When I say that the chief function of the phony, parallel right-wing press is to exert a disciplinary influence over the neutral "mainstream" press, this is exactly the effect I'm talking about.

Recent polling data, in outlets from Fox News to the Washington Post, shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans back the position of Michael Schiavo, Terri's husband, that he, and not his wife's parents, should have the final say about removing the feeding tube of his wife, who has been severely brain-damaged and incapacitated for the past 15 years. The polling data seriously undercuts the notion that Americans are deeply divided on the Schiavo case. Yet ever since March 18, when Republicans began their unprecedented push to intervene legislatively in a state court case that had already been heard by 19 judges, the press has all but disregarded the polls. ...

Which is why it has been so startling to find so few mentions by major news outlets of the recent polls regarding the Schiavo controversy. For instance, last Friday at 11 a.m., a Fox News reporter referenced a poll from earlier this month conducted by Fox that found that a strong majority -- 59 to 24 percent -- would remove Terri Schiavo's feeding tube if they were her guardian. According to TVeyes, a digital, around-the-clock television monitoring service, that was the last time a Fox News reporter mentioned Fox's own poll. ... But perhaps even more shocking are ABC News and the Washington Post, which, like Fox News, commissioned their own poll regarding the matter, and yet, again like Fox, neglected to present the findings once the story became a political one. On March 15, when ABC devoted its "Nightline" program to the Schiavo story, host Chris Bury informed the audience, "A new ABC News poll suggests that a clear majority of Americans, 65 percent, believe that husbands and wives should have the final say in family disputes over life support. Only 25 percent say parents should make that decision. And when asked, 'Would you want to be kept alive in Terri Schiavo's condition?' an overwhelming number, 87 percent, said no." ...

The next morning, ABC's "Good Morning America" repeated the poll's finding. On March 17, however, as conservative Republicans in Congress announced that they would try to intervene on Terri's behalf by passing legislation, it became clear that the story was morphing from a legal and ethical one into a political one. That night ABC's "World News Tonight" covered the story, but suddenly any references to the network's own poll had disappeared. The next night the same program opened with three straight reports about the day's developments in the Schiavo story. But again, not once did anchor Peter Jennings or ABC reporters inform viewers that just a few days earlier 87 percent of Americans had said they would not want to go on living with a feeding tube if they were in Schiavo's condition, or that they sided with the husband in this saga by a margin of nearly 3-to-1.

Meanwhile, as of Sunday the Washington Post had not yet published the results of a poll it paid for in any of the nearly dozen stories it ran regarding Schiavo over the previous seven days. For Post readers, the data simply did not exist.

This isn't a question of bias, in any usual sense: it's a question of a corporate press utterly cowed by the institutional power of a right-wing media/Republican government complex, and incapable of understanding that to report facts, certain facts anyway, you have to be willing to set an opposition agenda. Fox, of course, coordinates directly with the DeLay Congress: but ABC News, the Washington Post, and the NYT coordinate with it in effect, by omission. Kinda puts things in context, doesn't it, when Dana Millbank (see the next post down) congratulates himself about how crucial the "truth-telling" function of the mainstream media is to honest, nonpartisan public discourse?

posted by michael  2:34:30 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

In praise of partisanship. Reckless partisans are killing independent journalism—and if there's anything that pompous, self-satisfied bloviation can do to stop it, Dana Millbank (" My Bias for Mainstream News ") is the man for the job.

Millbank wants us to understand that the "independent press," the "traditional," "truth-telling" press, as he also calls it—by which he means (more accurately and less flatteringly) the sort of big, formally unaffiliated news corporations that employ the likes of Dana Millbank—is a national treasure, and that when we critique it for political bias we run the risk of destroying it, and probably democracy too in the bargain.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism asserts that, at a time of media fragmentation, the traditional press's truth telling is more important than ever. "In this new world, we continue to believe journalism is not becoming irrelevant," the new report argues. "The need to know what is true is all the greater, but discerning and communicating it is more difficult." But we're up against some short-sighted partisans who would prefer to do away with this truth-telling role.

Stephen Hayes of the conservative Weekly Standard protested in a November article that during the campaign, "journalists at the New York Times and the Washington Post and the television networks saw themselves not as conveyors of facts but as truth-squadders, toiling away on the gray margins of the political debate." These journalists, he continued, "fancy themselves thinkers, not mere scribes. They go to work every day to tell us not what the Bush administration has said, but what it has left unsaid."

Imagine that! An independent press looking for the truth rather than serving as stenographers for the powerful. It's a quaint tradition Americans would be wise not to abandon.

Want an emblematic instance of Mr. Millbank's fearless commitment to truth-telling? (That is, if the fact that a writer for the courtier Washington Post can manage, without embarrassment or evident self-consciousness, to disparage the practice of power-stenography doesn't already tell you all you need to know about the bankruptcy of Millbank's little game.) Try this on for size:

Two decades ago, the late senator-scholar Daniel Patrick Moynihan remarked that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." Now, ideologues are claiming their own facts as well. ...

"Today, a host of new forms of communication offer a way for newsmakers to reach the public," the Project for Excellence in Journalism observed in its annual report last week. "Journalism is a shrinking part of a growing world of media. And since journalists are trained to be skeptics and aspire at least, in the famous phrase, to speak truth to power, journalism is the one source those who want to manipulate the public are most prone to denounce."

In place of the traditional press, outlets once seen as alternative have become a new mainstream media. Conservatives tune in to Rush Limbaugh (20 million weekly listeners) or Sean Hannity (12 million), and log on to the Drudge Report (claiming near 10 million visits a day). Liberals opt for the late-night commentary of Jon Stewart, Web sites such as Salon and Daily Kos, and Michael Moore's films. Those on either side can scan the Google news headlines and click on those that fit their worldview.

The intellectual dishonesty that can measure the entire lockstep apparatus of right-wing talk radio and Fox News against a few left-liberal websites, an anti-Bush movie, and the Daily Show, for the sole (self-aggrandizing) purpose of maintaining a stance of anti-ideological purity against the undifferentiated "partisan" hordes, would be staggering if it weren't par for the course for this sort of big-media thumbsucker. This is false equivalence escalated to the level of pathology. But Digby and Avedon Carol have already taken Millbank to the woodshed on the topic, so it's wasting words for me to go on about it further here.

What really interests me about the Millbank essay is its (utterly unexamined) myth of the press as some sort of neutral arbiter of the limits of public discourse—its implicit notion that the natural and historic role of the press is to establish the ground of fact on which, and only on which, legitimate partisan contest can take place. Absent that operation of the Fourth Estate, we're to imagine, we find ourselves in a kind of political Twilight Zone, "a postmodern morass," to quote Millbank again, "where there are no such things as facts, only competing perceptions of reality."

This is a myth that has a considerable hold on the imagination: better and more critical thinkers than Millbank attest to it. Kevin Drum, reviewing the Millbank piece, worries that the "relentless barrage of partisan media criticism in the blogosphere" is "unhealthy," that its "eventual result will be an almost universal ability to ignore any news report you don't like simply by claiming it's the result of bias." (Isn't the ability to ignore news we don't like pretty much a universal trait of human psychology already?) And Digby confesses that he, too, "struggles" with the issue of partisan media critique, "because I really don't want to have two competing discourses out there. It's a risky and frightening thing to do and I honestly don't know where it will lead." (Though Digby, at least, realizing that Rupert Murdoch isn't going to just pull up stakes and leave the field because we'd all like our nonpartisan press back, argues that the Left has no choice but to fight fire with fire.)

And to Kevin and Digby I say, stop worrying. A little historical perspective works wonders here. The simple truth is that, for most of its proper existence—from the beginnings of mass-distribution journalism in the mid-nineteenth century to roughly the start of World War II—the American press has been explicitly partisan. Newspapers were often the overt organs of political machines; when they weren't, they differentiated themselves for their audiences based on ideology and partisan identification. Competition was fierce, and was very often a competition over what facts were actually facts, and over what sorts of things ought to be reported. (Strangely enough, this situation was understood by no one during the period as some sort of "postmodern" hell. Nor was it considered a challenge to the very possibility of democratic self-government.) The neutral, "objective" press that we now think of as a natural property of democratic civil society is, broadly speaking, an invention of the corporate, managerial capitalism of the twentieth century, and tracks its growth.

As I've written previously, the elevation of the "objective" press to almost an institution of state, a semi-official fourth branch in the American constitutional system, is a phenomenon of the post-World War II period. Like so much of what we regard now as the natural order of political things, in other words, the constitutional place of our so-called mainstream press is an artifact of the Cold War. In its pose of objectivity, the corporate press had a central role to play during that struggle: both in the maintenance of the internal consensus necessary to confront the Soviet Union over a long period, and as a support for, and embodiment of, the claim of Western liberal democracy (over against Communism) to represent a universal, historically unconditioned solution to the question of political and social freedom.

Well, the Cold War is over (though the Bush administration is trying for a replay, in its global war on Terror), and so is the era of consensus. Even if we hoped to return to consensus (really an ideological fantasy, which was never all it was cracked up to be), we live in a post-broadcast information economy now: the machinery to maintain consensus doesn't work as it used to. No point mourning the situation.

Nor is it worth mourning. When did the consensus-era press ever really speak the truth to power, except from the fringes, or opportunistically? (Not even Watergate, the press's shining constitutional moment, would have been Watergate without a Democratic Congress determined to use its investigative power against the Executive. Consider Iran-Contra as an instructive counter-example.) The ground of "fact" that we imagine the unaffiliated press to be responsible for policing is the ground of the unexamined assumption, the generally-agreed-upon. Fact in itself has no power to transform the life of the nation until and unless it becomes truth, political truth, made so by people committed to political engagement. To the extent that belief in a neutral press lulls us into believing that political truth is the result of some sort of technical or institutional process, something properly entrusted to a professional elite, to that extent it lulls us from our responsibility as citizens in a democracy to marry information to action.

As far as I'm concerned, the best if not the only encouraging feature of American journalism at the moment is the blogosphere's partisan engagement with the mainstream press. Let disagreement, even unfair disagreement, run rampant: we need disagreement if we're to have democracy. Granted, the Right—which has bought itself an entire parallel press, and has already begun extending political coordination into its share of the blog space—has an enormous head start of us. But the weak have won asymmetric wars in the past, and in any case we have no alternative but to fight. And while we still have the chance to fight, we ought to be glad of it.

posted by michael  12:05:46 AM  
tell me about it []