Dan Rather was in tears Monday night describing the culture of fear in the newsrooms now.
Further proof that the corporate world rules and the big boys (Dick, Baker III, Bush) hold the cards. Money rules all.
But at least some are starting to speak truth to power. We need to continue to encourage those with courage and a voice to use it. Chastize when they could do better and praise when they done good.
Tighten the ownership rules and get shareholder value out of the equation for news — the news is a public trust that should not be beholden to the whimsy of the market. And, hello, the public lets the networks use the airwaves, it’s not their right to.
Finally, for Isis’ sake can we please, please, get a liberal counteraction to the RWCM propaganda machine already?? Hello, Soros, Gore, Spielberg…
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Addressing the Fordham University School of Law in Manhattan, occasionally forcing back tears, he said that in the intervening years, politicians “of every persuasion” had gotten better at applying pressure on the conglomerates that own the broadcast networks. He called it a “new journalism order.”
He said this pressure — along with the “dumbed-down, tarted-up” coverage, the advent of 24-hour cable competition and the chase for ratings and demographics — has taken its toll on the news business. “All of this creates a bigger atmosphere of fear in newsrooms,” Rather said.
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Nevin asked Rather if he felt the same type of repressive forces in the Nixon administration as in the current Bush administration.
“No, I do not,” Rather said. That’s not to say there weren’t forces trying to remove him from the White House beat while reporting on Watergate; but Rather said he felt supported by everyone above him, from Washington bureau chief Bill Small to then-news president Dick Salant and CBS chief William S. Paley.
“There was a connection between the leadership and the led . . . a sense of, ‘we’re in this together,”‘ Rather said. It’s not that the then-leadership of CBS wasn’t interested in shareholder value and profits, Rather said, but they also saw news as a public service. Rather said he knew very little of the intense pressure to remove him in the early 1970s because of his bosses’ support.
Nevins took up the cause for Rather, who was emotional several times during the event.
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Rather praised the coverage of Hurricane Katrina by the new generation of TV journalists…
It’s been one of television news’ finest moments,” Rather said of the Katrina coverage. He likened it to the coverage of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.
“They were willing to speak truth to power,” Rather said of the coverage.
So true. So true. If only he had not backed down during TANG. That was also an opportunity to speak truth to power… but I suppose no one is perfect eh.
Wow …
When will we have an anchor who does a Walter Cronkite on the Vietnam war?
“If only he had not backed down during TANG. That was also an opportunity to speak truth to power…”
I think what surprised me at thae time was that rather really had nothing to lose at the time. His days were numbered and I am sure he knew it. I am sure he doesn’t need a job so I am interested to know why he didn’t pursue who was behind the forgery.
Wish I weren’t getting so cynical, but I wonder if there’s an embarrassing incident in his past they would smear him with. Worse yet, would they smear someone he loves?
I wonder too sometimes. I was telling someone the other day that i just don’t believe anything I hear anymore with the exception of a few but especially when it comes to republicans and news people. i know that is a vast generalization but I cannot find it in my heart anymore. I am very cynical these days.
Remember the Anthrax scare, only the top Dems and news anchors got it. I could be wrong, but i had heard the first victom played a part in publishing a story on the twins underage drinking.
Two more reporters murdered in Iraq yesterday. Somebody will have to use that word without being scorned as a conspiracy nut. As long as we’re in a war, you can’t call it murder. Who can blame them for their fear?
It’s starting to feel so childish – this peer pressure.
Thanks to Dan for his courage – this is a good beginning. He is a patriotic hero, despite the mockery heaped on him.
I agree, the peer pressure not look shrill is childish.
From the article:
“He said this pressure — along with the “dumbed-down, tarted-up” coverage, the advent of 24-hour cable competition and the chase for ratings and demographics — has taken its toll on the news business. “All of this creates a bigger atmosphere of fear in newsrooms,” Rather said.”
Who would have thought that 24 hours news channels would have resulted in us getting less news. It seems so backwards – all that time to fill, and there are fewer points of view than ever.
CNN’s Vernon Jordan called it and got rapidly canned.
I’m getting a little tired of all of the congratulation and self-congratulation about the coverage of Katrina.
OK, it’s nice that some of the reporters were willing to contradict the spin and misinformation of government officials and report what was actually happening. But what does it say about us that we are surprised by this and feel the need to rush off and praise them to the skies for doing their jobs?
And in the meantime, the image of the Katrina survivors firmly planted in the minds of most Americans is of criminals run amok. The “face” of those left behind in New Orleans in the popular consciousness is of Black people looting, raping, carjacking, and murdering.
In fact, the vast majority of Katrina survivors are Black people who are good, decent, ordinary people – most not poor, but working class and middle class – who now have to face agonizing decisions about whether to go back to a corrupt, failing, profoundly racist city (as it was before Katrina) and participate in its rebuilding which is shaping up to include opportunities for even more corruption, or to attempt the difficult task of starting their lives over in another place.
We good-hearted liberals that we are (and we are) know this. But the media spent several days reinforcing one of the primary pillars of our country’s rotten racist core – white fear.
Will we hold the media accountable for this? Or will we just go on about how proud we are of those reporters who suddenly decided to do their jobs, and forget the part the media played in portraying the survivors as criminals and thugs? Wherever the Katrina survivors decide to try to rebuild their lives, they won’t have the luxury of forgetting.
In other words, “It was their finest hour” is less a compliment than a complaint.
I agree 100%.
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New kid’s book “Liberals Under My Bed” becomes lightning rod for controversy. Prominent liberals liken it to Nazi propaganda, but conservative author laughs off allegations.
Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) September 20, 2005 — Liberals all over the country are up in arms over a new children’s book that portrays cartoon versions of left-wing icons Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy taxing and regulating a lemonade stand.
“Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed” (Kids Ahead; hardcover: $15.95; ISBN 0976726904) hits bookstore shelves today, but author Katharine DeBrecht has already found herself under fire from liberals.
MSNBC host Ron Reagan was incensed over the book and scolded DeBrecht on his cable television show.
Fox News host Alan Colmes claimed the book exists for the purpose of “brainwashing.”
Democratic Underground, a popular liberal Web site, named DeBrecht to its “Top 10 Conservative Idiots” list. And Daily Kos, the most trafficked left-wing blog, likened the book to Nazi propaganda.
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If this is the same person I knew much later in his career (there were a couple of people around with that same name)
Washington bureau chief Bill Small
he didn’t take anything from anybody! Tough, no nonsense newsman. A nearly extinguished breed, alas.
The only long term solution is to combat the extraordinary concentration of media power in very few corporate hands. Of course the Democratic sponsored Telecommunications Act of 1996 played a crucial role in creating this situation.
Which is another way of saying that in the area of the mass media — as well as in many other areas involving corporate power — we need to return to a regime of serious regulation, a course of action that the Democratic Party has essentially been running away from since the Carter administration.
When I went to the Media Reform Conference last May, the Telecommunications Act of 96 came up in every talk, every seminar, every workshop, again and again. Of course, before last May, I’d never even heard of it – or forgotten if I had.
B. Clinton and Gore both supported it when it was passed. I really think that they had no idea of where that Act would take us, where we find ourselves today. I think they actually thought that it would enable a thousand flowers to bloom and enhance public discussion instead of debasing it as it has.
Now, love or hate Clinton and/or Gore – that’s beside my point. They are both very smart guys. They didn’t see this coming. They were undoubtedly used by the growing corporate news conglomerates, but they either didn’t see that or thought they were smarter and that their vision of more diversity in media, rather than Big Media’s stranglehold on it, would come to pass.
Beware the unintended consequences. Bill Raspberry wrote a column a million years ago titled, “BISLAGIATT” (but it seemed like a good idea at the time). “bis-la-geeat” still reverberates in my head frequently.
In the meantime, everyone should have FreePress.net bookmarked, and check in with them from time to time. They do very good work in this area.
And, as a young friend says one of his co-workers is wont to say, “If you don’t like government regulation, you’re gonna love Mad Cow Disease.”
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Political influence through positions in regulatory bodies.
Part of the Texas McClellan clan I have published a number of diaries at dKos – see also above google link.
Identical problem with Internet regulation – Network Solutions – SAIC – Verisign – Pivotal Equity.
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I agree that one should never underestimate the power of unintended consequences (certainly more important to our political history than well-planned conspiracies). And in some sense I agree that Clinton and Gore didn’t understand what the consequences of the Telecommunications Act would be.
But others certainly did understand, and predicted the kind of increased media concentration we see today. And the mistakes that Clinton, Gore, and other Dems made in supporting the Telecommunications Act were indicative or larger ideological blindspots that can be seen in many policies embraced by the mainstream of the Democratic Party. These blindspots include: too much concern for efficiency over equity, too much faith in market solutions, and too little suspicion of concentrations of private wealth and power. These faults are also seen, for example, in the Democrats’ execrable record on intellectual property issues, which suggests that they are much more the party of the entertainment industry than the party of the little guy.
To this day, AFAIK, neither Clinton nor Gore has said that he was wrong in supporting the Telecommunications Act. And the Democrats have offered no bold, new telecommunications policy to replace it.
Finally, it is “brother” not “sister,” though unlike a lot of guys (I suspect), I’m actually pretty flattered that you might not have been sure.
Clinton supported a lot of really bad legislation. In a lot of ways, the DMCA is just as responsible for this mess as the Telecom Act. It means it’s possible to lock away recordings and other data behind fences of “copyright law” that can never, ever be breached by anything short of a court order. And it gave a lot of power over “copyright violations” to corporations, including (indirectly, through the DRM clauses) allowing them to define certain classes of copyright violation on their own.
There are plenty of “loud mouths,” in news today, that should be shown the door. Let’s say, “They add nothing worthwhile to the discourse.”
Kyra Phillips is one of those people.
“Liberals Under My Bed?” You gotta be kiddin’ me! There ought to be a “liberal foot” buried in someone’s rear-end.
Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Scrubbed from the American Security Council website after Rather’s vanquishment:
I started j-school about a month after Nixon resigned. Although I originally planned to go into print journalism, I started working for the university radio station (long live WNUR!) and decided that radio was my medium.
At the time, most of the school’s journalism professors were former staffers at a defunct Chicago paper; given an increasingly tight newspaper job market, they opted to teach. Although the school allowed students to major in broadcast journalism, that choice met with nearly universal scorn from the faculty–they didn’t consider broadcasting, especially television, to be “real” journalism. But it was the dawn of the all-news radio station, and we WNUR staffers had great faith in the potential of broadcasting to bring the people more news faster.
Well, the potential has been squandered. I left the radio news business in frustration after several years because I didn’t want to be a ditzy “personality” rather than a newscaster. And there’s just nothing good to say about TV news–it seems that the more of it there is, the worse it gets.
But my professors didn’t anticipate the downhill slide that newspaper journalism would take. Thanks to the conglomeratization of all media, newspapers have become just as much Chamber-of-Commerce cheerleaders, just as timid, as their broadcasting counterparts.
It’s just damned sad. I’m crying right along with Dan.
One thing that puzzles me is that while there is a big subscriber base for The Economist magazine, there is no obvious competing magazine with a leftist viewpoint. In structure, The Economist reminds me of Time or Newsweek before they turned into entertainment magazines: Mostly news, some editorials, and very small “soft” news sections.
Of course The Economist carries a pretty right-wing viewpoint along with it, but the question is, why isn’t there a comparable magazine on the left? Or is there, and I just don’t know about it?