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March 10, 2006

The State of American Journalism

Joshua Micah Marshall discovered (via a reader tip) this inflammatory, inaccurate headline on the CNN website:

As Marshall explains,

Needless to say, no Democrats have been indicted. The headline is for an AP story in which RNC honcho Ken Mehlman 'indicts' the Democrats for having no message.

Who's the headline writer? Yet more of the long steady decline of CNN.

CNN is still a great global newsgathering organization. Many of my international graduate students come to Atlanta because of the stature CNN International has all over the world.

But here in the US, we get an often-inferior product, packaged to appeal to an audience assumed to be made up exclusively of white professionals and soccer moms. It presents many more conservatives then progressives, and passes along the Bush administration's baldfaced lies with neither healthy skepticism nor necessary contextualization.

This specific headline gaffe in itself is more likely a result of one incompetent, unprofessional editor, rather than evidence of an institution-wide rightward slant. But the fact that the headline could make it online shows that quality control at CNN is not what it should be.

Company-wide, CNN right now should be searching its soul to ask how it could have allowed itself to be duped by the Bush administration into repeating so many of its lies on the way to war in Iraq. Bush used CNN, along with the rest of the American journalistic establishment, to sell his illegal war. They let him get away with it, just as they're letting him get away with impeachable offenses such as knowingly breaking the FISA law with warrarntless wiretaps. Oh, they're "reporting" on the story. But they're framing the issue as "is or isn't the administration breaking the law?" when the illegality of the wiretaps isn't really in any doubt. It's what Marshall calls "up-is-down-ism" - Republican spinners can present demonstrably untrue statements, and so-called journalists will simply report them as if they're one credible point of view. Another way to put it would be "2+2=5-ism." That's the logical impossibility the prisoners in Orwell's 1984 were forced by the government to agree was true.

But restoring journalistic integrity - to say nothing of the future of democracy - doesn't appear to be very high on the list of CNN priorities. CNN's owner, Time Warner, is currently making a major push to please the Republican Party, hiring a Tom DeLay protege as its chief DC lobbyist. That's because CEO Richard Parsons only narrowly survived a recent takeover bid by corporate raider Carl Icahn, who'd like to buy Time Warner, then sell it off in pieces.

One of the criticisms that has weakened the Parsons regime is that Time Warner hasn't been doing enough to shed a "liberal" image. (See, for example, this dustup last August, which presumably led to Time Warner's capitulation in hiring the DeLay crony.) That liberal image, it's presumed by stock analysts, is hurting its profits (since it has insufficient leverage with Republican regulators) and share price (since it's displeasing the conservative investor class). Parson's being one of the country's most powerful African-Americans is probably already a strike against Time Warner in some racist boardrooms. Not that I have a ton of sympathy for Parsons, who seems eager enough to sign away his organization's integrity to make good with the Republicans.

So there may well be corporate pressure at CNN to become something like Fox-lite. This may explain why they've so comfortably swallowed the conventional opinion that there's no money to be made in programming for the left. Evidence, however, has shown this to be a myth. One of the very few avowedly liberal tak shows ever allowed on cable, Phil Donahue's show for MSNBC, was cancelled even though its ratings were higher than those of many of its peers. Donahue later described how the network put ongoing pressure on the show to avoid booking too many liberals.

I'm sure it helps GE with the Bush administration to keep MSNBC to the right of center. GE, after all, is a global conglomerate with many regulatory interests at stake. It's also run by a bunch of very rich men who've saved many millions in taxes under the Bush administration, and look to clean up even after death if the estate tax is repealed.

It's not just GE and CNN, though. Research by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has repeatedly found that all the TV networks favor Republicans over Democrats, and moderate Democrats over progressives, in their choices for hosts and guests. Think of how relentlessly CBS, like Time Warner a cosmopolitan organization based in "liberal" New York City, has been hammered by the right for attempting investigative reporting of the Bush administration. With the ascension of Bob Shiffer, it looks like CBS is giving in, for now at least.

Bush has often said that he greatly admires Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy. Italian media resembles Pravda more than it does the public sphere of a vibrant democracy. Berlusconi owns the major Italian television networks, and controls the public broadcast system as Prime Minister. No wonder he's been able to survive numerous corruption trials, as he owns the major sources of public information for voters. I'm convinced the Republican Party looks to Italy as a role model. (Check out this site, for more on Berlusconi. It's the homepage for an excellent PBS documentary on Italian media and democracy, "The Prime Minister and the Press." See also this book from Verso.) Then there's Bush's admiration for Putin . . .

One huge irony, as the great documentary Control Room shows, is that while the US has been lecturing the Arab world on democracy, Al Jazeera is actually a much more professional, credible, and accurate international news organization than, say, The New York Times, which still hasn't come close to acknowledging the harm the Judith Miller saga did to this country. Without those bogus stories about Iraqui nuclear and chemical weapons - fabrications fed to Judy by Scooter Libby as part of a concerted propaganda strategy - American opinion, especially among the elites who read the Times, would have been far more skeptical about going to war. The Times really does have blood on its hands.

Just to put this in the context of the hallowed history of the "old grey lady," imagine what the consequences might have been for the country if the Times had quashed the Pentagon Papers and published only Nixon administration lies instead. The antiwar movement would have never reached the level of credibility needed to turn the majority of Americans' minds against the war. Without pressure to end the war, Nixon might very well have expanded it further. And the quagmire would have been even more difficult to extract outselves from.

Think also about the courage it took for Walter Cronkite to come out against the war, and the impact it must have had. Does any newsanchor today have that kind of courage? Why are comedians (Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bill Maher) the only ones on TV today allowed to tell the truth? And, more to the point, what can be done to change this sorry state of affairs?

CNN could try to offer a real alternative to Fox: fair, rigorous reporting, along with smart, thoughtful opinion from all sides of political issues. That doesn't have to be PBS-level dull, or dumbed-down. It can just be smart, engaging, and open, like The Daily Show or Sportscenter, except with real news.

This may be what Anderson Cooper thinks he's trying to do, but from what I've seen, other than those telegenic tears in New Orleans, he hasn't really followed through. And that Wolf Blitzer show with all the video screens just gives me a headache. Both of these shows seem to want to be hip and edgy without actually having to speak the truth to power. But that's not good journalism, or even compelling TV. It's just depressing.

So far, the most intriguing attempt to try a "Daily Show with real news" is Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. With Dan Patrick, Olbermann invented the Sportscenter sensibility at ESPN, and it turns out to be a solid fit for other forms of news, as well. Countdown appears to be both getting better and building an audience, which is encouraging. I'll be very curious to see how this develops - and whether Olbermann, a prickly guy with real integrity who left previous jobs at ESPN and Fox over conflicts with higher-ups, will start running into pressure from the bosses at GE to tone it down.

I'm actually not too depressed about the state of TV news right now, overall. With The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, there's more progressive satire on television than at any previous point in American history. If progressives can get the congressional tide to turn in '06, many media corporations will be relieved to back off of their marriage-at-gunpoint to the Republican party. And new experiments in democratic video production like Al Gore's Current TV, while not quite yet ready for prime time, are pretty exciting. I could imagine a service that combines Google Video and Google News to present a personalized, algorithm-generated daily newscast composed entirely of clips sent in from users around the world. (Now that I think of it, I wonder how hard it would be to create that myself via the Google API. Any thoughts?)

One way or another, that's the next step: for videoblogging to challenge TV journalism just as text blogging is challenging newspapers, and podcasting is challenging radio. It's going to be a bigger challenge, since viewers expect certain levels of production standards, and video production takes a lot more time and money than just writing words or talking into a microphone. And journalism often demands resources and training that amateurs are unlikely to have. But there are already some interesting projects that leverage the power of the web to make ambitious work widely available at little cost. For example, the progressive/radical nightly news show Democracy Now! is now available as a free video podcast through iTunes. There's also a great podcast, War News Radio, that's produced by a bunch of Swarthmore undergraduates largely by interviewing Iraqi citizens via Skype, the free international internet phone service. These students leverage new technologies to allow amateurs to share with a global audience the kind of information that even reporters on the scene aren't privvy to.

Those interchangeable bloviators on the TV talk shows are the dying gasps of a corrupt, bloated system. The web is the future of journalism.

In the meantime, I'm sure all of these news organizations are filled with smart, talented, and creative reporters, editors, producers and technicians chafing against these diktats from on high. As viewers and bloggers, let's do everything we can to encourage and support courageous journalists in the Eward R. Murrow tradition like Keith Olbermann.

At the same time, let's also not think we can ever trust the global media oligopoly to give us the information we need about our world. Let a million videopodnewscasts bloom!

Posted by tedf at March 10, 2006 07:11 PM

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