Just out of curiosity I want to ask y’all a question. What do you think is the larger problem in the media today? Does the prevalence and influence of Fox News and, to a lesser extent, right-wing radio and boutique winger magazines, represent the biggest danger we face? Or would you say that the faux-left/neutral posturing of mainstream bigfoot beltway pundits like Joe Klein, David Broder, Tom Friedman, Richard Cohen, Tim Russert, Andrea Mitchell, Wolf Blitzer, and even Maureen Dowd is the larger problem?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
neither
dumbass americans are the problem
not taught how to think for themselves
drunk on teevee and sugar
anaesthetized on purpose i believe
The largest problem is not ideological, but a complete lack of fact checking and shoeleather research in most print journalism today. That, and a few isolated cases of journalists selling out their ethics. The editorialists aren’t the problem because they’re introducing biasI is exactly their job.
As for television news, it’s so worthless I don’t know where to begin. I don’t even bother watching any longer. C-SPAN and print media is it.
Pathetic, eh?
Well, I didn’t quite realize it when I wrote the question but I placed Fox News squarely in the editorial mode along with the Weekly Standard, The New Republic, Talk Radio, ‘liberal’ columnists, etc, and then added in so-called neutrals like Russert and Blitzer.
To me, they’re all advocates to one degree or another.
The questions is which group does more damage.
The question is what sources do it right. I don’t read/listen/watch any of the outlets/people you list.
Well. The question is loaded. It presupposes that both groups are doing ‘damage’ to journalism. But there are no metrics to decide what is damage and what is not.
I mean, I’m sure you could find a conservative who would decry MSNBC while claiming Fox News should be considered a TV journalism standard.
I think in academic journalism circles you’d see a response more like mine: Not enough real research; not enough comparison quotes; bad fact checking; and in the name of ‘balance’ a false dualism that is due more to the incompetence of the journalist than to the positions of the interviewees.
shrug
I don’t think there’s really a way to quantify “which one does the most damage”.
In a hurricane what does the most damage, the first drop of rain in the storm or the final drop which falls and causes the levee to break? They are equal contributors to the end result, which is a major disaster.
Our media is one big conglomeration of incompetence. Some are worse than others, but they all play their own unique parts, in my opinion.
C. None of the above
The media-related problem is that there is no longer a “Press” in this society; it’s all “media.” It’s all about keeping the ratings high (in the “right” affluent demographic groups) and always pushing the profits up; giving the public the information it needs in order to be informed and participate in society is simply no longer regarded as a significant or even legitimate goal. A reporter or editor who attempts to put through a story on the basis of the public’s need to know will quickly be laughed out of the newsroom. A story with content, with news value, which makes the readers or viewers sit up and notice, maybe pay attention, will make the advertisers uneasy, and that will make the executives unhappy, and that will make the responsible reporter and editor unemployed.
An informed citizen is a dangerous citizen.
…because of a documentary film that’s at least six years old called, “Why America Hates the Press.”
It used to be that journalists were essentially working class stiffs. They identified with their readership because they were from that part of town.
Nowadays, it’s class warfare. Journalists are pretty much are of the elite or angling to become so. They enjoy fantastic salaries. They schmooze with captains of industry or presidential favorites, and owe them for favorites. Their kids go to the same private schools or even marry each other. That wouldn’t have happened fifty years ago. And that’s why the Beltway gang have more affinity being Administration hacks and bending over for Bush’s kicks in the posterior than anything.
I can blame Faux being the template from which all idiocy–and suppression–sprang for the last twenty years. I can blame the Reagan ascendancy and even Vietnam and urban riots…because Americans no longer wanted to hear or see any bad news about the Pax Americana, but to believe in their own invincibility again. But when you are talking about the Fourth Estate, it’s square in their laps, too. They are NOT doing their jobs. They aren’t kicking the traces off the corporate boardrooms, because Parent Company, Ltd., might be dumping toxic waste onto some state’s water table.
It’s a big mess, but there is enough blame to go around.
I agree wholeheartedly and would add that the fourth estate is continually striving and succeeding to keep blinders on the American public. It is very sad and the only hope I see is the ability of the net to poke holes in this ongoing Charade.
You are pointing to symptoms of the underlying disease. I don’t know the name of the disease. I don’t even know if it really has a name. But it has many symptoms:
I think we need to identify the disease before we do something about it. “Corporatism” is part of the disease, but I think it’s only a part.
I second the corporatism argument, but would add that the only reason the Beltway pundits are able to get away with seeming ‘left’ is that anything to the left of FOX now seems lefty. They have no MSM counterweight. Also, they’ve proved so commercially successful that other networks feel they have to imitate them.
It does seem to me that a big blow was struck against the mainstreaming of right-wing extremism with the Imus situation. The sort of cultural divisiveness he and others promote, from the mild to the off the scale, keeps people from looking at the true culprits in their collective problems.
And I do think that this is an important issue to address. We’re going to have a crappy Farm Bill this year, and a crappy Energy Bill; both of those pieces of legislation are enormously important. But we can’t get a media that has enough oxygen left over after talking about Lindsey Lohan to explain what the big deal is to people about the things that really affect their lives.
I support Democrats as a strategic decision, they’re closer to my ideals and where else am I … yada. But they don’t do the correct thing just for the heck of it, they only do it when they’re dragged to it. And we’re a few million draggers low. (Members of Congress have a density disproportionate to their volume and presumed composition.)
We need a citizenry that really gets that it’s a branch of government whose job isn’t finished when the polls close in November every two years. We need public leadership and activism so widespread that people don’t think to mark it out as an unusual level of participation. We need people to believe that they can happen to the world and make a positive impact, instead of letting the world happen to them as a colorful fiction fleshed out by the entertainment ‘news’ media.
Because our government isn’t by and large run by leaders. It’s run by influence brokers. They deal preferentially in low volume, high payout transactions, just like any corporate efficiency expert would suggest they ought to. That means the corporations win, whichever set of corporations is in favor with the current Powers-That-Be. So if we want real leadership, real responsiveness, it’s going to have to come from the public, bubble up from below. I see no other way, long term. And that means we have to push the people who are talking to the public by every available lever that comes to hand.
Thomas Friedman is to intellectual as Paris Hilton is to musician.
The media is a propaganda system. Basic principles have been spelled out by the German Nazi and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebels.
His principles have been implemented. In short, you create a fantasy, report “news”–facts or “facts” to support it–and lie about everything else. Film footage can be staged, if need be. (It was, and is.)
The media is FULL SPECTRUM propaganda. The “liberal” story-line and the “conservative” story-line have been integrated into one overall narrative which is designed to evade the truth and support the power of the establishment and the Permanent Government.
The correct name for what is happening has been described by the Pentagon: INFORMATION WAR. WE–that is US citizens (and not Arab insurgents, or anybody like that) are the main targets of the war.
The whole importance of Blogland is that it lies partly outside this narrative. (That is why they are trying to shut it down.) Sometimes there is success: We actually disrupt the narrative with information and facts. But then of course the media co-opts, which is totally familiar to anyone who lived through the sixties. This is done very much in the spirit of the “limited hang out route” as Nixon called it. The Limited Hang-Out Route is of course a form of disinformation since the truth is simultaneously conceded and twisted in order to keep supporting the lie.
The media is never going to “get it.” Their job is to lie: It is how they earn their salaries. They know their job. They do it well.
Nazis didn’t invent propaganda: Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays did. His techniques were used to get the US into World War I, before the Nazi party even existed.
Propaganda, a.k.a. “public relations”, is an American invention, invented to help corporations repair the very poor image they had at the beginning of the last century.
if they stole it from the Americans, so much the better.
What they wrote about the techniques they used is still very to the point.
Of course, by raising the American connection, you show that we should not be surprised how the media works at all.
Thank you.
Man oh man, Boo. Talk about opening up a can of worms. Multiple books could, and have, been written on this subject.
There are, I believe, a myriad of problems which we face. First and foremost, there is the problem of media consolidation. Now when you say this people start screaming “Fairness Doctrine, Fairness Doctrine!!”. But the reality of the situation is that the news media is, today, first and foremost, a business. It is a business which has to make money. And when you are beholden, firstly, to the bottom line, there are a significant number of compromises which you are inevitably going to have to make. And hard reporting, the kind which is labor intensive and isn’t a big contributor to the important parts of the annual report to stockholders, is not an efficient animal from a corporate standpoint. So, to make a long story short, you have what we are dealing with today. And that is simply the presentation of a “veneer” of real news. A Cliff Notes version, if you will. The existence of this veneer is essential to giving a degree of credibility and sanction to the business venture as a whole. And that has become, essentially, the standard. You have opportunities in the written media to have more depth, but the bar has been set, in large part, at the low level represented by television news. Because television news, whether it is Fox or CBS or MSNBC, is where the large majority of people get their information. And this is where their frames are established. Unfortunately, the written news (outside of blogs), where there is tremendous opportunity to explore a subject in depth, is rapidly becoming a dinosaur.
Secondly, the sheer volume of information available allows anyone to get their information fed to them from a perspective they wish to hear. Want to hear about the “radical left on Daily Kos and on the college campuses”, tune in to Fox. Want to hear about the latest missing white woman or celebrity news, then tune into CNN (or Fox). Want to hear about the scourge of the dark skinned people swarming over our borders, tune in to Lou Dobbs. Essentially, people can get validation of whatever world they wish to exist simply by tuning in to their information venue of choice.
This is a subject which could generate an exhaustive amount of opinion and analysis, but these are a couple of things which come to my mind right away.
The pundits you cite, in my opinion, are simply cogs in this larger wheel. I don’t believe they are really driving the debate. However, they are essential tools to the corporate masters real goal-Making Money!!
The problem with the media is not the subtle or overt prejudices of those on the front lines. Those issues are easily recognizable and fairly easy to deal with. The problem with the media is the innate and absolute obligation they have to generate revenue for the corporation. That is the driver of all things that happen. I don’t give a shit if some intrepid reporter discovers that the Earth is simply an extra-terrestrial aquarium being used in some alien science fair project. If that story cannot be presented in some way that generates cash, it will end up in the media crapper.
It’s about the money, BooMan. Just like they said in Jerry McGuire.
both groups appear to be causing the insanity we have today. It doesn’r take much to believe that there is a coordination between the groups. We all are clearly aware that the “daily talking points” that appear seem to support the “Unitary” problem(ha!)
Anyhow, does ity make a diff? If you want one to limit the choice to a single group, then I would have to go with the Media and talk radio group. They appear to be able to reach more lemmings!
These are all problems, but a major factor people don’t bring up often is the funding model behind the media. If we expect our media to be “free” then they will deliver what can draw audiences for their sponsors to purchase the brain-time of without offending those sponsors. This is how we get so much celebrity news and nothing serious that digs into the big problems in the world. Bad news turns many people off and any investigative reporting that “follows the money” will find that it leads to corporations. Uh-oh. Sponsors don’t like that.
The only way to have truly fair media is to have media that is subscriber-funded (NO ads) and whose only goal is to cater to the desires of the customer (the subscriber.) Like HBO or Showtime. You pay for them and that is their only funding. So they take risks and make the controversial programming that their subscribers want. They don’t have to worry about offending Proctor & Gamble or ExxonMobile or Big Pharma.
I would happily pay $10 a month for a subscription-based “Fair & Accurate” Cable News channel. And if maybe 10 million other Americans wanted that as well and the network received $5 of each person’s subscription fee, that would give them a $50 Million monthly budget to provide REAL investigative reporting and not settle for the free propaganda handed to them by the government and corporations. See how that could work?
C-Span is the only truly unbiased TV news/information network because of their funding model. They receive about 5 cents per month per subscriber of cable or satellite in the country from all cable and satellite providers. Those nickels add up to a decent operating budget, but not enough for hard-hitting original reporting. They only need to keep the cable companies and you happy. Even PBS can’t make this claim anymore since they have had their public funding slashed so badly by Gingrich & Co. that they need corporate sponsors nowadays. NONE of the commercial channels that provide “news” in any form can possibly be what we would like them to be because of their funding model.
For those who have not heard of the “Propaganda Model” presented in Chomsky & Herman’s book “Manufacturing Consent: The political economy of the mass media,” this would be the “filter” they refer to as “Funding.” Wikipedia covers the basics of that model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Propaganda_Model
that leaves us too few Bill Moyers and Charlie Roses, and values “infotainers” is the problem; it worships the sound bite and discourages the sound argument.
The commercial success of programs and presenters that promote window dressing over content, sensationalism over journalism, and personality over sagacity is a plague.
The biggest problem is management that lays off people like Robert Parry and promotes people like Mike Isakoff.
The problem is ostensibly respectable programs like the NewsHour that let Charlayne Hunter Gault go and keep apparatchiki like Jim Lehrer.
We’re all describing pieces of the elephant, but class and gender do play an outsize role.
Psychology accounts for yet another piece – it’s that high school lunchroom dynamic, writ large. It’s my experience that male journalists were often outcasts and geeks and thus are susceptible to flattery – the females, for yet another reason: They’re worried about being too brainy for male approval.
Oh, it’s all just one big junior prom.
There’s actually research on this. The more choices we get, the more we choose the media that reaffirm our pre-existing prejudice.
But the real problem is the significant gap between the obligation to provide truth and the way media gets its money–and its strokes. Bill O’Reilly couldn’t function if his audience were net-savvy.
There is a real light at the end of the tunnel. While there is a “digital divide” between those who have broadband and comfortable access, and those who don’t, the skew is moving in the direction of open access.
MSM is dead–and just doesn’t know it yet.
The key to the understanding of American MSM is thus.
No matter how illustrious, credentialed and the amount of “integrity” they profess to have there is a list of verboten topics which will never, ever be discussed.
http://www.projectcensored.org will start you on the list.
Second, the framing of the “debate” has already gone through hours of intensified study by the equivalent of what the Soviets called a “political officer”, the gentleman whose loyalty to the party was above question. How else could “intelligent” people stoop to the average mental age of thirteen to present their “arguments”.
Third, I have brought this link up before as it is easily findable through Google.
Strategic Communications Laboratories
The best “perception” money can buy. There is in fact far too much “media” far too often.
There is little difference between “left” and “right” as both exist to create the illusion that things are all “normal” but if you view both agendas and talking points in conjunction with historical facts over time the subject of global governance surfaces. Maximized profit for the elite few at the expense of less educated,politically oppressed people.
“Media” a for profit business is owned wholly by only what four or five huge conglomerates and even the very means, the path and or the tendency to develop the thought process which leads down any path of opposition of corporate greed and malfeasance is in America supressed.
Sorry if I go off on a seemingly incoherent rage every single time “media” is brought up but I have frequent conversations with the Lord God himself about wanting to tack up my Apocalyptic horse. I hope He knows something I don’t.
Oh, Olberman of course gets a pass on this and a few others too.
Our danger is that the virtual monopolization of the media of mass expression by big capital will distort and finally abort the democratic process. — John Strachey
Strachey was a well-known British socialist politician, whose period of greatest prominence was the 1930’s. So it’s not unreasonable to assume that the above words were spoken or written approximately seventy years ago. Plus ça change, etc. But hey – guess what? The problem in 2007 is undoubtedly a whole lot worse than it was in 1937.
Check out the Media Reform Information Center web site, for some sobering stats and graphics concerning the precipitous decline in the number of companies controlling the lion’s share (i.e., 90%) of the mainstream media.
In 1964 Marshall McLuhan famously observed in his seminal work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man that “the media is the message”. Forty-plus years later, it’s easy to see that this phrase has multiple connotations. When the public discourse is essentially controlled by a handful of giant multi-national conglomerates – all of whom have a huge, incalculable interest in maintaining the status quo – the media does indeed become the message, inasmuch as the sensibility and perspective that’s presented to the public is routinely filtered in very limiting and predictable ways.
In a corollary to Mr. Strachey’s remark about the danger of a media overly dominated by big money, Louis Brandeis once stated that “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
It is my firm and unshakable belief that so many of the evils that have manifested themselves in our society stem from the fact that the framers of the Constitution did not perceive one of government’s highest and most important obligations to be the protection of the citizenry from the predations of the wealth class; but rather, the protection of the wealth class from the encroachment of the masses.
No man born with a living soul can be working for the clampdown…