Friday, October 29, 2004
Fair, Balanced, and Dim
So last night The Mrs. and I are flipping around to our various local channels to see how they covered the Kerry rally. The pictures were all pretty much the same--Bruce, Kerry, excited rally participants. But two of the three channels (and I have no reason to think that the third channel was any different) were very careful to include either pictures or comments from anti-Kerry people. One station showed protesters at the top of West Washington Avenue who appeared to be gibbering idiots in Halloween costumes; another interviewed a pro-Bush student petulantly complaining about the trouble she had getting into and out of her house, as if the Democrats had scheduled the rally to trouble her personally.
You can argue, as the stations would, that they were trying merely to show balance. I can argue that the decision is actually dreadfully unbalanced. With 100,000 pro-Kerry people in attendance, the stations give minutes of airtime to a dozen anti-Kerry people, or one bitchy coed? This isn't balance--it's the lazy indulgence of a poorly understood journalistic tenet. Such laziness is endemic in the media at this moment in history, and it contributes to the critical thinking troubles that plague the American electorate.
Smarter people than I are covering this better than I. Josh Marshall, who has been covering the story of the looted explosives better than anybody else on the Internet, examined CNN's coverage of the story last night. UN weapons inspector David Kay appeared with Aaron Brown and pretty much annihilated the concept, pushed by Bush, Cheney, and other Repug surrogates, that we don't really know what happened to these explosives. Kay's answers to Brown's questions left little doubt that the United States knew the explosives were there and the military failed to safeguard them. Period. But, as Marshall notes, the lead story on CNN's own website continued to run the "balanced" version of the story--which amounts to giving the administration's politically motivated denials and evasions equal weight with Kay's expert opinion and the evidence of our own eyes on the news video of the weapons site.
And that ain't all. At Tapped, Matthew Yglesias compares the New York Times' two stories on the explosives--one on the discovery itself and one on the impact the discovery has on the campaign. Once again, the campaign story pushes the "we don't know" frame established by the Repugs, even though the other story in the same paper shows that "we don't know" is bullshit. The result--"balanced" reporting that's just plain wrong.
No American journalist would admit to having the goal of confusing rather than enlightening, but you wouldn't know it to watch many of 'em at work. The Gadflyer said it best several months ago, and I've mentioned it here a couple of times already: The media's ideal of objectivity falls apart in the face of official mendacity. Baldfaced lies can't be called baldfaced lies even if the reporter knows they are baldfaced lies, because to call them baldfaced lies would be considered unfair and unbalanced. So CNN and the Times leave the decision up to their readers--who won't reach an accurate opinion if they think all the information on which they are deciding is credible.
But even when the subject at hand isn't a baldfaced lie, our media solons often seem unable to call a spade a spade. They're afraid of being criticized by people who would prefer to call a spade a diamond, or, of what some reporters appear to fear even more than that--of appearing to be actual thinking beings instead of impartial conduits of information. I got into an e-mail exchange a couple of years ago with the news director of Wisconsin Public Radio regarding a story the network did on the release of Senator Joseph McCarthy's papers. The network reported on how most scholars agreed that McCarthy's charges of communists under the bed were even more ludicrous than previously believed. Then, however, they dug up some goober from the John Birch Society and gave him two minutes of airtime to suggest that the papers in fact proved that everything McCarthy ever said was true. I criticized WPR for giving equal weight to such nonsense, asking whether they would feel it necessary to interview a member of the Flat Earth Society as part of a story about space travel. I got an aggrieved e-mail from the news director, in which she defended the McCarthy story and said, "Surely you don't want us engaging in advocacy journalism." Well, frankly, I think this country needs more advocacy journalism, not less--but at the very least, I think you ought to be able to tell chicken shit from chicken salad. So often today, reporters who are supposedly trained to know the difference act like they don't.
Recommended Reading: The Mighty Krugman talks with Texas Monthly about President Kerry's first months in office, and has some advice for JFK and the Democrats.
Still, we'll risk it. Harold Meyerson describes the incredible convergence of Democratic groups to get out the vote on Election Day. And a Daily Kos diarist has more pictures from Kerry's Madison rally yesterday.
So last night The Mrs. and I are flipping around to our various local channels to see how they covered the Kerry rally. The pictures were all pretty much the same--Bruce, Kerry, excited rally participants. But two of the three channels (and I have no reason to think that the third channel was any different) were very careful to include either pictures or comments from anti-Kerry people. One station showed protesters at the top of West Washington Avenue who appeared to be gibbering idiots in Halloween costumes; another interviewed a pro-Bush student petulantly complaining about the trouble she had getting into and out of her house, as if the Democrats had scheduled the rally to trouble her personally.
You can argue, as the stations would, that they were trying merely to show balance. I can argue that the decision is actually dreadfully unbalanced. With 100,000 pro-Kerry people in attendance, the stations give minutes of airtime to a dozen anti-Kerry people, or one bitchy coed? This isn't balance--it's the lazy indulgence of a poorly understood journalistic tenet. Such laziness is endemic in the media at this moment in history, and it contributes to the critical thinking troubles that plague the American electorate.
Smarter people than I are covering this better than I. Josh Marshall, who has been covering the story of the looted explosives better than anybody else on the Internet, examined CNN's coverage of the story last night. UN weapons inspector David Kay appeared with Aaron Brown and pretty much annihilated the concept, pushed by Bush, Cheney, and other Repug surrogates, that we don't really know what happened to these explosives. Kay's answers to Brown's questions left little doubt that the United States knew the explosives were there and the military failed to safeguard them. Period. But, as Marshall notes, the lead story on CNN's own website continued to run the "balanced" version of the story--which amounts to giving the administration's politically motivated denials and evasions equal weight with Kay's expert opinion and the evidence of our own eyes on the news video of the weapons site.
And that ain't all. At Tapped, Matthew Yglesias compares the New York Times' two stories on the explosives--one on the discovery itself and one on the impact the discovery has on the campaign. Once again, the campaign story pushes the "we don't know" frame established by the Repugs, even though the other story in the same paper shows that "we don't know" is bullshit. The result--"balanced" reporting that's just plain wrong.
On John Kerry's side are witnesses, television footage, and officials from the U.S. Army and Iraqi Interim Government. On George W. Bush's side are Bush, Bush's political appointees, and the press aides to Bush's political appointees. It doesn't take a psychic to figure out who's wrong and who's right here. And yet people reading campaign stories--especially people out there in the swing states where their media is filled with wire copy--aren't getting any sense of the facts. Instead, day after day, they're reading transcriptions of each campaign's best quips.It's no wonder that out in the provinces, people throw up their hands at the prospect of understanding complicated stories and fall back on easy-to-grasp memes like Bush the Resolute or Kerry the Liberal to make their electoral decisions. Or worse, throw up their hands and claim that because all politicians are full of it, nothing a politician does has any relevance to real life, and thus, voting is pointless. (I have people of just that opinion in my extended family.) Reporting of the type Marshall and Yglesias describe leads directly to the phenomenon I first observed during the anthrax freakout of October 2001--contrary to what you'd expect, the longer you watch, the less you know. Equal weighting of conflicting claims, each one impossible to measure because there's no context for any of it, makes a person more confused about a given issue, not less.
No American journalist would admit to having the goal of confusing rather than enlightening, but you wouldn't know it to watch many of 'em at work. The Gadflyer said it best several months ago, and I've mentioned it here a couple of times already: The media's ideal of objectivity falls apart in the face of official mendacity. Baldfaced lies can't be called baldfaced lies even if the reporter knows they are baldfaced lies, because to call them baldfaced lies would be considered unfair and unbalanced. So CNN and the Times leave the decision up to their readers--who won't reach an accurate opinion if they think all the information on which they are deciding is credible.
But even when the subject at hand isn't a baldfaced lie, our media solons often seem unable to call a spade a spade. They're afraid of being criticized by people who would prefer to call a spade a diamond, or, of what some reporters appear to fear even more than that--of appearing to be actual thinking beings instead of impartial conduits of information. I got into an e-mail exchange a couple of years ago with the news director of Wisconsin Public Radio regarding a story the network did on the release of Senator Joseph McCarthy's papers. The network reported on how most scholars agreed that McCarthy's charges of communists under the bed were even more ludicrous than previously believed. Then, however, they dug up some goober from the John Birch Society and gave him two minutes of airtime to suggest that the papers in fact proved that everything McCarthy ever said was true. I criticized WPR for giving equal weight to such nonsense, asking whether they would feel it necessary to interview a member of the Flat Earth Society as part of a story about space travel. I got an aggrieved e-mail from the news director, in which she defended the McCarthy story and said, "Surely you don't want us engaging in advocacy journalism." Well, frankly, I think this country needs more advocacy journalism, not less--but at the very least, I think you ought to be able to tell chicken shit from chicken salad. So often today, reporters who are supposedly trained to know the difference act like they don't.
Recommended Reading: The Mighty Krugman talks with Texas Monthly about President Kerry's first months in office, and has some advice for JFK and the Democrats.
Do not be magnanimous in victory. I hope the people around him understand that this is not politics as we know it. It's not, "OK, well, we won an election. After the election we'll get together and work in a bipartisan way to help the country." They [Repugs] didn’t work in a bipartisan way when the United States was attacked. They immediately saw it as a way to achieve political dominance. Kerry has got to understand that he has a window of opportunity to expose what's going on and to rock these people back to the point where we can try to reclaim the normal workings of democracy. Unless there's a true miracle and the Democrats take the House--which is extremely unlikely--it’s going to be very bitter political civil war from Day One. The House leadership will try to undermine Kerry. I'm sure they'll try to impeach him almost immediately. On anything.Over at Orcinus, David Neiwert also sees ugliness ahead, but in more than just a political sense.
Still, we'll risk it. Harold Meyerson describes the incredible convergence of Democratic groups to get out the vote on Election Day. And a Daily Kos diarist has more pictures from Kerry's Madison rally yesterday.
