I was recently provided with a copy of Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sells Wars, Spend Election’s, and Destroy Democracy [1], by John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney. Written in 2005, this book is a great way to get an historical perspective on the state of journalism in America. “How bad have things gotten?” you might ask.
Our media system has become so dysfunctional that it repeatedly shows its willingness to stenographically report the Bush administration’s spin as truth “while rejecting expressions of reality as manifestations of partisanship that must be balanced with more spin.” (Page 4) The authors write that the media is a “lumbering and lazy media” that is ideally suited to the whims of “Karl Rove and the thousands of other paid liars.”
Our media system is so bad that American political discourse has become “meaningless.” There is no better way to exemplify the bankruptcy of the media system than the March 2003 press conference at which George Bush was not challenged by anyone in the Washington press corps with regard to the preemptive war he was about to launch. The members of the press “asked him not a single probing question about the flimsy case that had been made for war, nor its likely costs, nor about anything akin to an exit strategy.”
The authors argue that our elite reporters no longer show passion for truth, but rather passion only for access to those who wield power. Reporters for major media outlets have become “celebrity content providers” who play it safe and avoid all controversy, unless those who hold power choose to air public disputes with others who wield power. Unless an issue is being publicly debated by those in power, it becomes invisible to modern media. For it to be raised by the media when it is being hidden by politicians often draws the charge that the media is arrogant and partisan.
Consider this comment by the New York World, which published comments made by President Theodore Roosevelt followed by this disclaimer:
To the best of the World’s knowledge and belief, each and all of these statements made by Mr. Roosevelt and quoted above are untrue, and Mr. Roosevelt must have known they were untrue when he made them.
(Page 6) As Nichols and McChesney argue, “an assessment of a president’s credibility this blunt is unimaginable today”; members of the media have simply stopped challenging the President on credibility and basic factual claims.
This book looks hard for a bottom line cause for the problems with the media system. That cause is not incompetent or corrupt journalists or owners, but “a highly concentrated profit driven media system that makes it rational to gut journalism and irrational to provide the content a free society so desperately requires.” (Page ix) there are plenty of conspiracies between government officials and the media, including paid access, Swift boating, and embedded journalists, but these conspiracies don’t hold a candle to the pressures on journalism resulting from the consolidation of media ownership. Mainstream media treats Americans as consumers, not citizens. “The theory in the boardrooms is that consumers are attracted by entertainment, rather than information.”
Nichols and McChesney argue that democracy sustaining journalism has three components.
It must be a rigorous watchdog of those in power and those who wish to be in power; it must present a wide range of informed views on the most pressing issues of the day; and it must be able to expose deception and permit the truth to rise to the top… the contemporary US media system flunks this test. In this book we measure the caliber of our journalism by looking at the two central tests of a free press: how well it monitors the war-making power of the government and permits the citizenry to intervene to prevent military adventurism; and how well it empowers citizens to effectively conduct elections for leadership of the government. The results of those tests do not present a pretty picture.
(Page 12). The authors note that “objectivity” has been a relatively recent development in journalism. For the first hundred years of our republic, journalism was “highly opinionated and partisan.” Partisan journalism has strengths such as the ability to contextualize political issues, which provided meaning to the facts reported. Partisan journalism also drew people into public life, which resulted in higher voter turnouts. On the other hand, a partisan press can degenerate into “shameless lying and blatant propaganda.” The authors suggest that one possible remedy is to have a wide range of partisan viewpoints available.
As newspapers became more commercial, they actively sought to generate larger numbers of readers leading to “sensationalism, blatant fabrication of stories, widespread bribing of journalists and all sorts of other disreputable measures.” During the 20th century, newspapers consolidated to the point where many cities now only have one daily paper. In fact, “there has not been a single profitable new daily newspaper established in the United States in an existing market since World War II.” Throughout the 20th century, newspapers became larger and were owned by wealthy owners. They were “in bed with those who owned and controlled the community.”
The result was “professional journalism,” an attempt to put a Chinese wall between owners and editors. The problem, however, is that journalists “can never be objective.” Journalists always write from a viewpoint. Reporters internalize these viewpoints and write their stories, often unaware of their own viewpoints. According to McChesney and Nichols, most mainstream journalists have internalized the following three notions which guide their choices of stories and their methods of writing:
- A) corporate power is largely benevolent;
- B) capitalism is synonymous with democracy and
- C) the United States is a force for good in the world.
The authors recommend that professional journalists can do a good job, but only if they “stand outside of partisan institutions,” assume the perspective of those outside of power and “Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” Seymour Hersh, Bill Moyers, Charles Lewis and Amy Goodman are recommended as good examples of this new approach of consciously taking perspectives outside of partisan institutions.
The authors, who were founders of Free Press [2], explained that media reform is of particular interest to progressives due to its “commitment to a democratic society. True media of reform “draws the citizenry into active public life. This value is not as common among conservatives, although it is found among principled conservatives.” True media reform needs to be both progressive in a sense, as well as nonpartisan (not getting caught up in supporting specific politicians or parties). Effective media reform works hard to “make media policy a legitimate political issue, an issue that all politicians and parties need to address.”
This is a terrific book, with chapters on the embedded a war in media coverage of elections. The book was written in 2005, prior to the most recent National Conference on Media Reform [3] in Memphis (January, 2007), which took the principles espoused by the authors ever further. [4]
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