[IP] Why the Press Failed
Orville Schell is Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the
University of California, Berkeley. This piece is adapted from the
preface
to a collection of New York Review of Books articles on the media's
coverage
of the war in Iraq by Michael Massing. It will be published soon as a
short
book, Now They Tell Us (The New York Review of Books, 2004).
Why the Press Failed
By Orville Schell
TomDispatch
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1543
Friday 16 July 2004
When, on May 26, 2004, the editors of the New York Times published
a
mea culpa for the paper's one-sided reporting on weapons of mass
destruction
and the Iraq war, they admitted to "a number of instances of coverage
that
was not as rigorous as it should have been." They also commented that
they
had since come to "wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining
claims"
made by the Bush Administration. But we are still left to wonder why the
Times, like many other major media outlets in this country, was so
lacking
in skepticism toward administration rationales for war? How could such a
poorly thought through policy, based on spurious exile intelligence
sources,
have been so blithely accepted, even embraced, by so many members of the
media? In short, what happened to the press's vaunted role, so carefully
spelled out by the Founding Fathers, as a skeptical "watchdog" over
government?
There's nothing like seeing a well-oiled machine clank to a halt to
help you spot problems. Now that the Bush administration is in full
defensive mode and angry leakers in the Pentagon, the CIA, and
elsewhere in
the Washington bureaucracy are slipping documents, secrets, and charges
to
reporters, our press looks more recognizably journalistic. But that
shouldn't stop us from asking how an "independent" press in a "free"
country
could have been so paralyzed for so long. It not only failed to
seriously
investigate administration rationales for war, but little took into
account
the myriad voices in the on-line, alternative, and world press that
sought
to do so. It was certainly no secret that a number of our Western allies
(and other countries), administrators of various NGOs, and figures like
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and
Hans
Blix, head of the UN's Monitoring, Verification and Inspections
Commission,
had quite different pre-war views of the "Iraqi threat."
Few in our media, it seemed, remembered I. F. Stone's hortatory
admonition, "If you want to know about governments, all you have to
know is
two words: Governments lie." Dissenting voices in the mainstream were
largely buried on back pages, ignored on op-ed pages, or confined to the
margins of the media, and so denied the kinds of "respectability" that a
major media outlet can confer.
As reporting on the lead-up to war, the war itself, and its
aftermath
vividly demonstrated, our country is now divided into a two-tiered media
structure. The lower-tier - niche publications, alternative media
outlets,
and Internet sites - hosts the broadest spectrum of viewpoints. Until
the
war effort began to unravel in spring 2004, the upper-tier - a
relatively
small number of major broadcast outlets, newspapers, and magazines -
had a
far more limited bandwidth of critical views, regularly deferring to the
Bush Administration's vision of the world. Contrarian views below rarely
bled upwards.
As Michael Massing pointed out recently in the New York Review of
Books, Bush administration insinuations that critics were unpatriotic -
White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer infamously warned reporters
as war
approached, "People had better watch what they say" - had an undeniably
chilling effect on the media. But other forms of pressure also
effectively
inhibited the press. The President held few press conferences and rarely
submitted to truly open exchanges. Secretive and disciplined to begin
with,
the administration adeptly used the threat of denied access as a way to
intimidate reporters who showed evidence of independence. For reporters,
this meant no one-on-one interviews, special tips, or leaks, being
passed
over in press conference question-and-answer periods, and exclusion from
select events as well as important trips.
After the war began, for instance, Jim Wilkinson, a 32 year-old
Texan
who ran Centcom's Coalition Media Center in Qatar, was, according to
Massing, known to rebuke reporters whose copy was deemed insufficiently
"supportive of the war," and "darkly warned one correspondent that he
was on
a 'list' along with two other reporters at his paper." In the play-along
world of the Bush Administration, critical reporting was a quick ticket
to
exile.
A Media World of Faith-Based Truth
The impulse to control the press hardly originated with George W.
Bush,
but his administration has been less inclined than any in memory to echo
Thomas Jefferson's famous declaration that, "The basis of our government
being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep
that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a
government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I
should not
hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
The Bush Administration had little esteem for the watchdog role of
the
press, in part because its own quest for "truth" has been based on
something
other than empiricism. In fact, it enthroned a new criterion for
veracity,
"faith-based" truth, sometimes corroborated by "faith -based"
intelligence.
For officials of this administration (and not just the religious ones
either), truth seemed to descend from on high, a kind of divine
revelation
begging no further earthly scrutiny. For our President this was
evidently
literally the case. The Israeli paper Ha'aretz reported him saying to
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Prime Minister of the moment, "God told
me to
strike Al Qaeda and I struck, and then he instructed me to strike
Saddam,
which I did."
It is hardly surprising, then, that such a President would eschew
newspapers in favor of reports from other more "objective sources,"
namely,
his staff. He has spoken often of trusting "visceral reactions" and
acting
on "gut feelings." For him as for much of the rest of his
administration,
decision-making has tended to proceed not from evidence to conclusion,
but
from conclusion to evidence. Reading, facts, history, logic and the
complex
interaction between the electorate, the media, and the government have
all
been relegated to subsidiary roles in what might be called
"fundamentalist"
policy formation.
Just as the free exchange of information plays little role in the
relationship between a fundamentalist believer and his or her God, so
it has
played a distinctly diminished role in our recent parallel world of
divine
political revelation. After all, if you already know the answer to a
question, of what use is the media, except to broadcast that answer? The
task at hand, then, is never to listen but to proselytize the political
gospel among non-believers, thereby transforming a once interactive
process
between citizen and leader into evangelism.
Although in the Bush political universe, "freedom has been
endlessly
extolled in principle, it has had little utility in practice. What
possible
role could a free press play when revelation trumps fact and
conclusions are
preordained? A probing press is logically viewed as a spoiler under such
conditions, stepping between the administration and those whose only
true
salvation lies in becoming part of a nation of true believers. Since
there
was little need, and less respect, for an opposition (loyal or
otherwise),
the information feedback loops in which the press should have played a
crucial role in any functioning democracy, ceased operating. The media
synapses which normally transmit warnings from citizen to government
froze
shut.
Television networks continued to broadcast and papers continued to
publish, but, dismissed and ignored, they became irrelevant, except
possibly
for their entertainment value. As the press has withered, the
government,
already existing in a self-referential and self-deceptive universe, was
deprived of the ability to learn of danger from its own policies and
thus
make course corrections.
A Universe in Which News Won't Matter
Karl Rove, the president's chief political advisor, bluntly
declared to
New Yorker writer Ken Auletta that members of the press "don't
represent the
public any more than other people do. I don't believe you have a
check-and-balance function." Auletta concluded that, in the eyes of the
Bush
Administration, the press corps had become little more than another
special-interest lobbying group. Indeed, the territory the traditional
media
once occupied has increasingly been deluged by administration lobbying,
publicity, and advertising - cleverly staged "photo ops," carefully
produced
propaganda rallies, preplanned "events," tidal waves of campaign ads,
and
the like. Afraid of losing further "influence," access, and the
lucrative ad
revenues that come from such political image-making, major media outlets
have found it in their financial interest to quietly yield.
What does this downgrading of the media's role say about how our
government views its citizens, the putative sovereigns of our country?
It
suggests that "we the people" are seen not as political constituencies
conferring legitimacy on our rulers, but as consumers to be sold policy
the
way advertisers sell product. In the storm of selling, spin, bullying,
and
"discipline" that has been the Bush signature for years, traditional
news
outlets found themselves increasingly drowned out, ghettoized, and
cowed.
Attacked as "liberal" and "elitist," disesteemed as "trouble makers" and
"bashers" (even when making all too little trouble), they were
relegated to
the sidelines, increasingly uncertain and timid about their shrinking
place
in the political process.
Add in a further dynamic (which intellectuals from Marxist-Leninist
societies would instantly recognize): Groups denied legitimacy and
disdained
by the state tend to internalize their exclusion as a form of
culpability,
and often feel an abject, autonomic urge to seek reinstatement at
almost any
price. Little wonder, then, that "the traditional press" has had a
difficult
time mustering anything like a convincing counter-narrative as the
administration herded a terrified and all-too-trusting nation to war.
Not only did a mutant form of skepticism-free news succeed - at
least
for a time - in leaving large segments of the populace uninformed, but
it
corrupted the ability of high officials to function. All too often they
simply found themselves looking into a fun-house mirror of their own
making
and imagined that they were viewing reality. As even the conservative
National Review noted, the Bush administration has "a dismaying
capacity to
believe its own public relations."
In this world of mutant "news," information loops have become
one-way
highways; and a national security advisor, cabinet secretary, or
attorney
general, a well-managed and programmed polemicist charged to "stay on
message," the better to justify whatever the government has already
done, or
is about to do. Because these latter-day campaigns to "dominate the
media
environment," as the Pentagon likes to say, employ all the
sophistication
and technology developed by communications experts since Edward Bernays,
nephew of Sigmund Freud, first wed an understanding of psychology to the
marketing of merchandise, they are far more seductive than older-style
news.
Indeed, on Fox News, we can see the ultimate marriage of news and PR in
a
fountainhead of artful propaganda so well-packaged that most people
can't
tell it from the real thing.
For three-plus years we have been governed by people who don't view
news, in the traditional sense, as playing any constructive role in our
system of governance. At the moment, they are momentarily in retreat,
driven
back from the front lines of faith-based truth by their own faith-based
blunders. But make no mistake, their frightening experiment will
continue if
Americans allow it. Complete success would mean not just that the press
had
surrendered its essential watchdog role, but - a far darker thought -
that,
even were it to refuse to do so, it might be shunted off to a place
where it
would not matter.
As the war in Iraq descended into a desert quagmire, the press
belatedly appeared to awaken and adopt a more skeptical stance toward an
already crumbling set of Bush administration policies. But if a bloody,
expensive, catastrophic episode like the war in Iraq is necessary to
remind
us of the important role that the press plays in our democracy,
something is
gravely amiss in the way our political system has come to function.
Orville Schell is Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the
University of California, Berkeley. This piece is adapted from the
preface
to a collection of New York Review of Books articles on the media's
coverage
of the war in Iraq by Michael Massing. It will be published soon as a
short
book, Now They Tell Us (The New York Review of Books, 2004).
--
\
-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To manage your subscription, go to
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/