One last look at false balance between left & right for the weekend, based on the work of Brendan Nyhan's partner at Spinsanity, Ben Fritz
In July 2002, Spinsanity "evenhandedly" criticized media watchdog's FAIR (on the left) and MRC (on the right). Ben Fritz wrote this particular column, not Brendan Nyhan, but throughout its life the two wrote with great consistency from the same POV, balancing one potshot left with one potshot right. This one was just particularly memorable, since I wrote a long critique of it--which, unfortunately, I can no longer find. But, no matter, at this point, such a long critique is not really necessary. A much briefer one will do just as well, perhaps better, since more detail might give the false impression that a detailed critique is necessary to see through the false equivalency. You see, Spinsanity criticized MRC for attacking the media for failing to promote global warming skeptics vigorously enough, and it attacked FAIR for attacking the media for cheering on the Venezuelan coup as a good thing for democracy. So, science denial on the right = exposure of foreign policy double-standards on the left. That was the bottom line of the Spinsanity thesis in a nutshell. Check it out:
Despite their blatantly ideological agendas, both organizations claim to engage in impartial analysis. In practice, however, these groups often treat reporting that reflects the other side's perspective as de facto evidence of bias, with facts supporting their own views ignored or dismissed as an aberration. With MRC and FAIR, it seems, there's often no such thing as a balanced report...
Consider, for instance, MRC's response to network news coverage of an Environmental Protection Agency report stating that human activity causes global warming, the first time that the Bush administration has explicitly stated this position. The MRC's "media reality check" on the issue is headlined "ABC, CBS and NBC Promote Liberal Critics, Pretend Dissent Over Global Warming No Longer Exists." But in the broadcasts cited, critics of the plan were quoted as many times as those who supported the report's findings (if not its recommendations), and reporters and anchors on all three networks explained the anti-regulation conclusions of the report. Yet, by only providing quotes critical of the Bush administration, MRC is creating a false impression of what these networks actually reported.
Now, MRC really is a rightwing hack organization. And Spinsanity's criticism here is correct. But it doesn't go nearly far enough, since MRC was actually complaining that the networks were ignoring scientific dissent, and that dissent really did no longer exist by 2002. There may have been scientific authority figures who dissented on global warming, but there was no peer reviewed science dissenting on global warming. This was a good two years and change before Naomi Oreskes would publish her study conclusively showing this to be the case, but decent reporters should not have had to wait for that. They should have been asking right from the start, "So you say global warming is scientifically unsound? Where's your peer-reviewed evidence?"
In fact, the networks--like the rest of the media--were ignoring the scientific consensus, and generally giving equal weight to "both sides" in the "scientific debate". That's how how the issue was being framed then, and is still being framed all too often--see the recent "climategate scandal", if you have any doubt about that. By treating it as a story with "two sides", the media was actually reflecting a rightwing bias, and MRC was doing everything it could to push that bias even farther to the right. That's what was going on. But Spinsanity's analysis was too shallow to deal with that.
For years media critics like Bob Somerby have been comparing the journalistic community to the conformist mean girls of the movie "Heathers". Many reporters have no apparent interest in the news they cover and often they scarcely even bother with superficial accuracy. Instead, the in crowd makes up its collective mind about who's cool and who's not and covers the news according to those rulings. For example, for a long time John McCain was tremendously cool and consistently got sympathetic coverage, whereas even to this day malicious, untrue rumors about Al Gore are repeated over and over again.
The recent retirement of Mimi Gurbst, who dominated news coverage at ABC for many years, gives us an inside look at how broadcast news works. The online comment thread of an innocuous New York Observer piece reporting her retirement filled up with the bitter complaints of ABC staffers who had suffered under her rule. The comments really have to be seen to be believed, but it's impossible to imagine that good reporting could come from a culture as unhealthy as ABC's.
Here's a characteristic sample:
1. Mimi and her clique of chosen ones at ABC News were dubbed the “Mean Girls.” To be a part of the group you had to be at least 3 of the following: white/good-looking/rich/pedigree/Ivy(or fancy boarding school) or date/marry/be associated with people who fit that bill
2. If female, wear expensive jewelry and shoes. Talk about the size of your boyfriend’s penis, how good/bad the sex is, and how much money he and his family make.
3. If male, see #2 and add flirtation. Yes, even if you’re gay. Dress well and keep yourself groomed. Tell her which females and/or males you want to f***. And use that word.
4. If minority, talk about your racial sexual preferences. Bonus points if you like white women and/or men. Extra bonus if they are Jewish.
No one in the media has touched this story yet (except for Andrew Breitbart), partly because all of the comments but one or two are anonymous. Hopefully a few people who are no longer in the business will step forward to speak for attribution.
I've always thought that people neglect the degree to which the media (not just Fox) have a deliberate rightward skew because that's what the management wants. Political slant is not an issue in any of the comments I've seen, but the diseased institutional culture described by the commenters could hardly produce anything other than an upper-middle-class "let them eat cake" approach to the news.
The big rap against blogs is that they're parasitic. They don't do any original reporting. Of course, the same exact thing can be said about most newspaper and magazine columnists, and they're just as much a part of traditional print media as reporters are. * [see footnote at end]
But the unfortunate reality is that, on the really big stories, the traditional media doesn't do much original reporting, either. They certainly didn't when it came to the long and tortuous connection between 9/11 and the Iraq War. The irony is that there actually was a good deal of very fine reporting, mostly from Knight-Ridder, but also from Gannet and elsewhere. The problem was, the whole was much less than the sum of the parts, and as the scattered excellent reporting was drowned in an avalanche of propaganda. Far too much "reporting" these days is simply massaging press releases, or taking stenography at press conferences, never bothering to cross-question what's presented by those in power, and the path from 9/11 to the Iraq War was a prime example of how this failed system routinely operates.
The value of the blogosphere does not come down to any one thing, but one major factor certainly is to expose what the traditional media choses to ignore. Most often this does not involve original reporting. But sometimes it does, and "sometimes" struck again this week with Bobby Jindal's nationally televised lying to the American people in his response to Obama's not-State of the Union speech.
A Media Matters study of Sunday talk shows and 12 cable news programs from January 25 through February 8 found that few economists have been given time on television to talk about the economic recovery plan. During 139 1/2 hours of programming in which the economic recovery legislation was discussed, economists made 25 guest appearances out of a total of 460 -- only 5 percent.
As if that weren't bad enough, Media Matters went on to say:
On cable news channels, economists made a total of 18 guest appearances out of a total of 399 guest appearances in broadcasts that included guest discussions of the stimulus. The show that featured the most guest appearances by economists was Fox News' Glenn Beck, which featured seven: Arthur Laffer, Stephen Moore (who appeared twice), Barry Ritholtz, Amity Shlaes, Thomas Sowell, and Ben Stein:
That's more than 1/3 of all the economists who appeared on one show--and most of those economists (Ritholtz is the glaring exception) are not the least bit representative of the profession. As a group, they are more accurately described as political activists, impersonating economists, pimping their expertise, such as it may be. The way they are used (and use themselves) is entirely typical of the rightwing approach to expertise--particularly scientific expertise--across a wide range of issues, including global warming, and evolution, just to name two of the most prominent and outrageous examples.
In all three cases--global warming, evolution, and economic recession--there exists a solid professional consensus about the fundamental processes involved, a consensus which the right wing does everything possible to obscure, distort, deny--and even stand on its head. In short, they fight back through a process of mass impersonation. Traditionally, elites were honored, respected and obeyed without question. The triple threat of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment did away with much of that. Now we often trust experts instead-particularly scientists. And so the conservative elitists fight back by impersonating the sorts of experts who have proven themselves over the course of the past 300-700 years.
Earlier this week, over at DKos, Jed L called attention to another outrageous example of AP promoting rightwing propaganda. Rather than focusing too narrowly on it--especially since Jed pretty much hammered AP for its role, I'd like to use it as an occasion to step back and comment on bigger picture involved, the nature of liberalism, conservatism, and the role of conceptual games. First, though, here's how Jed started off:
AP Attempts A Fact Check by Jed L
Tue Feb 10, 2009 at 02:35:04 PM PST
The AP accuses President Obama of lying during yesterday's events:
President Barack Obama had it both ways when he promoted his stimulus plan in Indiana and later at a prime-time news conference. He bragged in Indiana about getting Congress to produce a package with no pork, yet boasted it will do good things for a Hoosier highway and a downtown overpass, just the kind of local projects lawmakers lard into big spending bills.
To be precise, what President Obama said was that this plan has no earmarks -- local spending projects inserted by members of Congress without review, things like millions for a goat herding museum in Alabama, or a moose-hunting education exhibit in Wasilla.
And as the AP notes further down in its story, President Obama told the truth about this.
("There are no 'earmarks,' as they are usually defined, inserted by lawmakers in the bill," the AP wrote.)
In my previous diary on the decline of American journalism (aka the decline of America), "Prediction And The Wretched Fall of American Journalism", I promised a second installment on how we got to the point where sheer gossip has come to dominate our national discourse:
This diary-and the one following-represents a brief attempt to explain just why and how this state of affairs came about. This diary takes a short-term focus on the historical why and how of recent times, not in a comprehensive fashion, but with reference to a few significant signposts. The next takes a longer-term focus on the philosophical/normative underpinings, and is more analytical. The two are related by the broad thesis that we live in a plutocracy masquerading as a democracy, and the subthesis that the nature of masquerade changed significantly from around 1980 onwards.
If the previous diary was a rehash of material that was surely more or less familiar to many, I trust that this one will not be. It starts with English philosopher of science, Francis Bacon. If René Descartes dreamed that reason by itself could unlock all truth, the English empiricists took the opposite approach, relying on the accumulation of facts, and reasoning from the systematic analysis of them. Bacon was one of the foremost expositors of this view. Fast forward a few centuries, just a wee bit past the French Revolution, and the French had started to come around, as Auguste Comte promoted the notion of a social physics-a hard science of human affairs, and promoted the term "positivism". Throughout the 19th Century, the notion of positivism-an absolute truth rooted in objective, scientific observation-became extremely popular among educate elites. It was, in a way, a form of post-religious fundamentalism. The notions of certainty, and an unassailable foundation for truth were preserved, but placed on a secular foundation. Eventually, under the post-WWI, 1920s-era polishing of the logical positivists, the claim would be made not simply that this was the way to truth, but that anything less than it was not simply unreliable, but meaningless. This had the added advantage of demoting even the very possibility of a critical discourse to the level of meaningless gibberish.
This was in sharp contrast to the philosophy of pragmatism....
When reading the op-ed pages in your local daily newspaper, have you noticed column after column written by conservatives? A new report released today by Media Matters for America confirms what many have suspected -- that for the majority of daily newspapers across the country, conservatives dominate the op-ed page.
Our new report, "Black and White and Re(a)d All Over: The Conservative Advantage in Syndicated Op-Ed Columns," is a comprehensive and unprecedented analysis of nationally syndicated columnists from nearly 1,400 newspapers -- or 96 percent of English-language daily U.S. newspapers.
STATE BLOGS
