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Tuesday, November 20, 2007
On The Other Side?
We were treated to a vast chorus of defeatists and outright cheerleaders for the Ba'athists as American forces assaulted Iraq. Then came the Mapes / Rather / Burkett / CBS / "National Guard" memos aimed at unseating President Bush. Not too long ago, we had Charles Enderlin and the Mohammed al-Dura "blood libel." Quite recently, there was Democrat "debate engineering" by CNN. And just yesterday, the government announced its intention to file charges against Iraqi "photojournalist" Bilal Hussein.
These are but a handful of the outright lies and deceits the "fourth estate" has been caught trying to perpetrate on us, its customers. Moreover, we cannot know how many times the "gentlemen of the press" have succeeded in such an attempt. Many a press fabrication is sufficiently subtle that it will only be caught a long time afterward -- well after it's done all the harm it can do. And of course, we also have "spin" and "framing" to consider: practices delicate enough to convince many a reader that good news is bad, or vice-versa.
The Old Media are well armored against any sort of legal action. Freedom of the press protects them against everything but libel. Nor is the publication of a newspaper or the transmission of a television show a legal guarantee that its content is trustworthy. So anyone who relies upon those sources for edification about current events is trusting to luck. Clearly, there's no extrinsic basis for trusting Old Media "journalistic ethics."
But there remains a question, urgently asked and only tentatively answered: Why do they do it? Fidelity to some principle they hold higher than reporting the news accurately and objectively? Partisanry so powerful that it overwhelms their ethics? Tangible benefits of some sort? Contempt for their customers?
It's probably some combination of all of these, plus others. One way or another, "Thou shalt not bear false witness" doesn't seem to cut much ice with the barons of the print and broadcast media.
The emergence of alternative news sources such as the Internet, cablecast news, and talk radio might have been thought to be the disciplining force the Old Media need to get them to clean up their act. It hasn't happened yet, nor can your Curmudgeon imagine it happening soon. There's a lot of inertia in the news business; its leading figures tend to have long tenures in their positions. More, they have historical reasons to believe that lying to the news-consuming public can't hurt them seriously, recent precipitous declines in their circulation and viewership numbers notwithstanding.
For his part, your Curmudgeon has resolved not to trust a single-point source on any subject of more than trivial importance. If he must assume, as policy, that what he's reading has probably been reshaped to promote some editor's preferences, at least he can try to average out the spin and the fabrications by reading about the same event in several heterogeneous sources. It takes more time this way, but the alternatives are all worse.
But it's time to address the question implied by the title of this post: Are they on the other side, in an objective sense? That is, do the Old Media have a conscious interest in deceiving Americans to our detriment?
We cannot know. As strong as the patterns are, alternative explanations remain, and probably always will. Among them is this one: Governments lie, too. More, governments have strong reasons to make bad news look good and good news look stellar. Journalists have occasionally been the worst victims of such deceits. That's not a justification, of course; merely one possible explanation for some of the mendacity we're fed, though it doesn't help to explain the times when journalists lie in support of a politician's deceits.
Journalists also believe themselves to be a superior class of creature: more intelligent, more observant, and more healthfully skeptical. It's not a conviction you could expect a journalist to articulate openly, but it's there in the overwhelming majority of the breed. They hold their convictions, particularly about political matters, to be better founded than those of the news-consuming public. Such an attitude is undermined by discovering that one agrees with those he holds inferior. That leads rather naturally to holding convictions at variance from the general citizenry -- and to spinning the news in such a fashion as to reinforce their positions.
There isn't much to be done except to remain skeptical oneself. All the same, it forces one to wonder whether Thomas Jefferson, who famously said that he'd unhesitatingly choose newspapers without government over government without newspapers, would feel the same today as he did at the end of the Eighteenth Century.
Comments
I still prefer reading the comics in the newspaper as compared to reading them on-line. I’m not sure why, but I just enjoy them more that way. That, and a few local news items, is about all the news paper is good for.
Posted by on 11/20/2007 at 07:12 PMIt’s the time of year when a fire in the wood stove must be kindled to cut the energy bill waaaay down. Then there’s the the fishing season when the catch must be wrapped not to mention the bird cage lining material. We’ve found alternative uses for the Atlanta Urinal and Constipation.
Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ on 11/21/2007 at 04:44 PMA fine essay by Ryan Cole entitled J-School Propaganda (http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2007/11/jschool_propaganda.html) will help explain how the news business lost any claim to objectivity. Mr. Cole, as a J-School granduate, does an excellent job of describing the ideological content of the program, based on the phrase “change the world.” BTW Maybe Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot graduated from J-School? They sure tried to change the world. Another important factor is that the focus of recruiting for news media is from J-Schools. This means that, like “education” graduates at university, the writers have no practical, and probably little theoretical, knowledge of the subject they are reporting on. That means that they will tend to identify with those sources who have a similar political view. The result is a heavily politicized one note symphony.
Posted by on 11/22/2007 at 07:44 PM
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