The Mustache of Understanding has a good piece up today at the New York Times that examines the viral lie that the president’s trip to Asia cost the taxpayers $200 million a day (or, about $2 billion total). He rightly praises CNN‘s Anderson Cooper for running down the origin of the story (an unnamed Indian provincial official) and debunking its accuracy. Cooper, of course, was motivated to investigate because Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-LoonyToonsVille) made the assertion on his television program.
Friedman commends Cooper for providing the “antidote to malicious journalism,” which is “good journalism,” and then concludes with this:
When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues — deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate — let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together. But the carnival barkers that so dominate our public debate today are not going away — and neither is the Internet. All you can hope is that more people will do what Cooper did — so when the next crazy lie races around the world, people’s first instinct will be to doubt it, not repeat it.
But, is good journalism really an antidote? When Bloomberg News polled Americans just prior to the midterm elections, they discovered that two-thirds of them were simply wrong about whether income taxes had gone up or down, whether the bank bailout money would be recovered, and on whether or not the economy had grown under Obama’s administration. If Friedman is correct that a Democracy that cannot think intelligently cannot tackle big problems, then it seems like we’re still in need of an antidote.
We here in the progressive blogosphere endeavor to be that antidote, but after seeing the way the people went to the polls completely unarmed with the facts, I feel like we are no more than a sterilized length of gauze papering over a sucking chest wound.
We’re not healing anything. And the country is not having a debate. We have one side that tries to deal with numbers, such as those provided by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, and another side that just makes shit up. The side which just makes shit up has the highest-rated cable news network, many newspapers (including the Wall Street Journal), and total domination of the radio waves. Malicious journalism is totally dominant, and good journalism is rare and ineffectual in producing an informed electorate. Taken as a whole, the news media is actually making people less informed or causing them to be misinformed. To me, that’s the story. That Michele Bachmann repeats fever-brained lies is not the problem. The problem is that more people hear her lies than the corrections to those lies.
Maybe the Mustache can ruminate on this problem and let us know how we can do more than merely hope that there is a cure.
What? Has Friedman been under a rock in Bangalore for the past thirty years? Doesn’t he know that both parties are exactly equally guilty of this sort of thing, and therefore it never needs to be reported on?
Yeah, where are the left-wing lies that circle the globe twice before anyone realizes they’re crap?
Didn’t some left-winger once say something mean about Bush in a MoveOn.org contest? And then the Democrat Congress was forced to apologize or something.
My point is that American “journalists'” holding Republicans and Democrats to be formally equally guilty of everything has been going on for decades and Friedman is only now noticing.
But kudos to Tommy anyway. It took thirty years, BUT AT LEAST HE FINALLY NOTICED that maybe something is wrong with American journalism promoting right-wing hogwash without even that vaunted sense of journalistic skepticism ever coming into play.
Consistent good journalism would be an antidote when combined with presenters who had earned the trust and authority of the American people through that constancy.
Unfortunately no one out there has much authority. The institutions that once had it gave it away by being stenographers for the White House under Bush and had it taken from them by the constant mantra that news is liberal.
These days if someone threatened to actually provide well researched news, then they would be celebrated as a national hero… If they weren’t taken down by the Wurlitzer that passes for news these days.
Is good journalism really an antidote? That is a really good question. I think there are three basic components to the problem of an uninformed or misinformed electorate Poor journalism is the first component, and it is certainly a very big part of the problem. It consists not only of malicious pseudo-journalism — of which Fox is the classic example — but also sloppy, lazy, hasty, self-censoring, or falsely “balanced” (pseudo-objective) journalism, which is actually the “professional” norm throughout American journalism.
The second component is a poorly educated public. Many simply are too ignorant to even understand what the issues are. Some are simply not interested, have little idea how they affect even their own lives, have almost no sense of perspective, and basically have little or no ability to form rational opinions about most issues. Many may have the ability, but literally no time to inform themselves so as to go beyond what they hear from family, friends and acquaintances, who are rarely any better informed than they are, or what they pick up from snatches of poor media journalism and political ads.
The third component is people’s personalities and emotions. Many are just angry and frustrated, and they react to political problems with the arsenal of defense mechanisms well known to psychologists — fantasy, idealization, projection, blame-the-victim; and more pathological ones such as denial distortion, and more extreme forms of projection.
In practice these components constantly interact on all levels. Basically, poor journalism helps foster an uneducated, angry and defensive public, and such a public is extremely vulnerable to malicious propaganda.
The situation of journalism in this country has reached the point where we have to regard it as simply unsustainable and unacceptable. Democracy cannot function without a well-informed electorate. But poor journalism isn’t even the root problem — it is the ownership structure of the media that fosters poor journalism of all kinds. In today’s corporate media, “free speech” equals zero consumer protection!
If that problem could be solved, it would go a long way towards ameliorating the others as well. (They can never be eliminated, but should recede to the fringes of American public discourse.) Many of us are old enough to remember the days before overconsolidation of the media, before hate radio, before sociopaths like Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and Morton Blackwell. Even in those days there was a lot of CIA interference and advertiser interference in the media, but at least we had the fairness doctrine and some semblance of an idea that the airwaves are a public good and that those licensed to use them bore some responsibility to the public.
Jay Rockefeller is my new hero, at least on this. Yesterday (Nov. 17), at a committee meeting on television retransmission consent,he said what needs to be said:
“More than just retransmission consent ailes our television markets. We need new catalysts for quality news and entertainment programming. I hunger for quality news. I’m tired of the right and the left. There’s a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to Fox and to MSNBC, “Out. Off. End. Goodbye.” It’d be a big favor to political discourse, our ability to do our work here in Congress, and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and, more importantly, in their future.
“When it comes to developing content, our entertainment machine is too often in a race to the bottom. In fact, it is in a race to the bottom. Getting close. Even worse, our news media has all but surrendered to the forces of entertainment. And much of our news media is entertainment as opposed to news. Instead of a watchdog that is a check on the excesses of government and business, we have the endless barking of a 24-hour news cycle. We have journalism that is always ravenous for the next rumor, but insufficiently hungry for the facts that can nourish something called our democracy. As citizens, we are paying one heck of a price in the dumbing down of America. You’re probably responsible for that.”
I love that transcription: “ailes our television markets.” Roger Ailes our television markets.
It’s past time for some introspection on the part of the news media. The ignorance of the American population is an indictment of them IMO. This is the worst media climate this side of the runup to the war on Iraq.
I actually disagree that the netroots has failed or is powerless in this regard. Can’t fail at something which was never tried. During this period of governance, the larger traditional blogs have not consistently checked the media or spread the news pertaining to what Dems did manage to accomplish because the focus was upon trying to play king- and queen-maker.
How much do they get paid if the public is well informed?
How much do they get paid if the public is poorly informed?
Is it easier to sell advertising eyeballs when their viewership is well informed or poorly informed?
There is a zero (0) percent chance that the media will engage in any kind of introspection because they are doing exactly what their owners want them to do – making money. And the ones that aren’t making money directly are influencing politics in a way their owners want and so are also making money, even if on the books it looks like a loss or a marginal gain.
What this points at is a failure of capitalism to provide a reasonable media for a democratic society. The aberration of “unbiased journalism” we had from the 40s through the 80s was just that – an aberration. Caused by government intervention into the market via the FCC regulations on broadcasting. When those regulations were lifted the market moved right back to where it can make the most money.
Not the ’80’s and not by government intervention. The news media crucified Jimmy Carter for four years, for no particular reason that is identifiable now. The election of 1980 was preceded by a year of ABC and “objective” journalist Ted Koppel banging the drums (literally) about the Iran hostage crisis every night. Coverage of the election of 1980 was a joke, as moronic remarks like “trees cause 90% of air pollution” from Reagan were seldom reported even when they happened right in front of microphones. The news media chose to go this route on their own, in part as a reaction to Watergate, which allegedly proved that the news media were liberal. In fact, very few media outlets ever said a bad word about Nixon, and most of them didn’t say anything until it was clear he was dead meat, when they piled on and patted themselves on the back for saving the system. A number of court decisions and Bill Clinton’s decision to permit a foreigner (Murdoch) to own a network, and slow constriction of actual liberal and outlets have not helped. But the media mostly did this to themselves.
The problem is that Friedman and his ilk need to pick a side. He does a decent job of identifying a lot of the problems, but he never says GOP bad, Dems good. Fox news, on the other hand, basically is 24/7, Dems bad, GOP good. We’re way past being able to be polite here. Pick a side or go away.
I generally believe in taking the truth wherever I find it, but Tom Friedman is an asshole. He was and still is one of the carnival barkers, hence I don’t give a shit what he thinks about their inevitable power.
There is no reason republicans have to win elections. If we get our people out, we will cream them. Let’s put out strong candidates, not flabby and lukewarm eternal incumbents. Let’s have a strong and true message about where we are and how we can get out.
I wouldn’t be so sure about value of facts in the progressive blogosphere.
For instance: Yesterday a story about lesbian student getting kicked out of an Oklahoma high school went viral. Except they weren’t kicked out, and their situation with the school wasn’t because they were lesbian. Never mind, the Advocate published a story based on a sensationalized and one-sided local TV news report, and Daily Kos, Alternet and others republished — leading the school’s principal to get death threats among the hundreds of calls and emails. Meanwhile, here in Oklahoma we have plenty of valid cases that go unaddressed.
Sorry, meant this as a reply to the main story.
So what really happened?
“, the news media is actually making people less informed or causing them to be misinformed.“
The news media ARE making people less informed or causing them to be misinformed. Media is plural.
And I agree whole heartedly with your point.