What is with the "Mainstream Media"?

[The Lone Ranger]

In the past few years, I've attended talks by Noam Chomsky, Daniel Schorr (of National Public Radio), and Christiane Amanpour (of CNN). One point that all three made was that the Bush Administration is absolutely unprecedented in the degree to which it attempts to control the Press. Schorr and Amanpour, in particular, explained that the Administration carefully selects the information that it reveals to the Press, and that a great many of the stories you read in the papers and hear on the news are nothing more than [ever so slightly] rewritten Press Releases.

Any reporters or news agencies that refuse to play the game are denied access to Bush and other White House officials, and so most reporters quickly learn to play the game.


Schorr claimed that no administration in history exerts such control over the Press as does the current one. Amanpour claimed that lots of important stories are killed due to pressure -- direct or indirect -- from government officials who threaten to deny access to any reporters or news agencies that report embarrassing things.

One reason for this sort of thing, as both Schorr and Chomsky stressed, was that investigative journalism is all but dead in this day and age -- it just isn't "cost effective." So, more and more, the "investigative pieces" you read in the newspapers and hear on the television or radio are simply rewritten government or corporate press releases. Amanpour stressed the same sort of thing when she pointed out that -- like it or not -- the purpose of most news agencies is to make money. As such, if a story is likely to cost them the business of wealthy advertisers, it gets killed PDQ.

“The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before.”

This was written by, of all people, William Safire, in the New York Times (September 2004). As Frank Rich pointed out, when someone who worked for the Nixon White House says something like that, we should pay attention.



Despite the fact that Bush has historically-low approval ratings, despite the debacle of Iraq, the "Mainstream Media" still seem remarkably craven when it comes to this administration. Why is that?


Is it that, after all these years of Conservatives screaming nonsense about the "Liberal-Biased Media," most news outlets are just plain terrified of saying anything unflattering about the kleptocrats who run this country, for fear that any implied criticism of Bush and his allies will spark more outcries of "Liberal bias," which many of the more gullible readers/listeners will accept at face value? Newspapers are losing readers fast; most television and radio news outlets aren't in much better shape. Maybe they're so terrified of losing what patrons they have left, that they don't dare risk saying anything that will get Conservatives screaming about their so-called "Liberal bias," which might cost them a few more precious readers/listeners?


In a similar vein, the pernicious influence of FOX News is surely to blame. Doubtless, it (not to mention people like Rush Limbaugh) has helped to "dumb down" the level of discourse in the media, with its insipid but frequently-repeated (and as Joseph Goebbels noted, "A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth" at least, in the minds of many people) claim that it's "fair and balanced" -- which implies, of course, that other news outlets are not fair or balanced.

And what's with the whole "balanced" thing, anyway? As the late, lamented Molly Ivins once pointed out, the insistence on "balance" is often an excellent way to hide the truth, or at least obscure it. Sometimes, it really is true that one side of a "debate" is simply wrong (or is lying outright). Yet, most media outlets are so desperate to appear "balanced" that, as Ivins once wrote, if someone wrote an article in which it was suggested that Hitler was a bad guy, most newspapers would feel obligated to run a "balancing" commentary from a Nazi sympathizer who insisted that Hitler was a great guy who was completely misunderstood and who loved puppies and kittens and who thought the Jewish people were the best people on Earth.

In this way, important truths can be converted into "debatable positions" and so swept under the table.


I've read suggestions that the Sinclair Broadcast Group may be even more insidious than is FOX. Its ownership is every bit as rabidly right-wing as is FOX's Rupert Murdoch, and it reaches 24% of American households (it owns or operates at least 62 television stations, including affiliates of all 4 major networks), but Sinclair is much more low-key than is FOX, and its partisanship is less obvious. Even so, Sinclair ensures that programs with inconvenient messages don't get aired (for example, its stations were ordered not to air the "Nightline" in which Ted Koppel read out the names of the American soldiers killed in Iraq), and it airs highly-biased "news reports" of dubious authenticity (for instance, Sinclair stations in the swing states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania were ordered to air a "news special" trashing John Kerry for four nights in late October, just before the 2004 election).



Edward R. Murrow, where are you now, when we really need you?