The Versailles Media Got Nothing Wrong

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Jun 07, 2008 at 14:25

The Republican Party is not the enemy this November.  They are a pathetic wreck.  Hegemony is the enemy, and the Republican Party's recent inability to enforce hegemony has been superbly compensated for by the corporate media.  

As Wikipedia explains:

Cultural hegemony is a concept coined by Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. It means that a diverse culture can be ruled or dominated by one group or class, that everyday practices and shared beliefs provide the foundation for complex systems of domination.

Or, as I like to put it, "Hegemony is ideology in common sense drag."

A key aspect of Gramsci's theory is that various different cultural institutions each fulfills their own function, often in ways that purportedly have nothing to do with one another-and yet they are actually functioning like various different units in an army-or nowadays an integrated fighting force, involving everything from infantry to satellites in space.

The media is an excellent example of this.  In the 1990s, the media led the charge to depose Bill Clinton.  As Gene Lyons meticulously documented in Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater, the New York Times and Washington Post persistently, repeatedly, and egregiously misreported virtually every major aspect of the so-called "Whitewater scandal."  When that failed, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal emerged in its place, dozens of leading newspapers editorialized that Clinton should resign. Sixty percent of the American people disagreed, but they couldn't get a word in edgewise-which is where, when and how MoveOn.org was founded.

In contrast, George W. Bush has not merely subverted the most central aspects of our constitutional order with his dictatorial theories of unchecked executive power, he has shredded the Magna Charta as well as the Constitution, and yet the media persists in lying that only the "loonie left" thinks that there's anything amiss.

That's hegemony for you.  And they do it, in large part, by following the supposedly "nuetral"  rules of professional journalism. Although he makes no mention of Gramsci, Jeremy Iggers does a masterful job of showing that journalism ethics itself is the problem here in his 1998 classic, Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics And The Public Interest.  So long as people think that the trouble with journalism is Jason Blair, not Judith Miller and her editors and publisher, then Houston, we have a problem.  (Iggers, writing in the 1990s uses early Reagan-era examples, but the comparative misdeeds are eerily similar.)

With all that in mind, here's an excerpt of the discussion that Moyers had last night with John Walcott, Washington Bureau Chief of McClatchy News, one of his ace reporters, Jonathan Landay , and Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor and Publisher magazine, and author of So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits--and the President--Failed on Iraq, The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics, and Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady : Richard Nixon vs Helen Gahagan Douglas-Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950. It begins on the flip...

BILL MOYERS:There's been all this media frenzy about Scott McClellan's book. Did McClellan, whom you know, did McClellan do a good thing in writing this book?

JOHN WALCOTT:  I think on balance, yes. This is one of the first times, I think, that a member of the President's inner circle, one of the Texans who came to Washington with him was regarded as being very close to him, has gone this far in denouncing what the Administration did with respect to Iraq and has come right out and said that they deceived the American people. And that is news.

BILL MOYERS:But you've been - you started writing that five years ago-

GREG MITCHELL: Right.

BILL MOYERS:-six years ago.

GREG MITCHELL: Well, that's what I mean.  It's not news-

BILL MOYERS:You were saying that the Press Corps, television and press in Washington, complicit.

GREG MITCHELL: Right. Well, that's - again, it's different coming from the chief White House spokesman than coming from me - you know, for better or worse. But you know, I - that's what I mean. I think what's troubling to me is the response to that. The media has not responded by saying, "Boy, we really got caught out here, and we really need to look at what we did wrong. And we're, you know, we need to report on what the mistakes we made and what we - you know, what we've really learned now."

JONATHAN LANDAY:  What's disappoints me is that here was an opportunity, once again, but a very large opportunity for major news organizations to do the mea culpa they never did, to admit that they indeed failed to do what they're supposed to do, failed to be the watchdogs they're supposed to be.

And yet we saw exactly the opposite for the most part. And I was just I was left breathless by some of the things that I heard where you heard correspondents say, "Well, we did ask the tough questions. We asked them to the White House spokesmen," Scott McClellan and others. And you say to yourself, "And you expected to get real answers? You expected them to say from the White House podium - 'Yeah, well, there were disagreements over the intelligence, but we ignored them'" when the President made his speeches and the Vice President made his speeches. No, I don't think so.

GREG MITCHELL: Yeah, what Charles Gibson said.  We wouldn't - I don't think we would ask any different questions.  I mean, it's shocking...

JOHN WALCOTT: Well...

GREG MITCHELL: ...to me that someone would say we would even with the chance to relive this experience and so much we got wrong - going to war is - which is still going on over five years later, all the lost lives, all the financial costs of that. And then to look back at this, you know, this terrible episode in history of American journalism and say that if I could do it all over again, I'm not sure we would ask any different questions.

"The operation was a spectacular success. Unfortunately, the patient died."

The rigid refusal to the rethink anything in the light of such spectacular failure is a testiment to the incredible power of hegemony.  It's not just thought, it's attitude bred deep in the bone.  It's the very air they breath, the five-star restaurants they eat in, the parties they attend-except when that kill-joy Stephen Colbert shows up.  It is, quite simply, not what they do.  It is who they are.

They are Versailles. We are America.

The conversation contimued:

JOHN WALCOTT: Well, I'm not - I don't know what questions ABC or anybody else asked. They may have asked all the right questions. The trouble is they asked all the wrong people.

BILL MOYERS:Yeah, if asking the question you all proved that asking the question is not essential unless you ask it to the person who can really tell you what you need to know.

JONATHAN LANDAY:  And you have to take the time to find those people.  It's not in-

GREG MITCHELL: And you have to play it up a lot.

JONATHAN LANDAY: It's not-

GREG MITCHELL: You can't bury it.

JONATHAN LANDAY:  You know, these people are on the - this, you know, this grind to get the thing out, you know? We gotta get it out right away. You know, we got live television going on. We've got, you know, 24-hour cable TV news. We gotta - when do you have the time to sit and cultivate sources to get them to talk to you about what essentially is top secret information?

JOHN WALCOTT: Yeah, but there are some terrific reporters in television - you know, at the Defense Department in particular. Jim Miklashevski at NBC, David Martin at CBS. What I think happened in part was another problem, which is they have sources. Believe me. I wish I had some of the same sources they have. But whatever information came from those unnamed anonymous sources is trumped by Donald Rumsfeld at the podium or Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice saying, "We can't allow the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

BILL MOYERS:Over and over again.

JOHN WALCOTT: Over and over again on camera. And that trumps the kind of reporting that John and Warren Strobel did from these mid-level guys who actually know that there's no prospect of any smoking gun let alone a mushroom cloud. And so when it gets to packaging television news, it's picture driven, it's celebrity driven, and that doesn't allow much room for this kind of hard-nosed reporting under the radar.

Truth be damned.  We have our conventions to follow.  As Stephen Colbert so painstakingly explained:

The President makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!

Back to Bill Moyers:

JONATHAN LANDAY: I also want to say one thing I think that it behooves the media to come out - major companies to say, "Yes, we got it wrong," because if you look at surveys today, the American public has lost an enormous amount of trust in the news media, in the people who are supposed to be watch, their watchdogs over government. And yet the number of people who trust the media is, like, 25, 26 percent.

So at a time when you have this problem, doesn't it behoove you to try and start fixing it?  

GREG MITCHELL: There's been numerous opportunities actually just in the last few weeks for the media to do this self-assessment. And you remember the fifth anniversary of the start of the war. Almost no media self-assessment at that time. Pointing fingers at everybody but themselves. There was the 4,000 deaths in Iraq. There was the fifth anniversary of "mission accomplished." Another great opportunity for this. We had the scandal of the Pentagon media generals, as I call them.

We had that opportunity. Now we've had Scott McClellan. There's been at least six opportunities in the last two months for the media to do this long delayed and much needed self-assessment, self-criticism to the American public and it hasn't happened.

In the biz, they're called "news hooks."  You have a larger story that needs telling, but to tell it properly, you've got to have people's attention, and at least their potential motivation to listen to a story that's got broader horizons to it.  And Mitchell-who knows the biz as well as anyone-was absolutely right.  The media has just had an unbelievable series of news hooks on which to hang a serious re-examination of itself-if, of course, they had even the slightest inclination to do so.

But since when did King Louis say, "Off with my head!"?

Let them eat mistakes.  God knows that's one thing there's an endless supply of.