New England Patriot

The State of the Media: Where it is Now, and Where it's Heading

2006-12-18T14:22:00.000-05:00

This is my lengthiest blog yet, and might be the longest I'll ever post, but it might be the most informative and interesting blog I've posted so far, so if you're a regular reader or just stopping by, please bear with me. In this blog, I'll briefly describe the six models of media we have and argue which of those models should serve as our media model. Then I'll evaluate mainstream media (MSM), or "big media," while comparing it with new media (NM). Finally, I'll look at what the future may hold for NM and whether it can fulfill the media model that I believe we should have.

Professor Jan Leighley, a media scholar, explains in her book, Mass Media and Politics: A Social Science Perspective, that there are five kinds of media models journalists and the media can operate under. Here's a short run-down of them (for further elucidation, see her book, pages 9-13):

1. Reporters of Objective Fact- This model says that reporters are only supposed to report the cold hard facts, and nothing else. Most members of the media would say that this is the model they subscribe to as professional journalists. However, biases can unconsciously creep into anyone's work; furthermore, reporters can't report all the facts, so choosing which facts to focus on is an important consideration that can have political consequences.

2. Neutral Adversary- According to this approach, the media should serve as a government watchdog and an outside, informal check on government. Many investigative reporters may claim to be following this model by trying to find out 'what the government is really doing,' or by "holding politicians accountable."

3. Public Advocate- This model assumes that the job of the media is to go beyond reporting the cold-hard facts and serving as a government watchdog to actively taking the side of the people against the government (or against other economic powers). 'Advocacy Journalism,' as it is sometimes termed, can be seen as the heir of the 'Muckrakers,' the Progressive Era journalists like Jacob Riis, Upton Sinclair, and Lincoln Steffens who exposed the corrupt practices that occurred in cities, businesses, and society.

4. Profit Seeker- I don't think I was alone when I thought this Sunday's New York Times first section looked more like a shopping catalog than a newspaper. On most Sundays, and especially during the Holiday season, the actual news articles are buried under avalanches of ads so much so that the news-stand guy may as well ask you 'would you like some news stories with those ads?' The Times' website, by comparison, isn't quite as smothered in ads, but it's still chock-full of them.

But I shouldn't pick on the Times alone. Big Media today, be it widely circulated newspapers, network news, and highly-rated cable news programs, operate under the profit seeker model, which holds that the job of news is no different than any other segment of the media- to garner the most profits as possible. This has had serious consequences for the media, which I'll elaborate on later.

5. Propagandist- Leighley's final model holds that the media's role is to be the mouthpiece of government, or to be 'the keyboard on which the government can type.' In this model, the media is allowed to manipulate the public- if that's what the government wants it to do. While we don't have a propagandist media in the 'classical' sense, such as the Nazi or Soviet media machine (or even the repressive Chinese media today), critics have said that much of our media is a mere mouthpiece for the government in that they merely transcribe what government says without really questioning it. This was a serious criticism leveled by Eric Boehlert in his book Lapdogs. Boehlert pointed out that in the run-up to the Iraq war, the media barely questioned the rationale behind going to war- that Iraq possessed WMD and was an imminent threat to the United States.

Even though our media doesn't operate in the propagandist model, there are elements that do, such as the 'stenographer journalist' who only types down the spin of what Washington officials give out and distribute it to the public. Political advertising is suffused with propaganda, as I've discussed. If you want to be on the lookout for propaganda, here are some characteristics of it, according to Nicholas Jackson O'Shaughnessy in his book Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction: propaganda appeals to the power of emotion over rationale; it conjures up utopian visions and repressed prejudices, and uses symbols, myths, and rhetoric that are "cognitive short-cuts" to convey its manipulative messages.

But on a lighter note, if we did have actual totalitarian-style propaganda, here's what it might look like:

6. The Tocquevillian Model- This is a media model coined by Professor Stephen Pimpare of Yeshiva University, a media and politics expert, that views the media as being responsible for adequately informing the public so that we have all the information we can possibly need, and in as convenient of a way as possible, in order to make the rational, well-thought out decisions (such as votes) that we have to make as a polity in order to be a flourishing democracy.

It's based on what Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his essay On the Relations between Public Associations and Newspapers:

"Nothing but a newspaper can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the
same moment. A newspaper is an adviser that does not require to be sought,
but that comes of its own accord and talks to you briefly every
day of the common weal, without distracting you from your private affairs...To suppose that they only serve to protect freedom would be to diminish their importance: they maintain civilization."

Yes, that's strong, but Tocqueville, as well as Pimpare, believes that newspapers- or today, the media, when functioning properly- actually uphold our democracy. And quite frankly, I agree. I believe that the media is such a powerful tool that for it to be used any other way than as a public service for which to properly inform the public is an egregious offense that can have disastrous consequences. The media operating in the propagandist model, or in the profit seeker model (as it currently does), has particularly horrible consequences.

But even functioning in the neutral adversary or public advocate models is not enough; if reporters are too caught up in trying to uncover secret government plots, they may neglect to cover the more transparent issues. If the goal of journalists is to inform the public as well as possible, then the positive aspects of the watchdog and advocacy models can be subsumed under the Tocquevillian model, since they also fall under the category of informing the public (and in those cases, informing the public of political corruption and making sure the government is also informed about the opinions of the people). The way to gauge how the media is performing is to examine whether it's upholding the republic by observing if it's keeping us as informed as possible.

(A big part of this model is that the media needs to serve as a "linkage institution" that not only informs the people of the workings of government but that also informs the government of the wishes of the people. This can be accomplished through well-done, truly random, representative, scientific polling, except that most of the polling that's done doesn't really measure public opinion, it is merely a reflection of attitudes conveyed by the media elite that are adopted by the audience. So most public opinion polls only measure the extent to which there's unity or dissent among elites in the media.)

So, looking at the media from a Tocquevillian framework, has MSM, or "big media," done a good job in maintaining the republic by keeping us as informed as possible? Well, the short answer is NO. Why the answer is no will require a bit more explanation.

The crux of the problem in terms of why MSM hasn't fulfilled the Tocquevillian model of media is because, unfortunately, it doesn't operate according to the Tocquevillian model; it operates according to the profit-seeker model. There has always been commercialization in journalism to a certain extent, but it has taken on a new level in recent times due to a contemporary drive towards media consolidation that has resulted in virtually every media outlet (except internet sites- at least not yet, but I'll get to that later) falling under the control of six giant conglomerates whose soul purpose is to maximize profits for themselves and their share-holders.

Robert McChesney discusses the "hyper-commercialism" of the media and the corporatization of journalism in his book The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century. He says that media consolidation and its resulting commercialization of news was not inevitable but was result of government policies of deregulation. It is something that can be reversed, as evidenced from the public uprising of 2003 against further FCC deregulation.

The 1976 movie Network, is a great portrayal of how the news business is obsessed with ratings and the lengths it'll go to achieve them:

News programs are expected to generate profits just like any other television program, and this has led to a dulling-down of the news that has made people less informed. Sensationalism, while also always present to a certain extent in journalism, has also taken off in news, as whatever can get ratings becomes news. So we're inundated with crime, sex, and human interest stories. The all-out media blitz and constant updates from the John Mark-Carr arrest in the media-favorite Jon Benet -Ramsey story was so overwhelming that you might've thought it was a Cuban Missile Crisis.

This problem is particularly acute in local news; no matter what part of the country you're in, your local news is probably a trail-mix of the latest murders, robberies, rapes, fires, high-speed police chases, and interstate highway car-crashes, combined with the weather (oh my God, it's winter and it's getting colder?! Who knew!), sprinkled with some "sweet" stories at the end like the world's tallest man who saved a dolphin (I'm not making this up), a report about a local school teacher nominated for a teaching award, or coverage of the annual Taste of Springfield food festival (the biggest "event" in my city of the year, after the Basketball Hall of Fame induction ceremony).

Because these kind of sensational stories, along with other "soft news" like celebrity news (e.g., the Tomkat marriage, Britney Spears's divorce, Madonna's African baby adoption) now takes up a lot more time in network news broadcasts, "hard news" (e.g., coverage of congress, the Supreme Court, and ongoing issues like poverty and African wars and epidemics) has been drastically cut down. Conversely, coverage of the President has increased, but it has increased because the President is a celebrity, and celebrity coverage gets ratings.

Therefore, since the public gets less information about serious policy issues, it knows less about them and can't make informed decisions on these issues. We've just emerged out of mid-term congressional elections that were highlighted by Foley-gate, Macaca-gate, and negative, sensational advertising a-la the anti-Ford ad in Tennessee. These were the main points of the campaign that were covered- the scandals and the sensationalism, not the actual policy issues. How can voters be expected to decided which candidate has a better plan for the Iraq War, solving global warming, or the economy, when all they hear is that George Allen is in trouble because he called someone "macaca" and because he just found out he 's Jewish?

Other symptoms of the commercialization of news include covering elections as horse-races, less international coverage (because it's too expensive to maintain foreign news bureaus), and less coverage of congress (because it's tedious and a process-oriented institution), as aforementioned. And what passes for "political debate" is mere shouting and conflict-driven news shows that do a serious disservice to Americans by turning them off from politics, as Jon Stewart argued on his famous (or infamous) Crossfire appearance:

Diana Murtz and Byron Reeves, in an article in the American Political Science Review 99, no. 1 entitled The New Videomalaise: Effects of Televised Incivility on Political Trust, demonstrated in a study that the more people are exposed to uncivil political debates- like the kind that dominate cable news shows- the less they trust government. Thus, not only is MSM falling far short of the Tocquevillian model, but it is covering news in a dangerous way, because, in addition to alienating people from politics, it isn't adequately educating us about politics and substantive political issues. When citizens don't know what the government is doing, it's easier for the government to get away with bad policies and it's easier for the government to manipulate the public.

Studies have shown that the greater your political knowledge, the less susceptible you are to mediated messages (i.e., propaganda) that try to manipulate you. This had disastrous results in the lead-up to the Iraq War, because the public wasn't well-informed about the pro's and con's of war. People were easily duped into believing that there was a connection between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The media plays a powerful role in agenda-setting and priming in terms of choosing what stories get covered, and the way the media framed the Iraq war- by covering it within a War on Terror framework- fed into the misperception that Iraq was somehow connected to 9/11. If the media had done its job and tried to give the public as much accurate information as it could have possibly done, we might not be in the situation we are today.

If Alexis de Tocqueville lived during our time and was a consumer of MSM and Big Media, I think it's safe to say he would not be pleased with the state of our media- at least, the state of our mainstream media. Because of the corporate control of media, people's knowledge of politics- and therefore, their participation in politics- has decreased. MSM has become an anti-democratic force.

But what would he think of NM? Is it doing a better or worse (or the same) job of conveniently giving people all the information they need to be informed, participatory citizens in a democratic polity? NM, on the surface, seems to have more potential for living up to the Tocquevillian model than MSM (for a discussion of some of the differences between MSM and NM, see a previous blog I've done on the subject).

In his book We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, Dan Gillmor writes that the internet has changed journalism by opening up journalism for every person. Now, anyone can make and/or report news; anyone with a videophone, laptop and internet access can be a 'citizen journalist.' Indeed, blogging and YouTube have transformed the media in profound ways, as I've discussed, and MSM is checking out what blogs have to say. Time Magazine even named "You" the person of the year (Yes, imagine "I'd like to thank my parents, my professors, my...hey, don't play me off!...I'm not finished!..." x6 billion) for everyone's ability to make news, comment on it, and contribute to national and global discussion forums via the internet, the blogosphere, Wikipedia, and YouTube.

Blogging, since the 2004 elections, has become a crucial part of political campaigns, and Professor Pimpare predicts that blogs and other emerging technological tools like SMS, Wikis, and RSS will be central to the upcoming 2008 presidential campaign. "Bottom-up journalism," as Gillmor calls it, has become just that- going from the bottom- the people- upwards to the MSM elite. Gillmor believes that in the long run, the lines between "bottom-up", between traditional media and new media will be blurred, ushering in a new media era where journalism is more of a conversation, not a lecture.

However, there are obstacles to how much of an effect NM can have. Yes, you can get any kind of news you want anytime, but how do you know what blogs and internet news sources are the ones you need to be properly informed about the most important political issues? Also, perhaps more seriously, the same big six conglomerates, along with emerging internet mega-corporations like Yahoo and Google, are buying up more and more internet sites, and Cable and Phone companies are fighting for more restrictions on internet usage. Gillmor urges us to defend internet neutrality and its capabilities for grassroots journalism "with the same vigor we defend other liberties (page XXVIII)."

Personally, I'm worried that the big six will be able to buy up the entire internet just like they've bought up all the other media outlets, and new media will only be subsumed under traditional MSM. For my concerns on this topic and whether NM can live up to the Tocquevillian model, please see a blog I posted a few weeks ago on this subject.

Gillmor quotes a friend as saying "only a tiny elite engages with political/news blogs; democracy needs a *tomorrow journalism* that reaches and activates a broad audience (page 244)." Among the problems that NM presents, such as lack of blogger credibility and others I've mentioned, an additional one is that NM is not mainstream (the word "blog," even in its full form as "weblog," doesn't even register with spell-check); it is still a haven of the politoco/techno-elite. I believe that NM in its current state cannot fulfill the sixth model of the media; until the internet and certain blogs becomes as widespread as traditional network news and widely-circulated newspapers that can 'come to you every day and talk to you about the issues without distracting you from your daily affairs,' NM cannot succeed in maintaining civilization. Until the internet and its media capabilities reach that point, it will be left to our current MSM to somehow fill that void.

But perhaps what NM can do now is to start making people aware that we can seriously change the media and get it back to talking about substantive policy issues and real news rather than the latest updates on the Miss USA 'scandal' or whether O.J. will go through with his "If I did it, Here's How I Would've done it" book. Maybe, slowly, we can get profit-making out of the news business and make it more like C-SPAN, i.e., a public service operation that makes us smarter, better-informed citizens that can participate meaningfully in a democratic polity. As long as the media operates under the profit-seeker model of journalism, we'll just have to live with the media in its current state- which is not good.

Corporate Synergy Gone Wild

2006-12-06T20:25:00.000-05:00

We know by now about the evils of corporate synergy, commercialization of the media, and shameless cross-promotion. I came across what I thought was a particularly egregious form of corporate synergy and shameless cross-promotion while watching Jimmy Kimmel's show the other night.

I'm not a Kimmel fan, but my roommate is, and he had the TV tuned to Kimmel Live. I watched in horror (well, not really horror, but definitely with some disgust) as Kimmel brought on Michael Irvin: Now, we know that celebrities usually go on late-night talk shows when they have something to promote: an upcoming movie, a book, a new album, etc. What was Irvin promoting? The Walt Disney company!

ABC is owned by Disney, and so is ESPN. Irvin, the former Dallas Cowboys star receiver, is on ESPN's Sunday NFL Countdown and Monday Night Countdown shows. This isn't connect-the-dots, this is look-at-the-already-connected-dots. Furthermore, Irvin convieniantly happened to be a teammate of NFL great Emmitt Smith while on the Cowboys. This allowed Kimmel to talk about Smith and therefore about Smith's appearance on ABC's Dancing with the Stars. Just sickening: ABC promoting ESPN promoting ABC. It's corporate synergy gone wild.

Blogging Takes Off

2006-12-05T20:14:00.000-05:00

Here's a list of various bloggers who've worked for politicians during campaigns, via this past sunday's NY Times. Some of them were paid pretty well for what was probably just part-time work.

But what's interesting to me is that politicians are beginning to realize that blogs are influential (just look at the rise of Lamont and Jon Tester). They can mobilize lots of like-minded people behind a cause. The Netroots community is growing, and the political world is taking it more seriously.

The question, I believe, is how long it will be until blogs become MSM or are otherwise absorbed by them. If a few blogs rise to the top of the food chain, as it appears MyDD, Daily Kos and others are(or have already by some accounts), how long will it be before they become "mainstream"? Or do blogs and other internet media by their very nature remain outside the mainstream?

Personally, I believe the former- I think that the more people start getting their news from the internet and read blogs, the more blogs will become mainstream. We'll move into a new NM where a few blogs will be acknowledged as the standard bearers of internet punditry, and others will be, well, alternatives of some sort.

Thus, what I think will happen is some sort of merging between MSM and NM, where parts of NM become essentially part of MSM; just as cable news channels were once considered obscure but eventually became mainstream for the most part, so too, blogs began in relative obscurity but may very well end up being as much a part of MSM, if not more, as cable news is. Will political coverage change if the 2008 presidential candidates are conducting interviews on the Daily Kos over Larry King Live? We may not find out in two years, but we likely will sometime in the near future. And if you're reading this, Hillary, Obama, McCain, and everyone else who has declared they're running or just formed an "exploratory committee," you're welcome to come on New England Patriot for a cyber-interview. Don't worry- only softballs!

The YouTube Revolution

2006-11-30T09:50:00.000-05:00

Much has been written about how YouTube is changing politics. Commentators have pointed out how anyone with a camera-phone can catch at a politician at his or her worst moment and put it on YouTube, where that moment can be shown to the world so that potentially every voter can see it. So far, YouTube has caught Conrad Burns dozing off in meetings and Joe Biden making some unsavory comments.

But the most infamous political YouTube moment so far is the George Allen macaca video, a statement many believed cost Allen his Senate seat and possibly his political career. For anyone that was trapped in a cave the past few months, here it is:

Ouch. Sure, Allen may've gained voters in southern Virginia with a bit of race-baiting, but I'm sure he lost a large amount of independents and centrists in the more populous area of Northern Virginia because of these comments. Senator Macacawitz, as Maureen Dowd calls him, is no more, thanks to YouTube. But I'm positive he's only the first of many politicians that will be derailed thanks to this video file-sharing website.

YouTube may indeed be part of a political technological revolution. Allen's macaca video had over 94,000 views on YouTube, and he only lost the election by a few thousand votes. In the past, where a politician's comments could only be seen and heard by a limited number of people, now, their comments can potentially be seen and heard by everyone in the world. Politicians will have to be more guarded and cautious wherever they go for fear that someone is catching them on a phone-camera or something of the like. Spontaneity, for better or for worse, may be gone from politics in the next few years. Can you imagine congressmen going to their local grocery stores and evading questions from the cashier as if they were on Meet the Press? I don't think we'll have to imagine in too long. Get ready for YouTube clips like this:

"So Bob, you goin to see Borat tonight? How'bout the new Bond movie, you gonna see that?"
"Jim, that's a decision I'll have to make when I'm sitting down with my family and discussing it. I'm not prepared to make a decision at this time."
"So I take it you'd rather see the Bond movie?"
"Jim, I cannot conclusively say yes or no at this time, it's something I'll have to discuss with my family."

Good times!

Citizen Journalism & New Media

2006-11-28T20:39:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, we discussed "citizen journalism," which according to the simplest definition is journalism done by non-journalists. We raised the question of whether citizen journalism is anarchy, and whether we're better off with anarchic journalism than with heirarchic journalism.

While we seem to have reached the conclusion that our new form of democratic journalism is largely beneficial, we did discuss its possible negative consequences. Gillmor clearly believes that citizen journalism, or "new media," should supplement, not supplant, MSM. And with good reason: there are many benefits of having a MSM, which seems odd to say, because we've only been bashing MSM for the most part of this semester.

Here's one benefit of MSM and a possible downside to new media (can I call it NM?) that I don't think has been mentioned yet. If we are holding up the Tocquevellian model of the media as the ideal standard of how the media should function, then I think NM in its current state presents a problem. The problem, in my opinion, is that there are now so many blogs, podcasts, and independent journalists on the web that it can be overwhelming; furthermore, I think this multiplicity of blogs contradicts Tocqueville's model of media in that NM is not readily available at our doorstep every day. We have to actively go out and seek NM; we have to find out which blog is the flavor of the month, determine which blogs aren't real journalism and are mere punditry; we have to go out of our routine and disrupt life in actively seeking out NM.

The benefit of MSM is that it CAN still fulfill the Tocquevillian model: television news and daily newspapers don't disrupt your rhythm, and if MSM weren't run in the profit-seeker model and just sought to inform us about what we need to know to function as effective citizens, we'd have an ideal media. I'm not sure NM can fulfill the Tocquevillian model as well as MSM could if it didn't care about profit-making.

Is International News too Foreign for America?

2006-11-27T14:25:00.000-05:00

For our (since collapsed) possible Final project, one of the ideas brought up was to attempt to get Al Jazeera's English news channel on American cable and satellite providers. While there are many reasons that such a project might not appeal to us, this doesn't mean that we should abandon the idea of trying to broaden our exposure to international news coverage.

While I was home for Thanksgiving, one of my friends brought up a good point: there are times when he's so fed up with the same CNN, MSNBC and Fox coverage that he'd just like to listen to the BBC like he did in Israel. So my question is, why can't we? Cable and Satellite providers these days carry hundreds of channels, and are constantly adding more and more niche-type networks(I discovered two new "sports" channels this weekend: Fuel, which I assume covers motor sports, and Versus, which I think covers rodeo...because America has been clamoring for 24/7 rodeo coverage for too long!), so what would be the big deal about adding the BBC, international CNN, or even (gasp!) foreign news channels with English sub-titles? Wouldn't it be fascinating to watch how a French, Japanese, or Australian news broadcast covers certain types of stories? (And no, whatever TV station Borat works for in Kazakhstan would not count for foreign news coverage...though I'm sure it'd be funnier. Maybe it'll be the flagship show of Comedy Central International.)

America may or may not be ready for Al Jazeera, but I think we could at least handle the BBC (though it may take some time learning to decipher some of the heavier English accents). I say bring it on. If we can get History Channel International (which I do), wouldn't it be logical to also be able to watch international current events? So before they consider The Volleyball Channel (and God knows they will) or Nickelodeon 3, how about the BBC?

Lapdogs: Can the Media Stop a War?

2006-11-21T20:07:00.000-05:00

Eric Boehlert claims in his book Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush that the Washington press corps has been less hostile to President George W. Bush than they were to President Clinton in that the press did not fulfill its duty of questioning the Bush administration Iraqi WMD intelligence, whereas the press went out of their way to criticize Clinton on dubious scandals like Whitewater. Boehlert calls out the media for “abdicating its reason for existing in the first place, which is to accurately inform citizens, particularly during times of great national interest.”

Boehlert goes so far as to say that “Bush never could have ordered the invasion of Iraq- never could have sold the idea at home- if it weren’t for the help he received from the MSM (mainstream media).” Maybe Bush could have never sold the idea of a preemptive war if the MSM had been peppering him with questions about it, but did they really have the power to stop the President from going to war? Does the MSM media really have that much power?

Perhaps if we assume that the MSM has the power to mold opinion- and indeed, we’ve seen that they do- then if the MSM could have convinced enough of the American people that war was a bad idea so that instead of two thirds being for the war, two thirds of the population would be against the war, maybe Bush would have relented. Maybe. This doesn’t seem like a President too concerned with public opinion, for better or for worse: two thirds of the country don’t support the war now, yet the closest Bush has come to ending the war so far has been dismissing Rumsfeld.

The other element to consider is that having a rational civic debate about the merits and demerits about whether to go to war before actually going to war sounds nice, and it is an ideal we should aspire to as a polity. However, historically, we have never had such debates in a run-up to war (which is called a run-up for a reason, because once an administration expresses desire to go to war, it is nearly impossible to stop it, so they’re merely “running up” to war). And before the Mexican War of 1846, which was an exception- there was some legitimate national debate- the Polk administration was too committed to war to hear any legitimate arguments against war. Otherwise, it takes a war becoming unsuccessful (and therefore unpopular), like the Vietnam War, for its rationale to be seriously questioned. Based on American history, Americans don’t dislike unnecessary wars (it was gung-ho for the Spanish American War and World War I), they only dislike unsuccessful wars. It’s hard to argue that the Korean War or the Spanish-American War were more legitimate than Vietnam. But since Vietnam turned out worse, it’s remembered, probably inaccurately, as our most unnecessary war.

In this vein, I believe that Dan Rather reflected the view of 99.9% of Americans when he said “Look, I’m an American. And when my country is at war, I want my country to win, whatever the definition of ‘win’ may be. Now, I can’t and don’t argue that that is coverage without a prejudice. About that I am prejudiced.” Of course we should want America to win its wars and for our soldiers to be successful. To root against our country in a war would be unpatriotic to an extreme degree, just as rooting against your favorite team would be disloyal and make you not a true fan (except when your team is out of playoff contention and you’re rooting for them to tank their last few games so they get a better draft pick…I’m not sure what the political equivalent would be).

But as William Fulbright said, it is not unpatriotic to be critical of your country if your aim is to argue that the country’s policies are leading it down a bad course. So to be a “lapdog” and blindly believe what the government tells you, as the MSM evidently did, is not patriotic; to be a patriot is to attempt to find out everything you can about a potential developing situation and use that information to make logical decisions about what the best option for your country would be. As Fulbright brilliantly articulated, it can be a greater act of patriotism to criticize your country than to reflexively obey it and keep quiet. The MSM clearly failed in this regard during the run-up to the Iraq War.

Free Speech During War Time: an oxymoron?

2006-11-20T15:41:00.000-05:00

As a history major, and particularly as someone who has taken mostly American history courses for the history major, the issue of free speech during war time immediately registers as an oxymoron in my mind. I’m not sure there has every truly been “free speech” during war time in American history- at least not until the Vietnam War.

If we’re looking at free speech as the ability to express any and all forms of political viewpoints without fear of recrimination or without having those viewpoints suppressed, then the history of free speech in war time during American wars is a bleak one. During the Revolutionary War, the loyalists who did not manage to flee to loyalist or British enclaves (such as New York City) lived in fear of expressing their sympathies; the vandalism of loyalist homes and property during the Revolution is well-documented.

During the Civil War, Lincoln famously suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and Confederate sympathizers in Maryland were seized and jailed. In World War I, anti-German propaganda stirred up hatred against German-Americans, many of whom were attacked in public when mobs assumed they were pro-German by virtue of their ancestral heritage. In World War II, patriotic fervor and general attitudes of moral superiority were so high that who would dare convey dissent?

The most infamous case of the suppression of free speech during war time did not even occur during a real war; of course, I am referring to McCarthyism, the nearly absolute suppression of any scintilla of Communist sympathies during the early part of the Cold War. Although Senator Joseph McCarthy was censured and eventually discredited, McCarthyism effectively ended any genuine debate and discussion about communism and even socialism in American politics and culture.

As I mentioned, it was not until the Vietnam War when real dissent was freely expressed during an American war. My father became a conscientious objector during the war and protested by, among other things, joining with hundreds of fellow college students and blocking the runways at a Massachusetts Air force base. Thousands of college students engaged in similar acts of civil disobedience and general public protests.

In our current war in Iraq, free speech in war time appears to be real, and dissent seemingly has been tolerated, something which we can thank the baby-boomers for. Even before the war began, when support for the coming war was strong, over 400,000 people turned out at an anti-war rally on a cold March 2003 day in New York City. Many who were against the war then were criticized- just as those who continue to support the war today are criticized- but at least debate is tolerated and able to flow from every perspective.

The larger question, though, is whether we have been correct in suppressing free speech during most American wars, whether we are being correct today in allowing free speech in our latest war, and whether we should allow free speech in our next war (because we will have another war- or at least send troops abroad- sometime in the next decade, no matter how badly the Iraq war turns out, because this is America, the home of the free and the land of the military-industrial complex).
The simple answer, I believe, is that if is determined that we are fighting a just and moral war (such as World War II, or perhaps the Civil War from the perspective of the North), then speech that negatively affects the morale of the public should be suppressed; would it have been a good idea to foment a peace movement to reach a settlement with Germany and Japan and leave half the world under murderous totalitarian regimes?

And even during our “wars of choice,” such as World War I, Korea, and Vietnam, anti-war and/or anti-military speech should be tolerated, but care must be taken that it should not reach the soldiers in the field. No matter what we think of a war, we cannot allow the morale of our soldiers to be adversely affected. If our government (well, more accurately, if our President) decides to send our troops abroad, we should vigorously express our dissent if we oppose the decision, but we should not bad-mouth our brave men and women in arms; even though we have a volunteer army, our soldiers don’t volunteer to go to war- our President volunteers them to go to war. It is against our Commander in Chief (and members of congress who relinquish their constitutional authority of declaring war) that we should be protesting, if we choose to do so, but not against our troops. The media also has some responsibility in that they must take care that our protests do not reach our soldiers.

I know this may be a thin line, but I think that if it is kept to by the media (in giving us as much knowledge as possible for us to make an informed decision about whether to support the particular war AND by ensuring that no dissent reaches the soldiers who are already in combat), the government (by not suppressing free speech), and by the public (by utilizing our first amendment rights appropriately), we can be successful as a nation that is able to be at war while also upholding its values, rights, and liberties.

Exploring AlJazeera.net

2006-11-15T10:59:00.000-05:00

Surfing through Al-Jazeera’s website is an interesting exercise for a patriotic American, and it is an especially interesting exercise for a patriotic Jewish pro-Israel American. I like to think of myself as objective and as someone who likes to be exposed to a variety of opinions and viewpoints (I’m a liberal who subscribes to the brazenly conservative Weekly Standard), but it is often too hard to get past your biases, and even when you think you’ve gotten past them, there are unconscious and sub-conscious biases that probably surface when going about such an exercise. Nevertheless, I’ve tried to approach this as open-mindedly as possible.

Al-Jazeera.net looks almost like any other news site, except for some Arabic at the top. Besides for covering the Middle East and the Muslim world, they also cover business, sports, science and technology, and culture. It prides itself on being “free of the shackles of censorship and government control.” They say they report the news with “objectivity, integrity, and balance.”

Some of their polls, despite not being scientific, are perhaps indicative of the people that frequent the site. For example, 56% of the people who responded said Saddam Hussein did not get a fair trial versus only 31% who said he did; and 63% of respondents said the U.S. should “cut and run” from Iraq, as opposed to 31% who said they should not.

While I was on, the site experienced a “server error” due to the server being “too busy.” This happened multiple times. Since I’ve never seen this message in any other site in my life while using the web, I’ll assume that either Al Jazeera.net is so popular that millions of people around the world use it and crash the server, or that they just can’t maintain a website properly. Neither option sounds fair, but I can’t come up with any other reason.

This headline jumped out at me: “Israel ‘apology’ as Palestinians grieve.” Besides for being grammatically incorrect, what’s objective about calling an apology an “apology”? At least Israel apologizes when it mistakenly kills civilians; when have the Palestinians apologized for a suicide bombing? It’s understandable that the best apology would be for Israel to cease military operations against Palestinian militants altogether, but realistically, most people understand that hostilities will continue between the two sides for some time to come, so at this stage an apology is the most either side could do.

Another interesting news story from a propaganda perspective was “West Bank fighter shot dead.” As we’ve discussed, naming and labeling is not an apolitical act; the name you chose to give something is significant. So the decision of whether to call him a terrorist, militant, or fighter is a political decision that says you believe he is not a terrorist. Furthermore, they quoted an Israeli military spokeswoman as saying that “Sixteen Palestinians suspected of ‘terrorist activity’ had been arrested overnight in the West Bank.” Blocking off the words ‘terrorist activity’ in quotation marks is also a political act which says you don’t really believe that these Palestinians engaged in terrorist activity.

In the Opinion section, the highlighted piece was “Israeli Killings Pass Unnoticed.” That editorial decision could be considered propaganda as well. Or it may be a business decision based on how many people they figure will click on the article. If they’re assuming more people will read that piece than opinion pieces about the North Korean nuclear testing or the American mid-term elections and its consequences on U.S. Middle Eastern policy, than that might say something interesting about Al Jazeera’s audience.

Finally, a reliable place to find propaganda is always in the cartoon section (as Muslims now know- I’m guessing they’ll no longer surf the web for Danish cartoons). Cartoons can use imagery that appeal to the imagination and conjure up hatred more readily than words can. In one cartoon, the late Pope John Paul II is shown sending doves into the air in a gesture of peace. In the next frame, the current Pope Benedict takes out a rifle and shoots them down out of the air with a sinister smirk on his face. Muslims were understandably offended by the Pope’s remarks about Islam last month, but it is blatant propaganda to suggest that the Pope some bloodthirsty figure who hates peace.

After perusing through Al Jazeera.net, I have to say that I would not rely on it as a news source. I admit I am not objective when it comes to the Israel-Palestinian conflict- I would venture that most Jews and Muslims are non-objective observers as well- but I am objective enough to be able to read New York Times coverage of the Middle East without crying out ‘they’re anti-Israel!’ just because they did a story about a Palestinian who lost his olive farm when Israel built its security fence/wall/barrier (you choose your own propaganda term). So I know good, objective news coverage when I see it (at least I think I do), and Al Jazeera is not it- but neither is arutz-sheva (israelnationalnews.com).

The Greatest Propagandists of All Time

2006-11-12T12:23:00.000-05:00

The Nazis and Joesph Goebbles were arguably the greatest and most effective propagandists in history. When the Nazis came to power in Germnay in 1933, they began a concerted state-sponsored propaganda compaign to slowly but surely persuade the German people that their concpetion of reality was correct. Through speeches, rallies, posters, films that purported to be real documentaries- basically through using all media available at the time- the Nazis deceived and manipulated Germany.

Germans began to believe that they had not not lost World War I but were in fact 'stabbed in the back' by weak leaders who capitulated to France and England and signed the disastrous treaty at Versailles. They began to view Jews as scapegoats for everything wrong in the world; perhaps most significantly they blamed Jews for the economic collapse and its resulting astronimical inflation and depression.

More generally, the German people were convinced to believe that they were the greatest race on earth- that they descended from more 'pure' ancestors and were destined to be the greatest people in the world. This overall ideology of racial and ethnic superiority was crucial for the Germans to buy into in order to lend support for the war. This notion also led to their willingness to sacrifice themselves for the greater cause of Germany.

At the German propaganda archive, you can find a panoply of propaganda material that was used by the Nazis from even before 1933 up until their defeat in 1945. You can even find propaganda material from the East German era up until 1989, which was probably influenced by both their Nazi German heritage and mostly by the new Soviet-controlled regime.

There's so much in this site to ingest- which the Germans did literally in the '30's-but at the top of the page is my personal "favorite" (because it reminds me RISK): it propagandizes the Versailles treaty. It's meant to show how defenseless Germany was as result of the treaty and persuade people for the need of an agressive rearmament program.

Decision 2006: The Effect of Propaganda

2006-11-07T12:43:00.000-05:00

Today Americans are going to the polls to make rational, informed decisions on which candidates are most qualified to represent us in Washington and in our respective state capitols…right? Hopefully, we’re casting thought-out, reasoned votes after considering the merits and demerits of the candidates, their positions on issues, and their records.

Unfortunately, the prospect of a rational electorate is something that seems to frighten politicians, especially those politicians who deserve to lose based on the facts and evidence of their records. In that event, what can they do? They resort to appealing to voters based on emotions: fear, anger, or even nostalgic yearnings for a mythic time in the past (or a utopian vision for the future). This, according to Nicholas Jackson O’Shaughnessy in Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction, would constitute political propaganda.

Propaganda, he believes, is an attempt to manipulate and persuade voters based on an appeal to visceral emotions; it is by design not an appeal to the voter as a rational decision-maker. Through designed rhetoric, constructed myths, and powerful symbols which function as “cognitive short-cuts,” propaganda seeks to influence us by conjuring up repressed hatred and fear.

A poignant example of the effect of propaganda during this campaign was the infamous anti- Harold Ford ad in Tennessee. The ad, in which a white woman winks and says “Harold- call me,” brings up conscious or sub-conscious racist fears of black men preying on white women, which is still powerful racial propaganda in the South and other parts of the country. (Sexual propaganda is also a genre of propaganda covered by O’Shaughnessy.) Ford, meanwhile, was not innocent of propaganda himself: his ads show him in church, with a cross strategically placed behind him, as if to say ‘vote for me because I’m Christian.’ Ford has also been talking a lot about faith and God in his campaign. (So just like in Virginia, where Jon Stewart joked that the race was between a racist and a misogynist, the Tennessee race is apparently a contest between a racist propagandist and a religious propagandist.)

Other cases of propaganda, in which candidates appeal to emotion over reason, occurred in this election season. The RNC ticking time bomb ad was meant to instill fear within people, basically saying, as LBJ’s ’64 ad, that if you don’t vote for us, you’ll be incinerated in a nuclear holocaust. Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania and Mike DeWine in Ohio, both faced with the prospect of losing, resorted to propaganda in their desperation by creating somewhat similar ads where they played on people’s fears of terrorism as well.

Even in Massachusetts, the home of Harvard and M.I.T., where we like to think of ourselves as intelligent and educated, Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey had an ad suffused with propaganda that included possible subliminal racist overtones, an attempt to appeal to people’s fear of dangerous criminals, and an attempt to play to people’s disgust of trial lawyers.

Another element of propaganda chronicled by O’Shaughnessy that has been evident in this election has been candidates, and especially party leaders, who’ve tried to create their own reality by merely repeating their assertions enough in the hopes that people will eventually believe them. Since perception can be stronger than reality, Republicans in the past two days have been hyping Saddam Hussein’s death sentence, a mere symbolic (and inevitable) event, as evidence that progress in Iraq has occurred. But symbolism is part of O’Shaughnessy’s holy trinity of propaganda; symbolism can be powerful enough to create consequential misperceptions, as it was during the 1968 Tet Offensive that created the perception that America was losing in Vietnam.

Perhaps the most effective form of political propaganda is labeling. O’Shaughnessy writes that “judicious choice of label is the most important rhetorical choice of all….the label adheres and over time it is naturalized so that people do not perceive it as a label at all (pg. 72).” John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004 was doomed by the label of ‘flip-flopper’ that stuck to him like glue. Many other candidates have lost elections due to their opponents’ “judicious choice of label”: Al Gore in 2000- robotic/boring (though if he got 600 more votes in Florida we would’ve remembered George W. Bush losing for being labeled as dumb and dim-witted); Bob Dole in 1996- old/dumb/non-presidential; Dukakis in 1988- lets black men out of prison to rape white women; etc. Much political advertising is propaganda by way of attempting to label candidates and link them in voters’ minds to negative images and concepts.

Do we really have a healthy, flourishing democracy when so much of political campaigns depend on whose propaganda is more effective?

Is Bush a Threat to World Peace?

2006-11-03T11:42:00.000-05:00

According to a Toronto Star Poll, Canadians believe that George W. Bush is a greater threat to world peace than every other leader except Osama bin Laden and Kim Jong-il. That means Canadians think Bush is even more dangerous than Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and belligerent Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. Meanwhile, the Star showed that Mexicans view Bush as more dangerous than even Kim Jong-il.

I don’t believe that this poll and its publication in the Star is propaganda. It is not, in my opinion, designed to manipulate and irrationally persuade Canadians to view America as dangerous. It is merely reporting that many Canadians already view American as dangerous because of our invasion of Iraq and our consideration of possibly using military force against Iran and North Korea if those countries do not halt their drive for nuclear weapons.

It does, however, showcase an extreme difference in perspective and opinion. As Americans, we don’t view ourselves as dangerous. It is the danger of Iran and North Korea, we say, that would create potential conflict. But from the viewpoint of our neighbors to the North and South, it is possible that they view the U.S. as more dangerous because they believe it is we who have provoked Iran and North Korea to wish to possess nuclear weapons in order to have a deterrent against American military action.

We don’t like to think of ourselves as threats to world peace, we’d rather think of ourselves as global peacekeepers and fighters of terrorism. But it is interesting to see what the rest of the world thinks about us- especially our closest neighbors. As a patriot, I believe Canada and Mexico could not be more wrong, and there is ample evidence for why: this past summer, Nasrallah provoked a war with Israel by kidnapping Israeli soldiers in non-disputed territory, and in the ensuing weeks Iran supplied Hezbollah with weapons that, if they had struck Tel Aviv, could have created a regional conflagration. In North Korea, Kim Jong-il’s nuclear testing has Japan deeply concerned and may lead to Japan beginning a program of military build-up with offensive capabilities.

Another country people should start to consider as a threat to world peace is China. Because of China’s growing demand for resources, they have pursued oil from Sudan, which has resulted in China’s unwillingness to pass tough resolutions against Sudan in the U.N. An October 2, 2006 article in The New Republic by Joshua Kurlantzick entitled Crude Awakening: The Coming Resource War, postulates that China’s autocratic government, disregard for human rights, and need for resources could combine to create Chinese regional aggression in a drive to secure those resources, similar to how Japan’s fascist government and need for resources led to their aggression in World War II. The article described an alarming incident that could have grave consequences down the road:

“In April, two leading Chinese academics suggested, in a much-noted article,
that Beijing now might fight a war to secure its energy…Beijing and Tokyo both
want to exploit the oil and gas resources in the East China Sea, which has
already led to near-clashes. After Japan began drilling in disputed waters last
year, Chinese state media warned that conflict was ‘inevitable.’ Five Chinese
warships, some armed with missiles, then appeared at a Chinese drilling platform
in the sea near where Japan had staked its claim. According to Japan, the
Chinese ships targeted a Japanese reconnaissance aircraft hovering overhead
before choosing not to shoot it down. Tokyo did not back off; it fortified its
claim in the sea and threatened military force against future Chinese actions.
This ‘could lead to the kind of vicious cycle that descends into military
conflict,’ leading Japanese politician Keizo Takemi warned in The
Economist.”

It seems China, along with Iran and North Korea, could be more of a threat to world peace than we think. Nevertheless, it is important to know what the world thinks of us and how we can improve our reputation around the globe. The Toronto Star poll is not propaganda, it is merely publicizing different perspectives that should cause us to reflect on how our actions are viewed and how we can improve our standing in the international community.

President' Bush's Latest Approval Ratings- what do they mean?

2006-11-01T14:01:00.000-05:00

Here's a link to President Bush's latest job approval ratings according to the data of nearly all the major news and polling organizations. The most recent poll in this list is an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that says 39% approve of the job President George W. Bush is doing, 57% disaprove, and 4% are unsure. (Unsure if Bush is doing a good or bad job, or unsure that Bush is doing a job? The answer is obvious- if it's the latter, then that number would be a lot higher than 4%).

After perusing through the numbers, what struck me first were the differences between the numbers. Looking at Bush's job approval rating from October on (which begins at the AP-Ipsos poll), Bush's numbers hover in the mid-to-upper 30's for the most part, occasionally cracking the 40's. The low was 33, according to a Newsweek poll, and the high was 41, according to two different Cook/RT Strategies polls.

Analysts may say that Bush's approval ratings are down from September, when they were in the low 40's and high 30's, but you could also say they're up from where they were in April and May when they were in the low 30's. Analysts and talking heads come on the news and discuss the latest numbers ("Brian, check out these numbers", as Tim Russert likes to say), but what do they really mean?

According to Mainstream media (MSM), it seems that the reason for Bush's generally low ratings stems from Iraq and the disaster it has become. Other MSM coverage has viewed Bush's recent approval ratings as reflecting on the overall negative view of the Republican party in light of the Foley scandal and its subsequent cover-up. In the blogosphere, interpretations of Bush's approval ratings range from his ratings being tied to terrorism alerts to being connected to the price of gas.

Dispensing for now with the larger question of whether polls are significant at all, as I blogged about last time, what's the point of conducting presidential approval ratings? In the best case scenario, presidential job approval ratings polls attempt to establish a connection between the executive branch of the government and the public. President Clinton was criticized for governing based on polls, but maybe that's what Presidents should do- they should be responsive to the American people. If the public does not approve of the job the President is doing, shouldn't he change course?

You might call this pandering, but Jacobs and Shapiro in their book Politicians Don't Pander would say, well, politicians don't pander. Instead, what they do through polling and focus groups is, if not to create policies based on them, at least phrase their policy goals in language that will sound favorable based on what the people want. They try to persuade the public that "their own policy proposal is what citizens really want," as Hochschild explained. They don't "pander," she says, they "craft."

If this is true, then we are far from the idealized version of what the politicians-media-public relationship should be. Perhaps the media should come up with a better system of communicating the public's will to the government so that the politicians can't just deceive us with carefully worded language and framing of policies. It's too bad that when Tim Russert says to Brian Williams "check out these numbers," that's all we're doing: checking out the numbers and muttering 'wow, Bush's approval rating is pretty low.' And that's the end of the conversation- both for the public and for politicians.

The Latest Poll on the Mid-Term Elections: What Does it Say, and How Important is it?

2006-10-29T18:08:00.000-05:00

According to James Fishkin, public opinion polling is “one of the main ways that we have to make the public’s unfiltered views consequential in contemporary American democracy.” It’s a way to make our views heard to our representatives in government. Unfortunately, there are many problems in polls. Many are superficial and don’t really measure public opinion but rather look at spontaneous responses to questions. Furthermore, many of the people asked, as Fishkin discussed, are apathetic about politics and don’t care enough to learn about the issues.

Political coverage often amounts to no more than “who’s ahead and who’s behind,” i.e., covering politics like a horse race without enough informed discussion of policy. To promulgate this kind of coverage, polls are conducted and made into top-stories. This has lead to Michael Schwartz to call us “poll addicts.” Schwartz points out that some polls can be as much as 15% off! Furthermore, Schwartz says polls are more useful for measuring huge changes over time as opposed to slight changes every couple of days. Also, it’s hard to even figure out who “likely voters” will be, since even they may decide not to vote (the weather may be bad, they could forget, stop caring, or just “not feel like it).

With this in mind let’s examine a poll. The latest Pew Research Center poll showed that, if the results of the poll are accurate, the Democrats have a major advantage in next week’s mid-term congressional elections. The questions of the poll are often critical in determining the poll’s results. In this case, the question was: “If the 2006 elections for U.S. Congress were being held TODAY, would you vote for the Republican Party’s candidate or the Democratic Party’s candidate for Congress in your district?”
The poll looked at three categories: competitive races, races in safe Republican districts, and races in safe Democratic districts. Democrats have a 50-39 advantage in competitive races, a whopping 58-31 lead in safe Democratic districts, and even in “safe” Republican districts, there’s a virtual tie (if you factor in the usual 3% sampling margin of error)- a 44-42 lead for Republicans, which forces you to ask how these districts can be “safe” for the Republicans if they’re in a dead-heat?

The poll was conducted two weeks ago with the Brookings Institute and the Cato Institute.1,552 registered voters were asked, and of those, 528 lived in 40 competitive districts. Nearly 200 more females than males were interviewed, and the 30-49 age group was the most interviewed age group. More suburban voters were interviewed than rural or urban voters, and more residents of the South were polled than any other region. The telephone interview questions were asked under the direction of Princeton Research Associates International, and the survey had a 2.5% margin of error. “Competitive districts” were based on indications from various publications, such as Congressional Quarterly and the New York Times.

What we’re led to believe from this poll is that the Democrats have a formidable lead in the mid-term elections and will win going away. However, things can change, and polls can be inaccurate, though this one was done very carefully. Polls that are done well are valuable and should be looked at, but we shouldn’t rely on them and look at them as scientific truth. We should, as Michael Schwartz would say, kick our “poll addiction.”

How Political Language Distorts Reality

2006-10-25T15:41:00.000-04:00

Political “orthodoxy…seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.” So wrote George Orwell in his essay Politics and the English Language, among other insightful remarks he made about political language. The first problem with political language, Orwell says, is that it’s bland and repetitive. If you want to be in politics, you have to master the art of speaking in a “lifeless” style where you have to be excruciatingly careful with everything you say lest you say something ‘politically incorrect’ or anything that could potentially be politically harmful.

Most political speeches and writing have becoming something like “coach-speak,” a term used by people to describe a sports language used by coaches (and players now, too) with clichés like “we take it one game at a time” and “it was a total team effort…you win as a team and you lose as a team.” Unfortunately, political language is becoming just as dull.

“The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved…if the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church.” Indeed, sometimes politicians repeat the same things over and over again until they’re saying them by rote. For President Bush, saying that we can’t “cut and run” from Iraq and that we have to “stay the course” (until he recently decided to stop saying it) was akin to responded “Amen” in a prayer service. Those responses are reflexes, not real thought-out statements.

But the advantage of repeating these boring, repetitive statements is that politicians dumb- down the electorate by not giving them real information. “And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity,” said Orwell; politicians want people to ‘start feeling and stop thinking,’ as we’ve said, not only through political ads but through virtually all of their public statements.

This leads to the greater problem of political language- creating political conformity by reducing public knowledge, which is done through inventing euphemisms and a new Orwellian vocabulary to ‘defend the indefensible,’ as Orwell would have it. For example, keeping American troops in Iraq, something clearly indefensible being that during the American occupation terrorism has actually increased and Iraq has plunged further into chaos, has been defended (up until this week) by saying that leaving would be “cutting and running.” The implication clearly is that only cowards “cut and run,” and who wants to be a coward? The Democrats have also come up with an Orwellian term of their own: “redeployment”, because “retreat/withdrawal” sounds wimpy, even if it may be logically better than staying in Iraq.

Orwell could have been writing today when he said that “politics is itself a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.” We only have to look at the lying and evasions of the truth from politicians during the Foley scandal to understand this.

Orwell also could have been describing what we call our current enemy when he said “since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism?” Today we’re fighting ‘Islamo-Fascism,’ according to Bush and others. But do we really know what ‘Islamo-Fascism’ is? Is it even a real term, or a neologism invented to give our enemies a name (and perhaps an attempt to link them with the Fascists of WWII, essentially saying Al-Qaeda are Nazis)?

“Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,” wrote Orwell. Even ‘ethnic cleansing’, a term used by the media, makes genocide sound better. The media constantly plays this word-game, changing our perception of ideas through the words they use to describe them. For instance, are suicide bombers “terrorists” or “militants”? Is it “market deregulation” or “monopolization”? Just as calling suicide bombers who target innocent civilians “militants” or “freedom-fighters” makes murder sound respectable by implying that they’re fighting for a noble cause, “deregulation” makes a lie sound truthful by implying that media consolidation is a “reform” (another term often used in Orwellian-esque fashion) movement that will make the media better.

Edward Herman discussed more cases of Orwellian political language, such as the classic example of the U.S. Dept. of War renaming itself the Dept. of Defense (‘War is Peace’ in modern-day parlance), implying that any military venture they undertake will be legitimate because it will be for defensive purposes. “Collateral damage” is another classic military euphemism to cover up civilian deaths and make them somehow sound like a technicality. You get the sense that accidentally breaking a window while playing baseball in your backyard is morally equivalent to accidentally dropping a bomb on an apartment.

And of course, as Herman mentioned, there’s the Patriot Act, the most brazenly Orwellian legislation of our time. It even makes The Ministry of Truth sound benign. The original Patriots revolted because their liberties were infringed upon by the British; now we’re called anti-Patriotic if we oppose an act that infringes on our liberties. Yes, Orwell would be rolling over in his grave.

Mainstream Media and New Media: what are they, and how are they different?

2006-10-20T14:18:00.000-04:00

We've been talking about mainstream media (MSM) for a while in this course, and a subject we've just started to think about is New Media, an ambiguous term. What is MSM, and what is New Media?

I think some things are clear: we can call the big 3 networks- ABC, NBC, and CBS- MSM in TV. We can call the most prominent, respected newspapers- NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and perhaps most other major papers like the LA Times, Boston Globe, and Chicago Sun-Times- MSM in terms of newspapers. I'm not sure if there is such a thing as MSM in radio news coverage because so much radio coverage is local (although that trend has been changing, as McChesney wrote, with Clear Channel and Viacom now owning most radio stations). And in magazines, maybe Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report can be called MSM.

Cable TV news channels, like CNN, MSNBC, and FoxNews, are not as mainstream as the other traditional media, but as more and more American households have cable, they are becoming more mainstream. At one point, people thought these channels were New Media that would challenge traditional MSM. But as McChesney pointed out, even though the big 3 networks' ratings have declined, those 3 cable news channels are owned by 3 of the 6 conglomerates that own nearly all the media in this country: MSNBC is obviously a branch of NBC and owned by GE, FoxNews likewise is clearly a branch of the Fox network and Rupert Murdoch's media empire, and CNN I believe is part of the AOL-Time Warner conglomerate.

The internet would be an obvious candidate that could be called New Media. The problem, as McChesney again pointed out, is that it takes money and resources that only the large corporations have to produce good quality news and journalism, so most of the successful news sources on the web have merely been sites that are part of MSM.

In terms of differentiating between MSM and New Media (NM), I'd say NM does not fit into MSM in either one of these two ways: it does not follow the profit-seeking model, and/or it does not follow the objective reporters of fact model (i.e., it is blatantly partisan). So I'd say talk radio is not MSM bec' it is outrageously partisan, for the most part. News magazines like Nation, National Review, Weekly Standard, and to a lesser extent maybe The New Republic, are also partisan for the most part. Free-lance reporting may not be MSM bec' it doesn't follow the profit-seeker model (i.e., free-lance reporters obviously have to make a living, but aren't part of the "hyper-commercial"ized corporations where maximum profit is the goal). Also, the blogosphere would almost certainly be considered NM bec'they are either extremely partisan, non-profit-seeking, or both.

One more interesting thing to consider, I think, is YouTube and other non-MSM entities on the web. The consequences of YouTube's purchase by Google are interesting: if more and more of these independent ventures are bought up by big corporations, are they no longer MSM? Will Google owning it have an effect on YouTube's content? I think this deserves a blog in itself, if I have time for it this semester.

New England Hypocrits

2006-10-11T14:49:00.000-04:00

Being home in Massachusetts for the break, I've been fortunate (or unfortunate) to have been able to catch up on the political coverage of the gubernatorial race here between Lt. Governor Kerry Healey, the Republican candidate, the Democrat Deval Patrick, and the independent Christy Mihos. More specifically, I've been able to watch the local ads. Such as this one:

And this one:

The Mihos ad has been called everything from "original and funny" to "controversial and distasteful." But compared to the anti-Patrick ad, the Mihos ad IS original; the other ad is a typical political ad (as we discussed in class): scary music accompanying hazy picture of the candidate that attempts to get us Bay State residents to link Patrick in our minds to the image of a "liberal" lawyer (yes, even in Massachusetts, liberal is a dirty word) who defends criminals. Apparently, people here, no matter how loudly they screamed against the unfair ads against our beloved Dukakis, learned the lessons of the '88 Presidential campaign well: attacking candidates for being soft on crime is a winning political formula. And more recently, despite how much we complained that it was unfair to cast Kerry as a flip-flopper in '04, we learned that it works, so the Healey people are trying to cast Patrick as a 'cop-killer defender.'

Is this hypocrisy? It's a fair question. But one thing's for sure: it's politics. Just like in sports, if you get beaten by a good team, you not only ask why, but you figure out what their strategies were and even try to implement them yourself. It's no different in politics, too. In the NFL, the New England Patriots have been lauded for their success and teams have tried to emulate and copy them (just look at all the teams with 3-4 defenses and Belichik-disciple coaches). But in politics, we in New England have been relegated to copying others. The irony of this situation is unbelievable: the Patriots used to be the laughing-stock of the NFL, while Massachusetts was the state that prided itself on politics (our state being the fomenters of the Revolution, Abolitionism, and dynasties like the Adamses and Kennedys). Oh how the tables have turned.

A-Rod...Slap-Rod...Choke-Rod....0-4 with 3 K's-Rod

2006-10-06T10:20:00.000-04:00

Let's relive one of A-Rod's greatest moments now that he's choking. Again. This is my first trial video post, so what better way to start? And after getting too annoyed with the media coverage of these elections, I thought I might as well have some fun and get back to politics later.

Scandalous Sex Coverage

2006-10-05T20:53:00.000-04:00

Now that I've gotten you to read this by putting the word 'Sex' in the title, I can tell you about the problems of this absurd media coverage on the Foley sex scandal. The reason I'm cranky (we can be cranky too, right?) is because here we are, less than a month until the mid-term elections, and all the coverage there is on the elections is about the Foley scandal. Before this, the coverage the past few weeks was mostly on the Allen- racism/macaca-just-found-out-he's-Jewish scandal.

Why is this bad? Because there are real policy reasons on which the media should be focusing on. Yes, the Republicans deserve to lose, as Tom Friedman discussed in Wednesday's column, but they deserve to lose because of substantive, important policy issues they've botched since they've been in control: the Iraq war, the continued deficit spurred by tax cuts, energy and backwards environmental policy, etc. The Foley and Allen scandals are embarrassing, but those isolated incidents aren't the reason Republicans should be voted out of power. As Friedman said (and which I pointed out in my last blog in regards to media coverage): "Unless you are caught sending e-mail to a Congressional page soliciting sex, your seat is safe." This is a shame.

Stephen Colbert also inadvertently made the same point when he interviewed a congressman in the great 'better know a district' 435-part series and asked him 'let's say something that would cost you the election if you were opposed: I like cocaine because...' Unfortunately, because of advantages to incumbents, the only way they lose is by saying things like "I like cocaine because...", or by IMing teenagers asking them if they're horny. Either way. But the point is the same. The Republicans should lose not because voters think they're all pedophiles, but because they mismanaged the country while they've been in charge. The way the media's covered these elections, though, could give voters the impression that it's an election about an IM-sex scandal, the word macaca, and not much else. That's why I'm cranky, too.

Scandalous Coverage

2006-10-03T10:57:00.000-04:00

In my last post I blogged about how the Allen-Webb Senate race in Virginia is the most heavily covered because it is the most controversial, not necessarily the most substantive, and that if voters get most of their information from mainstream media, they won't really know about the policy issues that are being contested in the race.

It seems this trend is only getting worse as we hit the home-stretch (since the media covers elections in terms of a horse-race) in the mid-term elections. Sunday's New York Times highlighted several key races (check out the "Pols in Trouble" graphic). What was the common demoninator in them? Scandal, of course, because, as I showed in last week's blog, that's what it takes for the media to pay attention to a race.

Even worse is the coverage of the Mark Foley sex scandal, which was all the rage on last-night's cable news shows and the Sunday NY Times, too. The lesson? If you want your race to be covered, concoct a scandal. If you really want your race to be covered, concoct a sex scandal. As the Week in Review article shows, that strategy never fails.

The Virginia Senate Race: Macaca vs. Other

2006-09-27T10:44:00.000-04:00

The U.S. Senate Race in Virginia between the Republican incumbent George Allen and the Democratic challenger James Webb has been one of the most interesting Congressional races that has been covered nationally. The race features a Republican, Allen, who is the son of a football coaching legend and is (or was) viewed as a strong potential conservative candidate in the 2008 Republican Presidential primaries. It also features a Democrat, Webb, who is a former Secretary of the Navy who even admitted to voting for Allen originally but is now running against him.

As a New Englander and thus an outsider, I chose to focus on the race from a national perspective and to look at how it has been covered in national mainstream media. What I found is that if this was the one race you knew about outside of your own state, you would assume that for a Congressional race to be covered nationally, it would have to have produced some bit of controversy and conflict. I also found that if all you knew about this race was information obtained from national mainstream media, you would know little of substance about the issues involved in the race unless you read newspapers or watched news-talk TV programs.

The New York Times and Meet the Press did mention some substantive issues. Two weeks ago on Meet the Press, Allen and Webb debated eachother, with the issue of the war in Iraq being the foremost focus. The Times in some articles has mentioned some of the issues involved in the race as well. But even the Times's coverage, like other MSM coverage, have covered this race as the macaca race.

Ever since Allen called a camera-man a "macaca" (some kind of racial slur) during a campaign rally, this Senate race gained prominence in national media because of this element of controversy. (The footage of that slip-up was posted on You-tube and prompted stories in MSM about the effect of You-tube on politics.) A Times article from September 18 talked about how Webb's candidacy grew not only because he challenged Allen on the war but also because of Allen's macaca comment. On NBC Nightly News two nights later, the race was covered in the macaca frame as well: Allen went from being a "shoe-in" to being in a dog-fight, according the NBC, because of his macaca blunder. The broadcast covered their disagreement over Iraq, but mainly covered the race as the macaca race.

Lately, another non-substantive issue has risen to prominence in the campaign. The New York Times reported on Friday, September 22, that Allen was in fact Jewish; his mother had informed him of his Jewish roots a month earlier. I'm not sure what the significance of a person's ethnic roots are in terms of a campaign issue and whether it's even controversial or scandalous like saying "macaca", but it just highlights the fact that MSM chooses to focus on non-substantive issues over substantive issues.

All of this is consistent with Thomas Patterson's study of media coverage as reported by Leighley. According to Patterson, the media focuses on "miscues and blunders" as well as personality problems of the candidates. Macaca is a miscue that has no "public policy importance", and Allen's Jewish roots may be picked up on as a potential personality problem for a candidate who has prided himself as being a conservative Christian southerner.

By contrast, there has been little coverage of Allen's challenger, Webb, probably because there is nothing controversial, scandalous, or negative about Webb. Thus, as an outsider, what you'd mostly know about the Virginia Senate race would be that it's between a guy who said "macaca" and just found out he's Jewish and a guy who...umm...is running against him.

Government Secrecy: How much is there, and what can we do about it?

2006-09-19T17:33:00.000-04:00

On Monday night, September 18, we were privileged to hear Steven Aftergood speak to us about the problems of government secrecy. Mr. Aftergood is the Director of the Government Secrecy Project of the Federation of American Scientists, and runs the very interesting website Secrecy News (at ww.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy), which seeks to combat and expose excessive government secrecy. The goal of his program, the FAS Project on Government Secrecy, is to reduce official secrecy and promote greater openness.

The purpose of the lecture was to show how government secrecy, when not properly employed, is a blemish on the Constitution and can even endanger the American public. The first example he gave was the President’s Daily Brief from August 6, 2001, which was entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.” Aftergood stated that if this information had been made public, perhaps the chances of Bin Laden actually striking the U.S. on September 11 would have been reduced due to increased public vigilance.

Aftergood then talked about the enormous bureaucracy that has been created by government secrecy. Last year, there were 14.2 million classification decisions; there are 4,000 executive branch officials who are authorized to create secrecy; and maintaining the government’s elaborate secrecy system costs $4 billion a year.

He also highlighted the absurdities of government secrecy. For example, the oldest classified documents go back as far as World War I. One World War I document that was just declassified was about the military preparations necessary for the U.S. if they were to enter the war in 1917, an obviously obsolete bit of information. Another recently declassified document was about information on operating naval laundry machines (were they nuclear laundry machines?!).

On the other hand, despite the severe over-classification of documents, some documents that should be classified are not. Aftergood mentioned that a nuclear blueprint is currently not classified. Even though that may be due to its being slightly illegible, you’d think that a nuclear blueprint should be classified no matter how legible or illegible it is.

So how far does government secrecy go? Aftergood said that there are restrictions on even un-classified information, such as labeling documents “sensitive but unclassified” or “for official use only.” The reasons for such excessive secrecy, according to Aftergood, are that those in power classify documents in order to gain political advantage (so that politicians can protect themselves from potentially controversial information), and that there is a ‘bureaucratic reflex’ to hoard information (such as the Pentagon not publishing its phone number).

Aftergood also touched on recent government secrecy issues such as the Abu Ghraib incident, the battle between the press and the government on publishing photos of military coffins (I tried to upload this pictures for this post, but it wouldn't load- is the government tapping my computer??), the New York Times reporting on the government’s activities of tracking funds and communications, and the AIPAC case.

The lecture ended on a hopeful note, with Aftergood saying that successful lawsuits filed against the government under the Freedom of Information Act show that we the people can actually stand up to the government and try to make them more transparent. It is imperative, Aftergood emphasized, that the press continue to challenge government secrecy, like it did in the case of military coffin photos, because excessive government secrecy can lead to citizens receiving false information and propaganda (and maybe not being able to combat it).

It is always a tricky balance, especially during a time of war, between a government trying to maintain openness with the people while simultaneously protecting them from harm and making sure that sensitive information does not fall into the wrong hands. Hopefully, Steven Aftergood’s news service on government secrecy and other public-advocacy journalists will help restore this correct balance and make our government more open and accountable.

Commenting on Comments

2006-09-12T23:42:00.000-04:00

The Daily Kos blog posted a link today to an article quoting what influential political commentators and prominent politicians thought about the speech delivered by President Bush yesterday on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. In the actual blog post, they quoted the Boston Globe’s D.C. bureau chief as saying that the speech was “political” because “there was a dwelling on Iraq.” Essentially, the point seems to be that Bush was once again framing the Iraq War as part of the War on Terror by connecting it to the September 11 attacks by virtue of simply speaking about the Iraq War on 9/11.

107 comments (actually, the 108th was just posted as I type) were published on the blog in response to this post, and the overwhelming majority of the comments are clearly representative of a left-leaning group of people united by their vehement hatred of George W. Bush. For example:

-“That’s a simple and very powerful way to discredit anything Bush says as spin.” Really? Just because Bush gave a political speech on 9/11, can we really extrapolate from that that all he says is spin? And don’t most politicians have political motives in their public remarks?
- “F- You, George W. Bush.” Now that’s simple and powerful!
- “That speech might have been the worst speech ever given by a world ‘leader.’” This person obviously has no knowledge of history- even recent history- whatsoever. Umm, how about Hoover’s speeches assuring the American people everything was fine in the midst of the Great Depression? Or Mahmoud Amedinejad’s speech calling for Israel to be wiped off the map? I could go on, but I’ll wait for William Safire’s next book, The Worst Speeches Ever.
- “This man knows how to campaign. Sadly, he has no clue how to govern. Or how to act like a respectable adult.” Legitimate criticism of Bush’s governing style is definitely warranted, but stooping to the level of calling him childish won’t really help further constructive debate.
- “He politicized 9/11. Who cares? He didn’t f-ing prevent 9/11! He could have prevented 9/11. He didn’t. That’s his f-ing problem.” So our President knew about 9/11 and let it happen? I’ll get back to responding to that right after I watch this documentary about the filming of Neil Armstrong’s moon-landing taking place on a movie-set…And is his point stronger because Bush didn’t “f-ing” prevent 9/11?

Some comments, though, did raise serious issues about government spin, propaganda, and the politicization of 9/11 without resorting to inane comments, vulgarity, or ludicrous hyperbole. For example:
-“I would really enjoy a moment of propaganda silence from this administration.” The Bush administration has been extremely effective at getting its spin out on issues and “staying on message” in its public remarks. But if we’re to believe that everything the executive branch says is spun, if you will, how will we ever realize if they’ve given us such a moment of propaganda silence? (Perhaps a neutral-adversary or public-advocate medial model could help us out with that one.)
- “Don’t you know that you’re politicizing 9/11 by pointing out how the Republicans constantly politicize 9/11?” If even pointing out that another party politicizes an issue can be considered “politicizing”, than we’ve reached the point that nothing said in public by politicians is not “politicized” (sorry for the double-negative). Which may, unfortunately, be true.

“Preventing 9/11 would have been a tall order. However, it was his duty to respond appropriately afterwards, and instead he took us into Iraq. The speech is irrelevant. How you respond to it depends on how you feel about Bush.” This was the best comment, in my opinion, because it stated the problem of the other comments: that they criticized Bush’s speech not because of the speech itself but because they hate Bush. This comment says the Bush haters should focus on the real issues- such as why we went into Iraq- rather than some cooky conspiracy theory.

The comment/blogger that had the most perspective pointed out that scare-tactics (such as the Republican party’s apparent use of the War on Terror as an election issue) are not a new phenomenon, alluding to how LBJ implied that electing Goldwater in ’64 would lead to a nuclear war.

But knowledgeable and substantive comments such as those were few and far between. Rather, the comments were filled with short (and not-so-sweet), vituperative statements about Bush. Perhaps the nature of blogging lends itself to such comments; should we really expect serious, well-thought out debate on the comments section of a blog? Based on these comments, the answer would be a resounding N-O. But if blogs are the town halls of the future and become our primary mode of political debate, we’ll be in some big f-ing trouble.

Anatomy of a Presidential Press Conference

2006-09-08T11:55:00.000-04:00

On August 21, 2006, President George W. Bush held a press conference in the White House Conference Center Briefing Room. The President began the conference with prepared remarks that emphasized the importance of an international force being able to effectively prevent Hezbollah from “acting as a state within a state” and from “instigating violence,” and he pledged American support to those goals.

President Bush continued by describing America’s humanitarian assistance to Lebanon (as well as his pledge to step up the aid), and Iran and Syria’s “darker vision” of halting Lebanon’s ability to “build their own democratic future.” In concluding his statement, Bush ended with his well-know assumption that since democracy works in America, all peoples presumably want to live in a democracy: “The Lebanese people have made it clear that they want to live in freedom.” Bush did not mention that the Lebanese people have also made it clear that they have no will-power to confront Hezbollah, a terrorist group that opposes such “freedom.” But that’s another discussion for another time.

Bush gave the first question to ABC correspondent Terry Moran, whom he addressed informally as “Terry” several times. Bush did this throughout the press conference with the other reporters as well. “Terry” asked if the President was concerned about the rising civilian casualties in Iraq, even though Bush’s opening remarks exclusively focused on Lebanon. Perhaps journalists, whom Leighley acknowledged to be more liberal than conservative, are trying to bring up the Iraq war, a sore issue for Bush and the Republicans, as much as they can before the November elections. Or perhaps combative questions just make for better TV. Either way, the sudden shift in topic by Moran was interesting.

In any case, Bush responded by framing the Iraq was as part of the War on Terror: “A failed Iraq would make America less secure. A failed Iraq in the heart of the Middle East would provide safe haven for terrorists and extremists.” This is part of a deliberate effort by the Republican party in the months leading up to the elections to portray the Iraq war as part of the War on Terror, and by implication to characterize those that urge withdrawal as politicians who don’t support the War on Terror.

The President then dealt with a question about Iran before Helen Thomas returned to the Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire and engaged in a typically awkward give-and-take with him, with Thomas interrupting Bush during his response, prompting Bush to ask her: “Let me finish- let – ma’am. Ma’am, please let me finish the question.”

This prompted some laughter, as did many other light moments of banter between Bush and the Washington press corps. It seems the longer a President is in office, the more he gets to become familiar with the Washington correspondents, leading to more friendly (if you can call it that) and humored exchanges.

From then on, the questions shifted back and forth from Iraq to Iran to Israel-Lebanon and back to Iraq. In one interesting question that, if I recall correctly, was parodied on the Daily Show as “the many moods of Bush” or something similar, Bush was asked “are you frustrated?” He responded with this gem: “Frustrated? Sometimes I’m frustrated. Rarely surprised. Sometimes I’m happy…but war is not a time of joy.” My grammar-check says “rarely surprised” is a fragment sentence, but we should rarely be surprised that Bush often speaks in fragment sentences.

Other questions included such topics as presidential pardons, gas prices, the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, North Korea, the Lieberman-Lamont Senate race, and the Plan-B contraception pill. All in all, it was a wide-ranging, amicable press conference, but the focus nevertheless remained on the various ongoing problems in the Middle East. Bush tried to spin the events in the Middle East in a way that would make his policies look as favorable as possible, while the questions attempted in a strong but not overly forceful way to try to fight through the spin and get Bush to admit what he thinks is really going on.

This press conference was another example of the constraints on the media in being able to be confrontational with the President, as Leighley discussed in Chapter 5. Since the press relies on the government- and particularly the president- for much of its news, it does not want to risk jeopardizing its relationship with him and his press staff. As a result, the media has to tread carefully between trying to find out the truth while still maintaining a good working atmosphere with the White House. As we saw in this press conference, it’s a difficult balance to strike, and it’s a balance that can lead to citizens not being informed of reality and instead being fed government spin.

The Corporatization of the News

2006-09-05T21:31:00.000-04:00

Katie Couric made her network news anchor debut this evening in millions of households across the nation. This event is significant for several reasons, but one that stands out is that it represents the corporatization of the news. For years, CBS has been lagging behind in the ratings, so they jumped at the opportunity to land Couric in the hopes that she will drive up those all-important ratings. There may have been better qualified reporters or more knowledgeable and experienced journalists who could do a better job of informing the American public, but Couric was chosen for her ability to draw ratings. Her journalistic acumen is merely ancillary.

In the 1976 movie Network, the business side of the news is depicted to an extreme degree, and the film shows the media as operating under the profit-seeking model of news. The film centers around the anchorman for the fictional network UBS, Howard Beale, who, despite (or in spite of) his wild rantings, is kept on as anchor merely for ratings.

From the very beginning of the film to the end, television news is shown in nearly the worst light possible, a light that exposes it as a cold, cruel, cut-throat operation; in short, it is depicted to be like any other big business.

How did this happen to the news? In the film, the news became more like a "business" when networks like UBS where bought by larger corporations that wanted to make the news more accountable financially to the rest of the network. The news show was losing too much money, they said during a stock-holders meeting of the conglomerate CCA. It was "showbiz" like any other show and had to also earn a profit.

After Beale's "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" ravings and after his news program began to dominate the ratings, he began to howl against media consolidation until he was persuaded by a network executive to preach the opposite message: that large, multi-national conglomerates were good for America. In a poignant scene, the executive lectured Beale on the realities of the business aspects of the news, saying: "There are no nations...There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM...AT&T...Exxon...The world is a business, Mr. Beale."

When Beale started to preach the corporate gospel, he caused ratings for his news show to plummet. Beale turned off viewers- literally- with messages like "it's the individual that's finished," since there are only corporations; Beale's audience refused to put up with his messages about the worthlessness of the individual and about the dying of democracy.

In the film's surreal ending, the ratings-driven media is seen as following their logic to its absurd conclusion: that if an anchor's ratings are spiraling downwards and it is impossible to fire him, he must be killed for the good of the network. And indeed, Beale was assassinated on live television, something that would likely be a sure ratings-grabber itself. It also hearkened back to a scene at the beginning of the film where Beale joked about committing suicide on live TV, and that "it could get a 50 share." Ironically, Beale ended up dying on TV after all. The underlying message is that since the news is a show like any other show on TV, then if the news-show doesn't get ratings, the show deserves to be killed- figuratively and literally.

In real life as well, America has become corporatized to the extreme. Six conglomerates control virtually every outlet of national media (excluding the internet). As Jan Leighly discusses in Mass Media and Politics, because the news has been placed under corporate constraints that must conform to the news's potential as a tool of revenue, the content of the major network news shows, and mass media in general, has become "homogeneous." If this is the case, then Katie Couric's news program will differ little from Charles Gibson's or Brian Williams's program, and Couric will be reduced to merely 'just another pretty face' of the corporate news world.

"Big News" that Shouldn't Be

2006-08-29T17:05:00.000-04:00

One of the problems with mass-media today is its fixation on entertainment. Hollywood gossip has not only carved out a niche for itself in tabloids but in mainstream media as well, unfortunately. A recent example is the "big" story about Tom Cruise's break-up with Paramount Pictures. Last week, NBC Nightly News devoted a segment to this "story," despite the fact that they have an entire show that airs immediately folowing it in many markets, "Extra," devoted to precisely such news! It's one thing to have specific shows on entertainment where audiences can tune in expecting Hollywood coverage; it's quite another to devote a valuable segment of a national news broadcast that reaches millions to such a story.

Brian Williams began the segment by saying that this high-profile split "resonated across the country." Did it really? Or did the media cause the story to resonate across the country because that's what it believes the public cares about, and thus gives us such stories? If the Tom Cruise-Paramount split actually did send shockwaves across America, it demonstrates the sad state of affairs in this country that a story fit for the tabloids, a story that affects people's lives in no way whatsoever (yes, despite this "tragic" break-up, Tom Cruise will still make movies), can take on a higher level of importance in the minds of the public- and the media- more so than stories about national or foreign policy. Perhaps if mainstream media like NBC told people that the impending nuclear crisis with Iran, or the coming Congressional elections, were actually more important, entertainment "news" would not "resonate" across the country; if the media focused on real news, we might have a more active, informed citizenry.

The Dangers of an Unfinished War

2006-08-27T16:52:00.000-04:00

It’s been over two weeks since Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a UN-brokered cease-fire, and we’re already seeing the problems of this cease-fire and the difficulties it will create in the future due to the fact that it never resolved anything.

Hezbollah has declared that they will not disarm themselves, and Lebanon continues to be reluctant to disarm Hezbollah and provoke a confrontation with a fighting force stronger than its own army. Furthermore, the two kidnapped Israeli soldiers are still in Hezbollah’s hands, and Iran continues to pump weapons and money into Hezbollah through Syria. Even the UN force that is supposed to keep the peace in Southern Lebanon looks increasingly anemic, as France- who spear-headed the creation of this force- has committed only 2,000 troops (after being pressured as a result of originally committing only 200), leaving the 15,000- man an improbable attainment.

What does this all amount to? In short, what we have now is exactly what Israel kept repeating throughout the war that it could not go back to: the status quo. Israel vowed that it had to retrieve its kidnapped soldiers in addition to eliminating the thousands of rockets aimed at her. Israel said it could not afford to leave Hezbollah in place. Instead, because of a combination of strategic errors and an unwillingness to further upset international opinion by continuing the military campaign, Israel agreed to a cease-fire that kept the status quo in place. Rockets are still aimed at Israeli schools, farms, and hospitals, Hezbollah is still entrenched in Lebanon, and the two Israeli soldiers are still kidnapped. The only difference is that now there are over 100 Israel soldiers and hundreds of Lebanese and Israeli civilians dead.

History has taught us that in war, there must be a winner and a loser. If the war is not conclusive and if the war leaves the conditions in place that originally caused the war, then the war will have to be fought again, usually with disastrous consequences. In World War I, instead of defeating Germany, the Allies agreed to German pleas for an armistice, thus preserving in the minds of Germans the illusions that they had never lost and were wronged by the Versailles treaty. Hitler and the Nazi party were able to rise to power by exploiting these sentiments, leading to another World War. But the second time around, the Allies knew they had to conclusively defeat Germany, and they did. Two of our current problems, Iraq and North Korea, became problematic because of a stalemate in the Korean War that preserved the repressive Communist North Korea, and an inconclusive victory in the Gulf War that kept Saddam Hussein in power and necessitated a later confrontation.

In the Civil War, Lincoln was originally content to fight the war merely to restore the Union as it was- with slavery in the South- until he was persuaded by Radical Republicans about the error of this strategy. In The American Political Tradition, Richard Hofstadter wrote about how problematic this notion would have been: it would be utterly futile to wage a war only “for the preservation of the status quo which had produced the war”!

Unfortunately, Israel seems doomed to repeat the mistakes that the Americans and the Allies made in World War I, the Korean War and the Gulf War: merely postponing the resolution of the conflict till another war, a war that, like World War II and our current imbroglio in Iraq, will likely be bloodier and more costly than the original war.

Flip-flopping towards 2008

2006-08-13T16:55:00.000-04:00

There were a couple of revealing moments on this morning's This Week that deserve some discussion. George Stepanapolis interviewed two likely 2008 presidential candidates, one a front-runner and one a long-shot, and from both interviews I think we can glean some interesting but troubling realities about our political system.

First, Stepanapolis interviewed the long-shot, Senator Russ Feingold (D- Wisconsin). Feingold will run on a strong anti-war platform and likely gain support from the Democratic left-liberal base due to the fact that he was the only Senator to vote against Bush's Patriot Act (no, my blog is not called New England Patriot because I support, or condemn, the Patriot Act. I called it this name because I'm from New England, I'm a patriot, and I'm a Patriots fan, so it works). If things break his way, he could become the Eugene McCarthy of this campaign. McCarthy was the anti-war Senator from Minnesota whose strong showing in the New Hampshire primary forced Lyndon Johnson to drop out of the 1968 campaign. (Many are also comparing this campaign to the '68 campaign- a fascinating topic that deserves its own post.)
Stepanapolis brought up a Playboy article where Feingold was quoted as saying he would not be able to beat McCain in a Presidential election (and now political junkies across the country can all say "I read Playboy for the politics"). Unbelievably, Feingold did not retract the statement.

In the second interview, Senator John McCain (R- Arizona) was asked if he would endorse Joe Lieberman in his Senate race. After trying to evade the question, Stepanapolis persisted, and McCain said 'I'm a conservative Republican, and Joe's a liberal Democrat. I'm gonna support the Republican.'

What can we learn from these interviews? Feingold, the long-shot, seemed to feel that he can afford to be more candid, and because he's not the front-runner, he doesn't have to worry about positioning himself as "electable"- he'll cross that bridge if he reaches it. McCain, on the other hand, has long been seen as a centrist and one of the more liberal Republicans in the Senate. He has a long record of working with liberal Democrats like, ironically, both Joe Lieberman and Russ Feingold. Everyone can see that he's consciously trying to move to the Right to appease the Republican base in the primaries- thus, his repititious "I'm a conservative Republican" statements, and his attempt to distance himself from Democrats.

Meanwhile, the front-runner Democratic side, Hillary Clinton, who originally supported the war, is trying to move to the Left to appease her base in the primaries (as evident from her excoriation of Donald Rumsfeld and his "failed" Iraq policy...although everyone on the Right and Left has blamed Rumsfeld for the Iraq fiasco). It's inevitable that her opponent will try to get her into a "I voted for the war before I voted against" contortion that doomed Kerry.

McCain and Clinton will take one set of positions in the primaries, and then another set in the general election. Karl Rove would call it flip-flopping, but what it really is is the pandering that's unfortunately become necessary to win a presidential election: we're just not completely sure which set of positions is the pandering: are McCain and Clinton really centrists masquerading as partisans, or vice versa? And if hardcores win the primaries, like long-shots Feingold on the Left or Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) on the Right, they'll have to pander to the centrists and independents during the general election. There's something fundamentally wrong with the primary system of presidential politics when even someone with a reputation as a "straight-shooter" like McCain has to has to flip-flop his way to the presidency.

First Post- Intro

2006-08-13T00:53:00.000-04:00

Hi, welcome to my blog. I will use this site to post my thoughts and musings on politics. I might feel inclined to connect current political happenings with historical events to make a point, react to the latest news (in a way that's more pleasant and insightful, hopefully, than the banter of the talking heads), or just make some observations on the absurdity that is American Politics.
I hope my three to five readers will enjoy this blog. Feel free to comment and offer feedback.

-Daniel