most of the press to resist being spun. Consider a case in point that appeared on April 25 of this year as a platoon of New York Times reporters jumped all over the story of how Vice President Dick Cheney attacked congressional Democrats in general and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in particular. The Times surely knew that Cheney was running at full spin, but the press loves a food-fight, no matter how contrived and meaningless. Times reporters even noted in the initial website version of the story that Cheney looked for reporters and cameras on a visit to the Hill, tipping off awareness by the reporters of their role in the charade. The clues were subtle but unmistakable. The Times noted in passing that the GOP spin strategy included singling out Harry Reid, latching onto his comment from the week before that “this war is lost.” “Republicans have turned their fire on Mr. Reid,” the Times reported. A subtle clue concerning the legendarily taciturn Cheney’s eagerness to unburden his innermost thoughts about Capitol Hill Democrats offers an insider wink to those in the know. Of course, the Democrats were—this time—equally engaged in spinning the press: “Mr. Reid fired back directly at Mr. Cheney on Tuesday, appearing at the same microphones just moments after the vice president.” Despite the clarity of the insider’s game that was afoot, the Times did its part and put the story all over its website (page one) within minutes of Cheney’s hunt for a camera, and on the front page in the next day’s print edition. Why do self-aware and sophisticated news organizations routinely fall prey to such blatant manipulation? Part of the answer is the news media’s obsession with insider politics. The media provide the stage for the high drama of personal politics. Covering manufactured drama like the Cheney-Reid sniping allows the press to dodge riskier endeavors, like a substantive and sustained exploration of the consequence of failure in Iraq, and instead stick with inside baseball reporting of manufactured squabbles. Not unlike an abusive relationship In this way, the press doesn’t have to get into the messy and complicated business of critiquing policy or appearing to conclude independently that a policy has failed. This is the same pattern we found in press complicity in the attacks on former counterterrorism czar Dick Clarke, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff Larry Wilkerson, and of course Ambassador Joe Wilson. In When the Press Fails, we call this the “tactical management of the news.” But it is rooted in the perverse news norm of running from any hint of independent assessment of many big stories and into the arms of he said-she said reporting. The press facilitates this “reality management” by habitually turning to a narrow range of sources it regards as legitimate and credible. The strange result of all this is not unlike an abusive relationship between mistrusting and wounded partners. To return to our initial concern: just what makes it so difficult for reporters and their editors to find more independent perspectives from which to address important issues? Spin can only work with willing victims. This problem of a dependent press will not go away until journalists can look squarely at why, despite being aware of their common vulnerability to catastrophic failure, they seem unable to change how they operate. Perhaps the path to reform is too obvious. Let every organization start each day by deciding whether they are reporting events from the standpoint of the people or from the viewpoint of those in power. Let them take the megaphones that they possess away from officials mouthing the scripts written by media consultants and opposition researchers, and put them in the hands of independent experts, civic groups, and international organizations. Above all, replace the failed norm of objectivity with a simple commitment to look at where the trail of evidence leads in the story. Much of that evidence in the Bush war years was in plain sight. It is just that the judgment of so many news organizations was obscured by their proximity and deference to power. After Matter: Notes, reactions and links… W. Lance Bennett is professor of communication and political science at the University of Washington. Regina G. Lawrence is associate professor in the Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University. Steven Livingston is a professor in the political communication program at George Washington University’s school of media and public affairs. From Words in a Time of War: Taking the Measure of the First Rhetoric-Major President byy Mark Danner at TomDispatch (May 31, 2007). Those in the “reality-based community” — those such as we — are figures a mite pathetic, for we have failed to realize the singular new principle of the new age: Power has made reality its bitch.
Posted by Jay Rosen at May 31, 2007 8:50 AM
Comments
This article is the best thing I've seen written about the press in the last 30 years. I look forward to buying the book. Posted by: William Ockham at May 31, 2007 10:04 AM | Permalink Howdy Jay, Gore is talking about this now. Very strange -- and intriguing in someone who may yet run for President. He's figuring himself a new Postman, apparently. Fineman, here, is talking about Epistemology. At Newsweek. Posted by: Richard B. Simon at May 31, 2007 12:31 PM | Permalink Excellent, as usual, Jay. You're sounding more like Chris Lasch every day. I would add two things. One, the establishment of an "objective" press was far more driven by the need to create a sterile environment in which to sell advertising than any real journalistic need. The first amendment wasn't written to protect facts. Secondly, the old adage that "in war, the victor writes the history" is gone forever, despite what those in power would like us to believe. The web has dismantled that old saw rather nicely, thank you very much. Posted by: Terry Heaton at May 31, 2007 12:32 PM | Permalink The first tragic flaw in this analysis is overlooking the master narrative that existed in the press concerning Iraq before the Bush administration that enabled the selling of the Iraq war on the media stage. In order to have skeptically examined the case against Iraq, the media would have had to skeptically analyzed their own reporting from 1998-2002 and "rowed back" from many of their own "independent perspectives." I still think the best raw research available on this is at the Echo Chamber Project. "reporting events from the standpoint of the people" -- but apparently not the 62 million people who voted for George W. Bush "put them in the hands of independent experts, civic groups, and international organizations" independent experts -- like former Democratic administration intelligence officials who got it wrong for years? civic groups -- like the Stalinist front group ANSWER? international organizations -- like old Lybian-chaired UN Human Rights commission? No thanks. I think we already know where that "trail of evidence" leads. Posted by: Neuro-conservative at May 31, 2007 5:02 PM | Permalink Good article, Jay. Except I think talking about the press cozying up and accepting the government's spin is a little disingenuous. Because the reporters didn't just lie back and transcribe during the Clinton administration. And they certainly won't stay docile and supine if the Democrats take control of the White House in 2008. No, for the last 25 years, the press has failed to do its duty only when a Republican president is in office. They loved Reagan, they were okay with George Bush I and they adored Bush II. They savaged Carter and Clinton. It's not just about sucking up to power. It's about continually being a propaganda arm for the Republican party. Posted by: Lynnell Mickelsen at May 31, 2007 6:00 PM | Permalink I know Jack Shafer has rarely had a good thing to say about Press Think, but his Slate piece on Fred Thompson playing the media like a conductor is pretty much a microcomos of "When The Press Fails" only on a story that one could argue doesn't matter (except when it does...) As a fairly new but - thanks to Jay's outstanding articles in the Huffington Post - now a regular reader of his, I enjoyed your take on the press's collapse, agree with most of it and also look forward to the book. I was curious, however, about your feeling that Bill Moyers special came up short on why so many in the MSM were hoodwinked, citing Moyers focus on the media's lack of objectivity. Item 1 in his freepress response is headed "The Failure of Objectivity," but isn't he really talking about professional skepticism when he talks about suspending their critical faculties? In a speech he gave two years earlier to the National Conference for Media Reform, also at freepress, Moyers sounds like he concurs with your view that what passes for objectivity today lies at the heart of the problem: One reason I’m in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn’t play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news. And: Take the example (also cited by Mermin) of Charles J. Hanley. Hanley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Associated Press, whose fall 2003 story on the torture of Iraqis in American prisons — before a U.S. Army report and photographs documenting the abuse surfaced — was ignored by major American newspapers. Hanley attributes this lack of interest to the fact that “it was not an officially sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source.” One of the most memorable parts of Moyers documentary was when he pressed Tim Russert on why the critical views went unheard and Russert laid it off completely on the political opposition, concluding by saying something to the effect of (referring to the political opposition), “I wish they had called.” The crux of the problem, imo, is that the msm’s idea of objectivity is pretty much what Moyers describes, that democrats/liberals and republicans/conservatives get equal time, regardless of the soundness or honesty of the view or direction of the facts. It seems this would only work , if ever, during times they are holding relatively equal political power. When there is an imbalance of power, the press’s two-sided approach to objectivity actually serves to exacerbate the imbalance, imo, rather than mitigate through critical analysis, because those in power dominate the agenda, and tend to have and be given stronger voice. Moyers is also correct that the rise of the right-wing propaganda machine disguising itself as “fair and balanced” journalism has further distorted things, mainly by taking advantage of the two-sided approach to force discussion and coverage by the rest of the media to legitimize their views, no matter how extreme, in the name of balance. Posted by: rollotomasi at June 1, 2007 12:42 AM | Permalink It will no doubt astonish you all to find that people are curious about why, since you were so concerned about torture at Gitmo and at Abu Ghraib, the MSM has avoided like the plague a mention of the al Q torture manual discovered during the rescue of 42 Iraqis from an al Q torture facility. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at June 1, 2007 7:33 AM | Permalink I very much enjoyed this article, but I have to say that it seems to be missing a pretty important facet. One of the reasons journalists continue to turn to familiar sources and seem to unable to change is purely financial. When a publisher has an agenda to forward, editors and reporters fall in line or lose their jobs. When a media company starts cutting jobs and resources, it's nearly impossible to develop new sources. All that takes time and money that no longer exist. Finally, the past 25 years have been enveloped by the "greed is good" mentality; journalists watched "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," too, and wanted theirs. A society that rewards success, whatever the cost to the body politic, is going to compromise all but the most uncompromising. [...Comments seem not to be posting for some reason following Ferdy's... we are checking into it...JR, Friday night, June 1...] Thanks for pointing me to Fineman, Richard. This is how it ends. I think we're going to have to say he's doing philosophy. What is a Fact? I like the inconclusive end. Fineman surprised me. This article strikes me as developing a point made by Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent, that US journalism has tended to conflate the legitimacy of a news story with the political authority of their sources. I've always thought that Chomsky let that drop and moved on a little too fast. It's great to see the three of you explicate with detailed examples just how devastating for journalism and democracy the refusal to think as an individual or as an institution really is. I wonder if this identification of authority with legitimacy is also part of how journalists rationalize printing oppo research under their own byline. They do seem to think that the parties are part of the government and the press reports on government, so anonymously printing any passing smear the parties choose to throw in their laps is consequently "journalism." Glenn Greenwald has a piece today on The Politico's Mike Allen as a champion practitioner of White House boosterism as journalism, but my personal favorite example of this practice comes from when Greg Palast was talking to a US television news division about breaking the story on voter roll caging in Florida before the 2000 presidential election. The network in question called up Jeb Bush's press secretary. The press secretary denied the story. The network drew the obvious conclusion that the piece was therefore without foundation and not newsworthy. As you point out, that is what the code as currently interpreted predicts most news organizations do. At this point, journalistic change is necessary for national survival, let alone the resurrection of democracy. Posted by: Mark Anderson at June 2, 2007 12:18 PM | Permalink Thanx to the authors of this piece, and thanks to Jay for bringing it to us. ********* In such a short piece, you obviously can't get to all the issues -- but I'm wondering if you deal with the influence of "official" opinion-makers among the media -- the basic "cult of personality" that makes what certain people say important merely because they are saying it, and not because of the ideas expressed or insights delivered. I'm asking because I was struck by the Fineman piece linked by Richard Simon above. Now, Fineman spent time talking to Al Gore about Gore's new book --- but the piece is not about what Gore thinks, its about what Fineman thinks...and its especially fatuous... a quote from the beginning of the piece... To answer an urgent question first, Gore didn’t look bad. He’s not the svelte Al Gore of old, and why should he be? He’s pushing 60, a grandfather three times over, a best-selling author, accidental movie star and media mini-mogul. He looked pale from the preapplied pancake makeup. Then again, so did I. huh? Gore's point is consistent with yours -- but Gore seems to be concentrating on the pernicious influence that television "news" is having on "reasoned debate" in this country. Fineman describes the heart of Gore's thesis as "[Americans are f]ed a steady diet of fear-inducing, rage-promoting, fact-free television shows..." But Fineman doesn't cite the cable news channels and network news divisions that Gore cites. The program that Fineman cites? "The View" (apparently because Rosie O'Donnell ocassionally goes off the deep end in expressive the progressive viewpoint.) But perhaps the most relevant aspect of Fineman's piece to what you have written above is his complete and utter denial of the very concept that the press should be doing a better job of informing Americans, and keeping politicians honest. Fineman's apparent 'solution' to the problems that Gore cites is FactCheck.org -- a bizarrely 'centrist' web site that concentrates on political ads. But anyone who has ever examined FactCheck.org will tell you that it fudges its facts to maintain a "centrist" image.... and doesn't really differentiate that much between lies that can best be characterized as "Whoppers" and the kind of garden variety spin one expects from political candidates. Yet it is the Finemans (and Broders, and Brookses, and Krautheimers, and Friedmans) who essentially set the limits of of "acceptable" opinions -- Rosie O'Donnell is "too far out" despite the fact that she usually speaks for a very large percentage of Americans, while Rush Limbaugh is "mainstream". How can the press fix itself, when the "leadership" that it recognizes is so out of touch? Posted by: p. lukasiak at June 2, 2007 4:24 PM | Permalink My apologies to those who left comments and saw them "held for moderation." It's not my doing. It's an out of control spam filter that prevented me from commenting, as well. I went through all the comments labeled spam and rescued a bunch that has been posted Thursday and Friday. So please re-read the thread from the beginning. If you leave a comment and the system tells you it's awaiting moderation, shoot me an email and I will try to find it and put it up. Also, I am going to try to get one or more of the authors to come in and respond to some of this. Sorry, folks. Palast also mentioned similarly farcical “investigations” by other news organizations, including CBS — who promised him a story on the 2000 Florida vote based on the reports he’d already broadcast on the BBC, then told him his story “didn’t pan out” because they’d called Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s office and a Bush staff member had denied it. Posted by: Mark Anderson at June 3, 2007 1:42 AM | Permalink I do have to agree with Lynnell Mickelsen that there is serious tension between the thesis that it is largely power that corrupts the US press and the pervasive media rejection of Clinton's legitimacy in the 1990s. Broder's "He trashed the place and it's not his place" in response to a mythological vandalization of the White House on Clinton's way out being exhibit A. If the press is intrinsically subservient to power, why did it seem like Republicans were in charge of media coverage through two Clinton administrations despite approval ratings by and large untouched by the current idiot favorite even in Clinton's "darkest" hours (60%+ after Monica)? I don't presume to know, but to pretend otherwise flies in the face of all facts. The press simply didn't have the slightest trouble opposing executive power in the 1990s. We might argue that this reflected Republican domination of both houses of congress and the public conversation on policy issues and it was that power that was reflected in persistently negative coverage of the Clinton administration. Well, we have the perfect analogy now, don't we? Democratic control of both houses of congress and an opposition party president. Should we begin to expect that press treatment of Bush II will begin to rival the long Republican editorial reign of the nineties? The tone certainly has changed, but even the comparison is insulting given the relentlessly mythological oppo-research basis of the most relentless and scurrilous charges against Clinton and how much more grave and terrifying Bush's systematic sabotage of democratic governance and salvagable world order has been, how the aura of an utterly unfounded belief in GOP policy seriousness and maturity still generally prevails. And GOPers, don't even start with the "Clinton deserved it" nonsense. In hindsight, all eight years of GOP hysteria over Clinton policy were ultimately premised on the grave danger posed to the republic by Clinton's failure to pursue the idiot GOP policies that directly and logically led to Bush's serial world-historical catastrophes (still promoted by the Weekly Standard crew whose analysis Neuro amusingly points too as an authority who knows better than the featured writers). They effectively argued that Clinton was illegitimate because he actively obstructed Bush style failure for eight long years. That argument isn't very impressive in 2007, people. Recognize. "Representing" the 62 million Americans who sadly voted for Bush (who have largely since rejected his policies) whom Neuro claims to stands up for (and most of whom, other than Neuro's fellow 25% dead-enders, now suffer deep voter's remorse) is not the solution to bad journalism. Not only does it have no bearing whatsoever on where the truth should take journalism, it is the very definition of our current crisis. "Mainstream" media taking its cues from Matt Drudge has a long way to go to catch up with how deadly reality is for the long strange trip the GOP has taken us on over the last two decades. As for myself, Clinton was too Republican, too pro-globalization, but compared to the neocon neanderthals he looks like a freaking genius. If those in the media with children really want to protect them in the many senses that entails, they will first have to move past the presumption of legitimacy they continue to grant the authoritarian propagandists in the White House. Posted by: Mark Anderson at June 3, 2007 1:03 PM | Permalink Mark.... I've also thought about that question. And the answer I come up with is that Clinton was genuinely non-elitist in a city obsesses with status and power. Most politicians are good at making other people think they are special, but for most politicians its just a performance, and the elite were given genuine "special" status, not the performance. But Clinton wasn't giving a peformance -- his empathy and regard for "common people" was genuine, and the elites were just as special to Clinton as the "common people". That drove the elites crazy... Posted by: p.lukasiak at June 3, 2007 3:42 PM | Permalink |
|
Print
