Your Call Is Important To Us

by Penny, Laura

  One of the most frequently invoked reasons for the increase in sensationalistic semi-news is that the media marketplace is simply giving the people what they want. People aren’t interested in the tedious intricacies of the new farm bill. That stuff is seriously snore-making. The people want sex and violence and scandals and scares. The people want live coverage of car chases. That’s what gets the ratings, not blah-dee-blah about policy or lengthy expostulations about unstable foreign countries. Or so they tell us. But when we viewers are asked what we want in our news, without fail we value things like timeliness and accuracy over entertainment value and attractive talking heads. Soft news isn’t entertaining enough to lure viewers away from entertainment programming, but it’s fluffy enough to piss off the folks who like a little news in their news. Contrary to the corporate catechism that the dumber, lighter, and flashier stories always mean better ratings, there is a market for hard news.

  In the first few months after September 11, hard news made a roaring comeback, comprising 80 percent of U.S. television reportage. The media didn’t just talk more about what happened yesterday, they started to talk about why it happened. They also reinvested in foreign bureaus, used more sources, and named their sources more frequently. Even the morning shows, which were basically product-pushing lifestyle infomercials before September 11, started devoting more than half their segments to hard news. The result? Ratings for the news and the press in general improved appreciably, after years of steady decline. People watched the news, talked about the news, and read books to learn more about the things they heard about on the news. Sure, some of that interest was fueled by terror. But it was fed and sustained by reporting, until the Bush administration clammed up and clamped down, and the networks realized they were spending way too much money.

  After a few months of enthusiasm and effort, viewers started to get tired of the complexities of hard news. Two decades of increasing fluffiness meant that it was awfully difficult for the audience to get up to speed on their -stans, and the other fine points of international affairs. As the Onion headline put it, a shattered nation longed to care about stupid bullshit again. The public trust that the media had gained in the months after September 11 leaked away, and returned to pre-9–11 levels, in less than a year. Once Afghanistan was in the can, bullshit stories, stuff like the Robert Blake trial and the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping, came crawling back to their customary omnipresence. Kidnapped kids were the mainstay of Connie Chung’s much-hyped show on CNN, which also featured occasional palate-cleansing forays into frivolous litigation. Chung’s show was one of the first victims of the War in Iraq, postponed and then canceled to make way for constant coverage. However, even constant war coverage didn’t totally preempt the Laci Peterson mini-series, which was a little bit Court TV, a little bit Lifetime, and a sneaky way to advance the pro-life cause of fetal rights as well, via Laci and Connor’s Law.

  The war in Iraq has been the lead story in the news for the past couple of years. When major combat operations began, the administration came up with a wonderful way of accommodating the public’s desire to know, and aiding and abetting their friends in the press. Enter the “embedded reporter,” which, as many folks have noted, sounds an awful lot like “in bed with.” Embedded journalists traveled alongside the troops in the Persian Gulf. While this might seem like an unprecedented level of openness and access, what this really meant was that the military controlled every aspect of embedded reportage. Many of the justifications the administration offered for the war, like Iraq’s ties to terrorism, or possession of weapons of mass destruction, have since been proven utterly bogus by the media. But the Bush administration greets every criticism with the same deflecting defense: We must move on in the war against terror, we must never forget 9–11, we must punish the evildoers, we must spread freedom and democracy, may God continue to bless America. When journalists have the temerity to pick at the propaganda and platitudes in search of the facts, they usually find themselves deflected on the grounds of national security and classified information. If they keep it up, and run stories critical of the administration, they find themselves exiled to source Siberia, denied access to information and interviews on account of their nitpicking. The “you’re with us or against us” rhetoric of war and foreign affairs also extends to the media.

  The Bush administration may well be the most secretive, press-repelling one since Nixon. In his first term, despite presiding over a national crisis, a recession, and steady warfare, Bush held fewer solo press conferences than any modern president. Bush did eleven press conferences, and only three of them aired during prime time. Eleven! Clinton held thirty-eight press conferences over the course of his first term. Bush the Elder, though he may have been the grand poobah of the sentence fragment, spoke to the press seventy-one times. Dubya is not a big fan of taking questions from the press, and it shows. He becomes visibly surly when the media tries to drag him off-message. In the April 13, 2004, press conference, one of the prime-time ones, Bush got rattled when a reporter asked him about his mistakes. What did the president think his biggest mistake was? Had he learned from his mistakes? The president bristled and said: “I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. John, I’m sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way. You know, I just—I’m sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn’t (sic) yet.”

  Bush went on to state that he was confident weapons would be found, and that Saddam was a dangerous man. He was flustered, but back on book. Then he remembered the impertinent query, and he said he was confident he had made mistakes, but couldn’t think of any, what with being put on the spot and all.

  Put on the spot? When you’re the president, you live on the spot. I wish this book could include a video clip, because the transcript and the description don’t really do this exchange justice. You need to see the video to catch all the dead air, the fumbling, and the frustrated hemming and hawing. It also helps to hear Bush’s sarcastic, affronted tone as he blusters his way through his nonanswer. What really surprised me about this question was that it seemed to totally blindside the president: Dubya and his handlers didn’t even plan a joke response to the question about mistakes, something like, “Well, Laura’s been keeping me off the pretzels,” har-dee-har-har.

  The administration shuns direct questioning by the press, and prefers staging little tableaux vivants, like the “Mission Accomplished” landing on the aircraft carrier, or prepared orations, like the State of the Union and his speeches before vetted crowds. The Republicans have also created their very own media to combat and infiltrate the MSM. Karl Rove got his start in direct mail, and the Republicans still use it at as a right-wing samizdat, a way of spreading stories unfit to print. As previously noted in the PR chapter, the Republicans have paid pundits to praise their initiatives and distributed video news releases to television stations. In February 2005, bloggers broke the story of Jeff Gannon, a White House correspondent for an organization called Talon News. Jeff was a regular at White House press briefings from 2003 until 2005, when the blogosphere began wondering who this guy was and how the hell he got a White House press pass. They discovered the following: Talon News is a fake news front for GOPUSA, a Republican group run by a Texan named Bernard Eberle, who has long supported Bush and Rove. Jeff Gannon had no prior reporting experience or credentials, save for a two-day workshop at a right-wing think tank. Jeff’s questions and articles reproduced, verbatim, talking points from the administration. Jeff Gannon is not even his real name. It may be James D. Guckert, and it may be something else, but it ain’t Jeff Gannon. Gannon’s career previous to his time in the press corps? Personal trainer and gay male escort. Nobody has explained why Gannon kept getting daily press passes for years when a number of legitimate media outlets would kill to get that kind of access. Nor has anyone explained how a
guy with a fake name gets past all that post 9–11 security.

  People like Gannon are part of the network of right-wing think tanks and front groups and professional bloviators that has helped move public discourse rightward and selfward over the past twenty years. But the right also has its very own cable network, Fox News. I write this chapter at an unfortunate distance from the mother lode: I don’t get Fox News. The CRTC, Canada’s FCC, finally approved Fox News’s application to broadcast on digital cable in 2004. John Doyle, a television columnist for the Globe and Mail, wrote that he couldn’t wait for the channel to come to Canada. He saw it in the States and thought it was a riot, and figured the rest of us would find it pretty hilarious, too. This bit of impunity landed him on Fox News and right-wing message boards, and he got hundreds of hate e-mails denouncing him, his socialist paper, and his communist country. The few choice snippets of Fox News I have seen on Canadian television have largely been from Fox News reports about Canada, and they are unilaterally intemperate and ill-informed. That said, I’m with Doyle: I can’t wait to get it. I think it is important to keep an eye on the unilaterally intemperate and ill-informed, especially when they happen to be running the latest competitor for cable news supremacy.

  Fox was the first network to declare Bush president in 2000, and Roger Ailes and the gang have been singing his praises ever since, and lavishing invective on the old media, the liberal media, like CNN. The Fox News Channel markets itself as the news for people who don’t trust the news. One Fox survey found that only 14 percent of the respondents trusted the media. The military, the president, the public school system, and the Catholic church—even in the throes of its pedophilia scandal—all inspired more trust than the media. The only institution that polled worse than the media was big corporations, which is kind of funny given that Fox is a big media corporation. But the poll was part of Fox’s ongoing effort to position itself as news for people who don’t like the news. The Fox News Channel has aggressively marketed itself as the unbiased alternative to all the other news, with the tagline “We report, you decide” and frequent brags about their “fair and balanced” coverage. Fox’s top-rated show, The O’Reilly Factor, markets itself as a No-Spin Zone, but it features a host who bellows about socialists and traitors, who bullies his guests and tells them to shut up when they disagree with him. It is popular precisely because O’Reilly is a reactionary loudmouth, not because he’s Mr. Neutral. CNN maintains the credibility edge in this battle of the broadcast titans, but they too have made their broadcasts louder, flashier, and quicker, so as not to be totally trounced by the belligerent Fox juggernaut.

  It should be noted that the very idea that journalists should be neutral or objective is a fairly recent one. America’s earliest papers were fiercely partisan. The invention of the telegraph and the founding of the Associated Press helped standardize coverage in the late nineteenth century. But for the great turn-of-the-century newspaper tycoons, like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper was a platform and a project as much as it was a moneymaking enterprise. During the heyday of yellow journalism, both editors trafficked in sensation and scandal as they fought for readers and meddled in political events, like the Spanish-American War. During World War II, the FCC’s “Mayflower laws” discouraged editorializing. Over the course of the forties, however, this no-editorializing policy seemed too restrictive, and changed into an equal time policy, otherwise known as the fairness doctrine, in 1949. Equal time refers to election laws that require networks to give opposing candidates for office equal airtime to get their messages out. The fairness doctrine was less binding, being a FCC guideline rather than a law, but it meant that media outlets had to make an effort to present both sides of a controversial issue, and give all interested parties the opportunity to speak out. Editorial content was supposed to be evenhanded, and reportage was supposed to be neutral. The idea that reporters would traffic only in facts and figures made it possible for the new news owners to distance themselves from editorial content, and present and sell the news as independent and professional. Television’s ability to air footage also helped the turn toward just-the-facts journalism.

  The fairness doctrine was the object of furious debate during the Reagan administration. Opponents of the doctrine, like right-wing think tanks, argued that airing both sides of every issue was a violation of the First Amendment, and actually discouraged coverage of controversial issues. Supporters of the doctrine pointed out that it actually stipulated that the broadcasters cover issues that were important to the public, and made broadcasters present a range of opinions about these issues. Reagan vetoed the fairness doctrine in 1987, and then Bush the Elder threatened to veto it again when Democrats brought it up in 1991. In 1993, when the Democrats tried to revive the fairness doctrine, right-wingers spun this effort as the Hush Rush bill. There’s a little truth in that spin; Reagan’s deregulation of the FCC spawned tons of right-wing radio shows. In January of 2005, during the course of a House debate on the FCC and indecency fines, Democratic members such as Louise Slaughter called, once again, for the reinstatement of the fairness doctrine. Given the majorities in the House and the Senate, this seems highly unlikely. The FCC is more interested in Janet Jackson’s boob, and pandering to the latest wave of culture warriors, than it is in fostering broader public discourse, or more evenhanded coverage.

  Few of us still think that the media are objective or neutral, but there are plenty of arguments about exactly which way that bias skews. Liberals say that the corporate press corps is inherently right-wing, and that journalists have become the toadying and fawning lackeys of power, reluctant to expose the excesses and trespasses of their owners and advertisers. Right-wingers decry the touchy-feely liberal media that likes gays, minorities, feminists, and big government, but shits all over guns, God, country, and money. Both are right and wrong. Professionals in the media do tend to vote Democratic, and to be fairly liberal on social issues. However, those who run media organizations tend to be right-wing, like Rupert Murdoch, or corporate interests, like GE, owners of NBC.

  The idea that the media are a bunch of commies has long been a favorite thumping tub on talk radio, where the voices range from the right wing to the paleolithically right wing, including freshly chatty types like G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North—I guess the airwaves have opened them up in ways that being under oath never could. According to a study conducted by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, 40 percent of viewers think that the media has a liberal bias, and 32 percent think that the media’s bias is conservative. Content analyses of CNN and Fox show that they’re actually both pretty conservative. Fox is more right-wing on social issues, but both channels are equally likely to shake their pompoms for the Bush administration. The right wing certainly bellows louder, and is insistent that the default mode of the media is liberal. The usage of the word liberal as an epithet has long been part of the right’s media strategy. They call this strategy playing the ref, and it is the preferred technique of professional right-wing bloviators like O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh. First, you argue that all the media suffers a liberal bias. Then, you argue that your views are not getting the fair hearing they deserve thanks to those rotten, biased liberals, even though you just so happen to be saying all this during your millionth TV appearance.

  The overwhelming majority in the Shorenstein study thought that the media were biased, but they summed up media bias not in partisan terms, but with other words, bummer words like negative, cynical, and depressing. The really bad thing about the news is not that it favors a specific political agenda, but that the news is always bad. All the tales of crime and sleaze and misery don’t just bum people out. These bleeding leads inevitably crowd out news about other crucial social issues. For example, the labor beat is long gone. When reporters write about work, they don’t write about jobs or working conditions, they write about careers, management, or investments. The growth of prime-time newsmagazines has led
to more coverage of celebrities, crime, lifestyles, and health, not in-depth coverage of education, the economy, military policy, and domestic and foreign affairs.

  Certain politicians may enjoy extended press honeymoons, particularly during wartime, but political coverage in general is reflexively negative, a steady stream of dismal plotting and posturing. Media critic James Fallows notes that people and media people talk about politics in two entirely different ways. In election campaigns, when people are invited to ask questions in town hall programs, they tend to ask about the what of politics. They want to know what the candidates are going to do about specific problems affecting their communities. Journalists always look for the how of politics, the strategic angle, the spin. You don’t hear about how any given policy or issue affects citizens, or voters, only how it affects the campaign. Covering politics as a horse race may seem more exciting than simply explaining the political process to people, but it only serves to distance people further from the political process, and reduces democracy to a game played by the powerful few. The more the press describes politicians as corrupt to a man, the less interest readers have in politics. This is a very dangerous cycle, for the press and politics both, since they are ultimately dependent on one another. People who care about politics are far more likely to follow the news, and people who follow the news are far more likely to care about politics.