Many people have criticisms of the media. They hold the media responsible for the sorry state of civic discourse and the fact that, for example, about half the population still believes that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. Their plaintive cry “If only the media would do its proper job, then people would be better informed and we would have better government” is often heard. They wonder why the media highlights some stories and ignores others, and suspect dark motives.

In this series on the way the media operates, I have tried to steer the discussion away from issues of human motivation and bias in understanding the media. What we have is not a system of individuals consciously and deliberately steering news coverage in a particular direction which they know to be false or misleading. Only a few people at the very top of the institutions are likely to be like that.

Instead we have a system in place that has the effect of weeding out all but those individuals who view the news in a particular way. Most of the journalists who remain and prosper in the system are those who have internalized the values of the corporate media system and its rules of operation. Rather than thinking of themselves as doing something that is less than good journalism, they actually think that they are upholding its finest traditions, of maintaining “objectivity” and “neutrality”. So by and large they will be able to work with a clear conscience. That is the sign of a really good propaganda model. People cannot fake things on a consistent basis for a long time. If individual journalists were writing and saying things that they did not themselves believe in, it would soon become obvious and they would not be effective.

All large institutions have such filters that weed out people with ideas that oppose its basic interests. For example, the advertising industry is unlikely to be congenial to those who feel that telling the truth about products, both good and bad, is important in creating an informed consumer. Those people, even if for some reason they chose to enter that profession, are likely to be weeded out quite early. The people who remain and succeed are not necessarily intellectually dishonest. They are people who think that it is better to dwell on the positive rather than the negative, and that the marketplace as a whole will be the best judge of what is good and bad, not individuals, and that it is not their job to make such judgments on behalf of others. They see their job as to present their product in the best possible light.

Universities are also not immune from this kind of filtering. They tend to filter out those people who do not value knowledge, however esoteric, for its own sake. People who think that the only knowledge of any value is that which has a practical and immediate payoff are not likely to find universities to be congenial places for them, except in a few departments like engineering or business. The converse is true for manufacturing industries. Those places have little use for people who like to think about ideas in the abstract and are unable to translate those ideas into actual products.

The problem with the media is not that it has such filters in place that result in producing “news” that suits the needs of the pro-war/pro-business one party state. The problem is that the media is not perceived by the public as having any kind of bias at all. And it is this that makes it dangerous.

Most people are savvy enough to realize that the advertisements they see for products are not produced by impartial people. They are aware that consumers of print and video media are the targets of a careful campaign to persuade them to adopt a particular point of view, which is that the product being advertised is something they need (which may not be the case) and that it is the best among the options available to satisfy that manufactured need (which may not be true).

Despite this self-awareness, it is a dubious tribute to Madison Avenue that advertising is so successful in persuading people to purchase products. But even advertisers know that advertising is even more successful when people are not consciously aware that they are being marketed to. Hence we have the more recent innovations of product placement in films and TV shows, and having seemingly ordinary people in places like bars praise the virtues of products to other patrons, thus creating what seems to be a spontaneous “buzz” for a product. ‘Word of mouth’ praise from friends and acquaintances is more effective than being pitched something by people who are paid to do so.

The success of the propaganda media is likewise dependent on most people not realizing that they are being sold a product, in this case a particular slant on “the news.” For example, I was sitting in a restaurant one day and a person at another table was recommending The O’Reilly Factor to his companions as a show that “tells it like it is” with “no spin.” This person had clearly bought into the slogans that are carefully marketed by news organizations, that they are fair and balanced. Such people are for more susceptible to propaganda than those who understand the invisible drivers at work in creating the news.

Next in the series: How this knowledge can be used to build a better news system.

POST SCRIPT: Happy first birthday, Baxter!

There is one final filter that Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman do not include in their in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent that I think is worthy of addition, and that is the changing class nature of journalists and the professional paths that have developed.

Journalists in the past could enter the profession with little formal education. They could join a newspaper after high school as copy boys (and be essentially gofers), and then work their way up the ladder to become full-fledged reporters. They pretty much learned their profession on the job, by observing the reporters in the newspaper and being mentored by them.

An important consequence of this kind of career path is that the profession was open to a wide array of people. In particular, there was little in the way of barriers, especially income and wealth barriers, to entry in the profession. Furthermore, the very fact that journalism was so open made the profession less desirable to the members of the professional classes and people in the upper income brackets. Such people were more likely to steer their children to the prestigious professions of medicine and law and the corporate world.
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In the previous posting in this series, I wrote about how Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent provide a good model for how a sophisticated propaganda model works. They point out that rather than direct control of news, what exists in the US is a system of five filters that has the effect of steadily weeding out of the system those who do not serve the needs of the dominant interests. In the previous post, I described three of the filters. Today, I will discuss the other two.
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Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent provide a good model for how a sophisticated propaganda model, such as that which exists in the US, works. They point out that rather than direct control of news, what exists is a system of filters that has the effect of steadily and almost invisibly weeding out of the system those individuals and media businesses that do not serve the interests of the ruling elites.

They point to five filters at work:

1. Size, ownership, and profit orientation

They point out that in the nineteenth century in Britain “a radical press emerged that reached a national working-class audience. This alternative press was effective in reinforcing class consciousness: it unified the workers because it fostered an alternative value system and framework for looking at the world.” (p. 3) Of course such a press was seen as a major threat to the elites and they sought to suppress it using punitive measures, by “using libel laws and prosecutions, by requiring an expensive security bond as a condition for publication, and by imposing various taxes designed to drive out radical media by raising their costs.”
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In the previous post, I quoted a former Fox News staffer who revealed in 2003 how the senior management at Fox News carefully monitored and directed what news would be covered and, more importantly, how it should be covered. This was done by means of “The Memo” that was sent out by top management every day to all the news staff. For example, the staffer said:

[J]ust after the U.S. invaded Iraq, The Memo warned us that anti-war protesters would be “whining” about U.S. bombs killing Iraqi civilians, and suggested they could tell that to the families of American soldiers dying there. Editing copy that morning, I was not surprised when an eager young producer killed a correspondent’s report on the day’s fighting – simply because it included a brief shot of children in an Iraqi hospital.

These are not isolated incidents at Fox News Channel, where virtually no one of authority in the newsroom makes a move unmeasured against management’s politics, actual or perceived. At the Fair and Balanced network, everyone knows management’s point of view, and, in case they’re not sure how to get it on air, The Memo is there to remind them.

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When we talk of a ‘controlled’ media, we tend to think of editors and political leaders telling reporters what they should write about and how. That does happen in some countries and newspapers, and we rightly call those things ‘propaganda’. But that kind of overt control is rarely effective over the long term because when people know that journalists take their instructions from people with openly political agendas, they tend to factor that in and discount the credibility of those news sources.
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Understanding the US media is an important part of political education and two of the best analysts are Ben Bagdikian who wrote the classic The Media Monopoly (updated recently to The New Media Monopoly) and Robert McChesney, author of The Problem of the Media and other books.

Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (published in 1988) remains a powerful read in describing how the media, both wittingly and unwittingly, colludes with powerful interests in creating a public consensus that actually goes against the interests of the people they supposedly represent. If they updated their book, they would undoubtedly use as one of their examples how the media effectively aided the administration to persuade the American public to go along with the disastrous policy of invading Iraq and linking that hapless country to the events of September 11, 2001, even though there was no evidence linking those two events and there was no justifiable case for attacking Iraq at all.
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Since I am interested in how the media operates, I regularly go to the annual Susie Gharib Distinguished Lectureship series sponsored by the English Department at Case where they invite journalists to talk about their work.

It is always interesting to listen to journalists from the big newspapers such as the Washington Post describe how they work. One thing that always strikes me is how confident they are that the media and journalism in the US is far superior to that in other countries. They seem to accept this as an unquestioned truth.

Two years ago, two journalists from the Washington Post (a husband and wife team) described how they were in Iraq just prior to the US attack on that country, and he somewhat disdainfully spoke of the practices of their British journalistic counterparts. During the questions, I asked them why they thought they were superior. The husband replied that the US editors seemed to exercise much more oversight to make sure about getting the facts just right than the British newspapers. But if that was so, I said, how was it that the US media completely failed to discover the fact that the case being made at that time for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction was totally bogus. The US mainstream media pretty much accepted the administration’s arguments largely uncritically, whereas the supposedly inferior media in many other parts of the world were very skeptical.

He became very defensive and said that this was just one case where the US media dropped the ball but that in general it was much better than the rest of the world. He said unlike much of the world’s press, the US media was “objective” and “unbiased” in its coverage. My response was that this massive failure in what was the biggest story that any of them was likely to ever cover, and one that had momentous consequences, could not be dismissed as a mere aberration but pointed to a fundamental problem in the way that the media operates here.

Last year, Pulitzer prize winningWashington Post journalist Dana Priest (who won for her story on the secret prisons operated by the CIA to hold prisoners in foreign countries) was here and during the question time someone else brought up the deficiencies of the coverage leading up to the Iraq war, and brought up some examples of what he felt were stories that the US media missed.

Priest replied that the media did cover them. But the questioner persisted saying that saying something once was not enough in the face of repeated false assertions to the contrary by the Bush administration. He asked why the journalists did not periodically (say every week or month or so) keep raising the same issues again so as to act as an effective counter to the misleading propaganda pushed by the White House. She replied that they could not do so because that would imply that the journalists were pushing an agenda. She said that they had to be “objective” and “impartial.”

This exchange clearly highlights the fundamental problem. Priest was right that if you look carefully in the US media, you can probably find some journalist somewhere who did ask the right questions and did report on the facts of almost any issue. She is also right that many US reporters, especially those in the quality media, think that they should strive for some kind of impartiality and objectivity in their reporting.

But the key question is not the validity of some abstract ideal of journalism. The real question is what kind of system will end up with the general public having a good sense of the truth. And I think that a strong case can be made that partisan journalism is more likely to deliver the goods.

I grew up in Sri Lanka with partisan journalism. My father subscribed to three daily morning papers and two evening papers. These papers were much slimmer than the papers in the US, with far fewer ads and feature articles, and a greater percentage devoted to news and political commentary. The political affiliations of the papers were quite clear. There were the government-controlled papers, those that were sympathetic to each of the main political parties, plus those that were run by private entrepreneurs (kind of like Rupert Murdoch) who had their own agenda of using their newspapers as clout to further their business or political interests. There were also smaller circulation papers that had their own political leanings, representing trade unions and smaller political parties.

Everyone knew the partisan leanings of each paper. These were not secrets and readers factored them in when reading the news. So what kind of journalism was produced by this system?

What happened is that the newspapers, whatever the leanings, could not publish outright falsehoods. Newspapers rarely made flat out untrue statements because those are easily refuted by the other newspapers and there existed libel laws to prevent that, as well as a Press Council which could investigate charges of serious distortions What the newspapers did do was downplay the negative news about the people they favored and highlight their successes, while doing the opposite for the people they opposed. They would give wide coverage to political events of their side and to the speeches of the people they favored while downplaying those of their opponents.

They also used biased language. It was not unusual to see a photo of someone they disliked in an unflattering pose accompanied by a snide caption. You would never see such things in the US press and whenever I go back to Sri Lanka, it is always a bit of a jolt initially to see such blatant editorializing mixed in with the “hard” news.

As a reader, it was not hard to figure out what was going on. If one paper made a major allegation, and the other paper did not deny it but tried to ignore it or downplay it, the chances are that the story was credible. If a story was serious, a paper could keep harping on it day after day, making sure that it was not forgotten or buried, and forcing the people concerned to respond to it in one way or another.

Since it was clear to everyone what each paper’s agenda was, there was no point in really trying to hide it under cover of neutrality.

Of course this kind of media required the reader to do some of the intellectual heavy lifting, to read multiple sources, factor in their biases, and infer the real facts of the case. If you read only one newspaper, you were definitely missing important information. So people became adept at news interpretation and filtering.

This kind of partisan journalism is, I think, the norm in most countries. England’s newspapers are like this to some extent and so are the French. The US is unusual in its big media feeling that they have to be “neutral” and “objective” and “unbiased.”

Next: Is the US media actually unbiased? And how did it get to value “neutrality”?

In a previous post, I showed how George Monbiot of the Guardian newspaper provided an example of good science reporting, distinguishing the credible from those who indulge in wishful thinking. But unfortunately, he is an exception. And Chris Mooney writing in 2004 in the Columbia Journalism Review describes how the more common journalistic practice of attempting to provide “balanced coverage” of a scientific issue tends to allow the scientific fringe elements to distort reality.

As the Union of Concerned Scientists, an alliance of citizens and scientists, and other critics have noted, Bush administration statements and actions have often given privileged status to a fringe scientific view over a well-documented, extremely robust mainstream conclusion. Journalists have thus had to decide whether to report on a he said/she said battle between scientists and the White House — which has had very few scientific defenders — or get to the bottom of each case of alleged distortion and report on who’s actually right.
. . .
Energy interests wishing to stave off action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have a documented history of supporting the small group of scientists who question the human role in causing climate change — as well as consciously strategizing about how to sow confusion on the issue and sway journalists.

In 1998, for instance, John H. Cushman, Jr., of The New York Times exposed an internal American Petroleum Institute memo outlining a strategy to invest millions to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours with Congress, the media and other key audiences.” Perhaps most startling, the memo cited a need to “recruit and train” scientists “who do not have a long history of visibility and/or participation in the climate change debate” to participate in media outreach and counter the mainstream scientific view. This seems to signal an awareness that after a while, journalists catch on to the connections between contrarian scientists and industry.
. . .
In a recent paper published in the journal Global Environmental Change, the scholars Maxwell T. Boykoff and Jules M. Boykoff analyzed coverage of the issue in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times between 1988 and 2002. During this fourteen-year period, climate scientists successfully forged a powerful consensus on human-caused climate change. But reporting in these four major papers did not at all reflect this consensus.

The Boykoffs analyzed a random sample of 636 articles. They found that a majority — 52.7 percent — gave “roughly equal attention” to the scientific consensus view that humans contribute to climate change and to the energy-industry-supported view that natural fluctuations suffice to explain the observed warming. By comparison, just 35.3 percent of articles emphasized the scientific consensus view while still presenting the other side in a subordinate fashion. Finally, 6.2 percent emphasized the industry-supported view, and a mere 5.9 percent focused on the consensus view without bothering to provide the industry/skeptic counterpoint.

Most intriguing, the Boykoffs’ study found a shift in coverage between 1988 — when climate change first garnered wide media coverage — and 1990. During that period, journalists broadly moved from focusing on scientists’ views of climate change to providing “balanced” accounts. During this same period, the Boykoffs noted, climate change became highly politicized and a “small group of influential spokespeople and scientists emerged in the news” to question the mainstream view that industrial emissions are warming the planet. The authors conclude that the U.S. “prestige-press” has produced “informationally biased coverage of global warming . . . hidden behind the veil of journalistic balance.”
. . .
Some major op-ed pages also appear to think that to fulfill their duty of providing a range of views, they should publish dubious contrarian opinion pieces on climate change even when those pieces are written by nonscientists. For instance, on July 7, 2003, The Washington Post published a revisionist op-ed on climate science by James Schlesinger, a former secretary of both energy and defense, and a former director of Central Intelligence. “In recent years the inclination has been to attribute the warming we have lately experienced to a single dominant cause — the increase in greenhouse gases,” wrote Schlesinger. “Yet climate has always been changing — and sometimes the swings have been rapid.” The clear implication was that scientists don’t know enough about the causes of climate change to justify strong pollution controls.

That’s not how most climatologists feel, but then Schlesinger is an economist by training, not a climatologist. Moreover, his Washington Post byline failed to note that he sits on the board of directors of Peabody Energy, the largest coal company in the world, and has since 2001.

Eldan Goldenberg, who has long been concerned with the way science is reported, kindly sent to me a report put out by the Stratfor group about a conference of journalists and scientists convened last month to discuss this very issue. Some excerpts:

Panels of journalists and scientists gathered July 25 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington to discuss the mainstream media’s reporting on climate change. The consensus was that the media have not covered the issue well.

According to both panels, the greatest shortcoming has been in persistent portrayals of the issue as one of contentious scientific debate: In reality, the assembled scientists said, man-made climate change is generally accepted throughout the scientific community as a reality.

Most of the time at the conference was dedicated to examining the media’s portrayal of the issue and explaining how it came into being. The root of the problem, most participants agreed, is that climate change has been covered primarily as a political rather than a scientific issue — and thus, the media have focused on the political debate rather than the science behind it.

In the background of this discussion loomed a larger issue: The mainstream media, recognizing that there is more to the story, now are struggling with ways to change their portrayal of the climate change issue. Arguments are emerging that the scientific debate ha now been concluded, “industry” has lost and the new debate is about policy options. Though this line of thinking is nearer to the truth, it does not entirely close the gap. The fact is that industry all but stopped contesting the premise of man-made climate change two years ago, but the media’s preoccupation with the traditional battle lines — industry versus environmentalists — continues to obscure the complexity of the issue and the positions of various players.
. . .
Because the media continue to write about these matters as political issues — debates between two interested parties – the scientific questions at the center of campaigns on climate change, the relative risk of various chemicals and substances and the risks posed by genetically modified organisms have been relegated to the backburner. Rather than being the focus in the policy debates, the science is used as a tactic in a communications and public relations battle.

The proposed solution to this problem is that journalists should eschew the goal of “balanced coverage” when it comes to science. This, I believe, is unworkable in practice because it would be singling out science for different kind of treatment than other topics. Journalists are generalists, sometimes doing science, sometimes shifted to other beats. It is unreasonable to expect them to radically shift their mode of operation depending on the topic.

In fact, I believe that this problem is not limited to global warming or to scientific issues generally. Instead, I feel that this idea of “balanced coverage,” that has become the journalistic ideal in the US, produces lower quality of journalism in general.

But that is a topic for another day.