News Cycle

How can we be surprised that the major media aren't covering the voting "irregularities" story? As Eric Alterman wrote in The Nation in late October, "I could not have imagined more irresponsible coverage than the 'Gore's a liar, Bush is a dope'-athon to which we were treated in 2000. But given that most of the mainstream media have been performing like trained seals in a Karl Rove-produced traveling circus, Sam and Cokie's giggling about an Al Gore grimace on This Week four years ago would be the equivalent of Pericles' funeral oration today."

I remember all the soul-searching after 2000 when big media stars mournfully admitted that they'd done an unaccountably poor job covering the 2000 campaign. That followed all the soul-searching after the Ken Starr frenzy, even as far back as the 1988 campaign when the press was flummoxed by the Willy Horton horror show.

"We need to do a better job" they said after 2000. And in 2004 they didn't. They did a worse job. They allowed themselves to be swallowed whole by the Swift Boat Liars and the Rabid Right inflation of the CBS gaffe. They were apparently unable to ask themselves a simple question: which is more important: that CBS was gullible, or that the entire Bush administration lied about Iraq, resulting in more than a hundred thousand deaths, some 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from malnutrition, and the world's tallest mountain of debt, which will likely mean more poverty for the elderly and higher taxes for the unborn?

The big news of 2004 in "the news business" was the rise of the blogs. Not that the media could even get this story right. Finding that they couldn't ignore it, they covered a few of its more prominent practitioners. That's the standard Act I: The Rising Star. We're getting intimations of Act II:The Star Falls in some dark hints that the blogs are overdoing the vote "irregularities" story and when it doesn't pan out, people will stop paying attention to the blogs. If that doesn't work, maybe pretty soon we'll be learning that Josh Marshall is a drug addicted paid agent of the French, and kos is really the Unabomber.

I ran into a local media guy today. Like all media people, he spent most of the conversation complaining about the media, especially management. TV reporters want you to know that it's not their fault they're superficial. I asked him about bloggers and he gave the standard answer about the Internet information: that there are no editors, no gatekeepers, like there are in "professional" media.

The beauty as well as the bane of the Internet is that anybody can say anything. But 2004 has shown that in the political blososphere at least, gatekeeping can be a group process. The bigger political blogs are the focal point for the self-editing of the blogosphere. But more to the point---and more embarrassing--- there's the remarkable phenomenon of bloggers as gatekeepers for the professional media.

There are plenty of weaknesses in the blogosphere. There will be lessons ahead on the perils of celebrity, the bandwagon effect, emotions overriding judgment, and the dangers of speed over substance. But the contrast with major media is striking. The blogs in 2004 were skeptical while the pros were cynical. The blogs were enthusiastic while the pros were gullible. But the blogs thought about what was important, while the pros thought about what would maintain their professional, personal and corporate power. The blogs judged stories by context, while the pros ignored context and cared only about not losing audience to the competition. Sure, the blogs have points of view, but they are liberated by advocacy to tell the facts before evaluating them.

In his next column, Alterman discussed the confessions of the Big Three network anchors that both in the newsroom but mostly in corporate offices, coverage was being affected by the blizzards of emails the Rabid Right sent them if they were displeased. The blogs tried to organize and prod a counter-response this year, which might help take the pressure off the newspeople who want to do the right thing. Those million dollar salaries notwithstanding, it's the lesser paid people who would suffer more from corporate wrath. Still, there's only so much room, or time, for sympathy. It's probably not coincidence that Rather is joining Brokaw in retiring.

But it was cable news rather than the networks that drove coverage in 2004. With a few exceptions,when it comes to professional media, cable news represents the dregs. Never have so many embarrassed themselves so openly in a frenzy to attract so few. They are all about celebrity and advertising. The paid advertising is negligible, so mostly they advertise themselves (or on MSNBC, the "parent" network.) Is that Tim Russert on the Brian Williams show, or Brian Williams on the Chris Matthews show? If you watch CNN for a few hours, you'll see the host of every show interviewing the host of every other show coming up. This is because the function of a news channel is to create celebrities, for as we all know, viewers will only watch celebrities.

Where are the gatekeepers on cable news? With few exceptions, there are none. The words that come out of Chris Matthews' mouth had no prior existence. He says the first thing that occurs to him.

CNN and MSNBC are dying for the audience of Fox News. Last year CNN tried to recapture its former glory by out gung-hoing Fox in Iraq. They sobered up a little this year, but let their Gallup Polls be their guide. MSNBC assembled an utterly laughable panel to comment on the presidential campaign. Apparently Fox and CNN had soaked up all the Rabid Right celebrity commentators, so Matthews had to scoop up lawyer Ben Ginsberg, who continued advocating for his client the Bush administration, and actor Ron Silver, apparently the only first, second or third-rate Hollywood celebrity he could find who was for Bush.

As for Fox, what is there to say? One paragraph from the aforementioned Alterman column says it all: "When the New York Times ran its May 26 admission that it gullibly swallowed the Bush Administration's deception about Iraq's nuclear weapons program," it was reported 38 times in US newspapers and wire reports, and 7 times on cable news in the next 48 hours---except for Fox, which totally ignored it. But Fox was all over the one phony document that CBS cited in its otherwise factual report on GW Bush's dishonorable National Guard non-service, including coverage on every single Fox News program in the 48 hours after CBS admitted its error. It was also reported 57 times on other cable news, and 167 times in print.

There's plenty to say about media that's controlled by a few corporations, and news celebrities who are more than a little cozy with the more powerful of the people they cover. There's plenty to be disappointed about in the sycophantic tendencies of overpaid and merely well-paid media celebrities, managers and reporters. But the worst of it is the aid and comfort it all gives to the enemies of not only the political opposition, but of the news profession.

The base standard of the news profession is fact. But the people they are pandering to now don't care about fact, let alone truth. For there are reporters literally risking their lives to report from the blistered cities of Iraq and the refugee camps of the Sudan. There are news professionals risking their careers on reporting stories they feel are worth that risk.

But what happens when one NBC camera documents a U.S. Marine shooting an unarmed, injured Iraqi? There are Rabid Right blogs that have literally called for the reporter-cameraman's death. A Republican member of the U.S. Congress suggests that this report is reason to stop the practice of embedding reporters in the war zone altogether.

This of course is in the context of a sensationally underreported war. The combination of tight government control, the nearly universal cutbacks in overseas reporting by U.S. media, and U.S. media timidity in reporting possible unpleasantness, has left the vast majority of Americans pretty clueless about what's going on there. They see lots of shooting and explosions, so they can work out for themselves that people must be getting blown up and shot. But they don't see bodies, especially of Iraqi civilians. The media don't even question their own lack of information about wounded Americans or Iraqi casualties.

If the Rabid Right are upset by seeing something that an NBC cameraman stumbled onto, they would really be apoplectic after a few minutes of reporting from Fallujah by the independent journalist featured on Democracy Now radio and TV. He spoke of the stench in the streets of Fallujah, of rotting bodies, of rotting childrens' bodies, left there for days.

There's a lot to work out about how to cover news when there is so much of it, pouring out of so many megaphones, all the time. But it's no use pretending this is the major problem. The sad conundrum of professional news is they're desperately anxious to please people who have nothing but contempt for what news professionals would like to believe they still do.

Maybe the wattage of too many smiles is a lot higher than of their brains. They just aren't equipped to do a better job. The skills of reporting and thinking are less important than of talking while somebody is talking to you in your earpiece. And maybe the pressure, or the opportunity, of gaining readers and power through celebrity is too tempting in print journalism as well.

Journalists like to think that they are essential for our democracy, and they are, but it only works if they have the integrity to do what they say they do: report the facts and exercise judgment. Maybe they think that because we just had an election, democracy is working. And maybe that's why they don't want to hear about people in power who may very well have taken an ax to the integrity of the vote.
---Theron Dash