The book Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression by Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto presents an organized overview of Social Dominance Theory (SDT), developed by the authors and their colleagues during the 1990s. As the publisher's blurb (from Cambridge University Press) explains:
Social dominance theory argues that the major forms of intergroup conflict, such as racism, classism and patriarchy, are all basically derived from the basic human predisposition to form and maintain hierarchical and group-based systems of social organization. In essence, social dominance theory presumes that, beneath major and sometimes profound difference between different human societies, there is also a basic grammar of social power shared by all societies in common. We use social dominance theory in an attempt to identify the elements of this grammar and to understand how these elements interact and reinforce each other to produce and maintain group-based social hierarchy.
SDT argues that there are three main sorts of hierarchy observed in societies around the world: age-based (elders over the young), gender-based (men over women) and special groups (ethnic-based, race-based, religion-based, etc.) Significantly, a recent paper looking at the makeup of congressional guests on Sunday talk shows finds all three kinds of bias are present--although it does not consciously invoke the SDT model. "Guess Who Won't Be Coming to the Studio: An Unknown Congress" by Alex B. Mitchell, George Mason University School of Law; The Green Bag, found that:
in 2009 the talk shows told us (by their selection of congressional guests) that the people who matter are disproportionately white, male, senior, and Republican - disproportionate not just when compared to the American population overall, but also when compared to the population of Congress itself.
(Data covered most, but not all of 2009, as data collection began on February 22, 2009 and ran through December 20, 2009.)
The findings are so clear, and so striking that little is needed beyond presenting the tables of basic findings. Note that in addition to the groups I mentioned above, Republicans function as a dominant group over Democrats, in addition to whites over minorities, and that institutional seniority functions in place of actual physical age.
Here's the first broad-range overview of the demographics, showing that both women and minorities are dramatically under-represented in Congress:
And here we see the increased imbalance on the talk shows:
Which also applies to Senators (insitutionally senior) over Representatives:
The weekend before last, in "David Weigel and the death spiral of American journalism", I pointed out that the Post's de facto firing of Weigel represented an internalization of rightwing media attack standards. As evidence, I returned to a 2002 analysis I had done of the Media Resource Center (MRC), whose "Annual Awards for the Year's Worst Reporting" was top-heavy with examples that were not reporting, but rather people giving their opinions in opinion forums. Indeed, the first place in one category, the "Pushing Bush to the Left Award", went to Eleanor Clift for opening her mouth on the The McLaughlin Group. Who knew that McLaughlin was part of the liberal media conspiracy?
I found this practice somewhat strange and confusing. But I was assured by MRC staffer Richard Noyes that I was the first to find it so. Similarly, when I did the math and found that MRC's judges had been harsher on opinion pieces, online columns and the like than they had been on network news reports, Noyes assured me, "I think that probably misses the point. I think what, particularly with our judges, they do tend to focus on personalities," rather than actual biased reporting.
And so it was that the Post's termination of Weigel due to opinions expressed in private emails was directly modeled on MRC's style of "media criticism", one that attacks people for their opinions, and then lies about it by calling its attack fest its "Annual Awards for the Year's Worst Reporting".
And then, the following week, 20-year CNN editor Octavia Nasr was fired for a tweet. The Post itself reported:.
Octavia Nasr has been fired. CNN fired the editor responsible for Middle Eastern coverage after she posted a note on Twitter expressing admiration for a late Lebanese cleric considered an inspiration for the Hezbollah militant movement.
Octavia Nasr later apologized for her tweet, but CNN's senior vice president for international newsgathering, Parisa Khosravi, said Wednesday that Nasr's credibility had been compromised.
The Atlanta-based Nasr worked at CNN for 20 years, starting as an assignment editor on the international desk. Her job was mostly off the air, but she occasionally would appear as an on-screen analyst during discussions of Middle Eastern news
Hey folks, I wanted to share my latest column with everyone here at OpenLeft -- a review of Bernard Goldberg's latest book, "A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media".
-K
That certainly didn't take long. Just shy of a week after Barack Obama took the oath of office, becoming America's 44th president, the nation's foremost right-wing publishing house has released a new tome by Bernard Goldberg that seeks to trash the supposedly liberal "mainstream media" for being in the tank for Obama.
The three-ringed circus of liberal media bias cryptozoology is nothing new for Goldberg. He's been part of this factually challenged freak show for years. This isn't even his first book on the subject -- he wrote 2001's creatively titled, Bias.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the real battle in this election is Obama vs. the media.
(Most of you know the content of the next 3 paras - after all, here and DailyKos is where I understood this from. But there is some hopefully interesting stuff about action later.)
As many have pointed out, one simple explanation for the lack of a VP bounce and poor polling numbers (adding onto race and other themes mentioned in the Chris Bowers frustration thread) is that the media is working extremely hard to ensure this with the content and style of their coverage. No conspiracy theory needed: this is the result of the intersection of corporatization and media infiltration.
Corporatization has trimmed news budgets, replacing real coverage with "analysis". It has created pressure to "keep races close" and conflated news with entertainment. This has ultimately created a culture where the media is the story, abetted by the public's lapping up of entertainment junk food over real nutrition.
This has been heavily abetted a very strong rightwing media infiltration effort. They started by moving the window by complaining about liberal media, but have also driven liberal journalists out of the media with pressure tactics abetted by corporate ownership, largely taken over PBS, created FOX, facilitated conglomeration etc. They have infiltrated the media system with right wingers, and made them look reasonable by also adding hate radio extreme right wingers. This is a long range systemic change in the structure of media, complementary to the more visible Supreme Court infiltration. The Pentagon generals were only the tip of the iceberg (and no accident that the story gained little traction).
The cycle is complete with the "Beltway wisdom" dynamic where they pick up each other's frames and narratives.
I have been meaning to draw up a system dynamics diagram of this cycle of influences, but haven't got round to it. If there is interest, will try and get it done in the next few days.
Of course Obama and other Dems are aware of it. This is likely a major reason the Obama campaign is so extremely heavily invested in the ground game. They know it is their best chance to counter this media problem in the short term.
The real question is, what can the netroots do about it?
Direct pushback is part of the answer, but the response to it is likely to be cosmetic changes that create only the sense of fairness (false balance, the same game that is already being played) - a few more articles will come out, but the fundamental dynamics will not shift.
The Fournier story is one opportunity. Extreme coordinated pushback across the netroots may have some effect, but again, it is likely to be semi-cosmetic (at the most, removing Fournier, which will help only a little bit).
A different lever is to work directly with local media. Compile a strong case against Fournier, take it to every local newspaper (needs coordinated push across the netroots). Most will laugh it off, but some (the most fairminded / independent / liberal) might be persuaded to run a story about it, or even better, add a disclaimer to their AP political articles: this story represents the views of the AP, not necessarily this paper. If even a few dozen local papers did it, that would be a HUGE story eventually, giving the opportunity to make the larger case.
A complementary activist opportunity is to create a series of well-researched factual articles on the major issues: tax cuts, healthcare, Iraq, constitution etc. Write them not in a partisan way, but as genuine unbiased pieces that real journalists would write. Then run each by factcheck.org (they will do it on request, right? Get the articles published by HuffPo or someone if necessary, then get it factchecked). Once these articles are ready with the factcheck certification, offer it to each local paper as a free series. Most, especially the smaller ones in small towns and rural areas, will be happy to get high quality free material. Even if they publish it as Democrat opinion pieces, it will still be an opportunity to get facts in front of voters, in a different form than if they came directly from a campaign.
And of course, contribute to the ground game.
Just my thoughts on how one can counter a propaganda machine. Don't know how much of it is practical. Will definitely require the creation of a Netroots Media Coalition.
Above is video of Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC complaining bitterly about lack of press access in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wish I had a longer clip that had Andrea Mitchell responding to the idea of the military being too positive to the Obama campaign. The idea is laughable on its face. General Petraus has no particular reason to be overly friendly to Obama, as he and Obama clash on opinions about what to do in Iraq (in today's news conference, Sen. Obama asserts that this clash is appropriate - that the generals on the ground have a single mission while the president, or any candidates for that office, have to think about the country as a whole, and not just one aspect of the country's strategic objectives). My point is - it seems highly likely that McCain is the favorite of the military, NOT Obama - and if the press was shooed away from the goings on in Iraq and Afghanistan it was either for their protection, or because the candidate wanted an opportunity to do as close to a genuine assessment as he could - which likely necessitated being away from press view.
Yet another Soapblox glitch has prevented me from posting what I intended. So here's a quick little stop-gap that I think is probably more relevant than any of us realize.
It' a case study in how the national Fox News Channel (FNC) tactics of smearing Democrats trickles down to the local level through their affiliates--and then how it gets picked up by local rightwing elites. The Fox-owned affiliates are--what a coincidence!--under the management of the same Roger Ailes who runs FNC. So what are the odds?
This is the last draft I wrote of a piece that just ran in Random Lengths, published on Thursday. There were some slight edits after mine, but nothing major.
If you have local exmples of similar stories, I would welcome hearing about them in the comments. It all begins after the flip...
This may be trivial in the grand scheme of the nomination contest, but what is up with CNN's rounding errors in reporting election returns?
According to the CNN web site, with 99% of the precincts reporting, Obama has 56% of the Democratic primary vote in North Carolina, with 890,695 votes out of a total of 1,571,337 votes cast. Check with your calculator, though; that's 56.68% of the vote, which rounds to 57%, not 56%.
It's not that they don't know how to round; they correctly rounded Clinton's 41.87% (657,920 votes) up to 42%, after all.
The result is that Obama's 14.8% victory margin should round to 15%, not 14%. It's not just on the main primary page where this mistake happens; CNN.com writers refer to Obama's "14-point win" here, for example.
Weirdly, CNN did round Clinton's percentage up from 54.64% to 55% in Pennsylvania, although they then made a similar math error when they used already rounded numbers to calculate her margin of victory at 10 percentage points instead of 9.
I'm not suggesting they are in the tank for Clinton. I'm saying they are doing every little thing they can to stretch the Democratic nomination out as long as possible. Given the Republican bias of the mainstream news media, this is no surprise. We should expect (but not forgive) that they cherry-pick and spin the facts in order to promote that agenda. But this is MATH.
Also, since this math is all likely being done through automatic calculations on a spreadsheet, somebody at CNN must stepping in to replace the accurate numbers with inaccurate ones--purposefully lying to their audience. Yes, it's a small lie. But its such an obvious one that I'm left bewildered.
update: Yes, I know that popular vote count is largely beside the point in the Democratic primary; it's delegates that matter. But the MSM, through a combination of venality, stupidity, and laziness, insists on covering the primary as if it followed exactly the same rules as the general election. If they're going to do that, they could at least do it correctly. I guess my point is that this small error is a very clear proof of their bias.
In a logical turn of events, Barack Obama's recent appearance on Fox News, which while a good interview, was not an attempt to "take Fox on" as promised by an Obama surrogate on Greg Sargent's blog, has birthed much criticism. Many, including Chris and Kos, had hoped that Obama would in fact attack the network when asked inevitably irrelevant questions about the "scandals" around his campaign. Instead, it amounted to ironically Clintonian Triangulation, on issues such as abortion, taxes, regulation, and John Roberts. While he didn't "throw Kos under the bus" as claimed by many, he did use him as a point of distancing himself from "the Left." In a strange, though honestly predictable turn of events, many Obama supporters are refusing to criticize the move, and many are even defending it as a means by which to court more voters, with claims such as
regardless of whether WE think the questions were vacuous or stupid, as Wallace pointed out, there ARE a lot of voters to whom these things do matter, and this allows Obama to address them more directly than just hoping they will get a snippet of his stump speeches.
This comment is actually from a diary on Kos, with the intent of criticizing Kos for his criticism of Obama.
What I think is important to note, throughout this entire fiasco, is that this was not just a mistake in its treatment of us, the activists, but also a missed opportunity to attack the current structure of the media. Now, I've said on previous occasions that I'm not sure that it would have helped him in the short term to attack Fox on the network, as it would have simply solidified his already attained base, and pissed off conservative viewers of the network (I personally think he should not have gone on in the first place), but in my research of past events, it has become clear to me that going on and "taking Fox on" could actually have helped the breaking of the current creation of false media narratives, especially by the uberpower, Fox News. This is especially evident by viewing the Dan Rather interview of George H.W. Bush in January 1988, fairly early in the campaign for President. Bush's reaction, and the firestorm after the fact, lead to one of the most important turning points in American Media History in recent times. Follow me below the fold for the details.
I've written before about the Gramscian "war of position" that the right has been fighting for the last 40-50 years or so, and which liberals and Democrats have still largely refused to engage. The war of position is all about controlling instutions that in turn serve to define social, cultural and political reality.
Gramsci developed the concept in response to the question of why the European working class had failed to make a proletarian revolution. His answer: bougroise institutions still controlled their thought. A proletarian revolution could only occur after proletarian counter-institutions had been created to counter their indoctrination-subtle and not-so-subtle-by bourgoise institutions. Although Gramsci is a figure of the left, conservatives long ago surpased the left in picking up on Gramsci, even without knowing in most cases. However, Rush Limbaugh wrote about Gramsci explicitly as far back as 1992 in his second book, See, I Told You So.
A key aspect of Gramsci's theory is that different institutions work together, like units in an army, simply by fulfilling their individual functions. However, it is obvious that if one defines those functions in slightly different ways, one can significantly increase how effectively different institutions work together. And nothing illustrates this better than the way that conservatives define media bias and the detection of it by media watch groups. While the left is reality-based, and defines bias in terms of things like (a) spreading falsehoods, (b) ignoring truths, and (c) presenting biased pictures by excluding some topics, stories, sources and points of view while dramatically over-representing others, the right is war-of-position-based, and defines bias in terms of "are you for us, or against us"? And because of this, it is intensely personal. It's all about demonization and attacking individuals, just like their politics.
As an illustration of this, on the flip, I'm posting a extended version of an article I wrote for Random Lengths News back in 2002. It's about the rightwing media watch group, the Media Resource Center, whose "Notable Quotable" newsletter is sent out to thousands of news organizations-including us. The way in which they conceive both media bias and their role in fighting it fits perfectly into a Gramscian framework-and has nothing to do with "media bias" as an objective social scientist might define it.
I am not saying that we should mimic them. Indeed, I think that Media Matters has developed a very potent reality-based counter-strategy. But we do have to understand them, and we do have to do a much better job of integrating the work that Media Matters does into a larger structure of institutions that does not yet exist, even though it is most certainly growing-although far too much of that growth is still confined to the online world.
For a deeper look at what we're up against, join me on the flip...
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