Tragedy and Farce,

Crisis in Journalism

excerpted from the book

Tragedy & Farce

How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy

by John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney

New Press, 2005, hardcover

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Unlike the rest of the world, we in America don't see the reality of war - the blood and gore inflicted upon our soldiers or the women and children of Iraq - because our media acquiesces in the administration's sanitizing of reality.

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... the media crisis is not due to incompetent or corrupt journalists or owners, but rather to 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. This media system is not natural, it does not result from a free market. Rather, it is shaped by corrupt policies and subsidies made secretly by powerful corporate interests and their political bagmen in Washington, D.C. and the state capitols.

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James Madison
"A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives."

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New York World published comments from President Theodore Roosevelt followed by the disclaimer:

"To the best of the [New York] 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."

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So it is that we find ourselves in the Madisonian moment. Lied to by our leaders, cut off from popular information, and denied the debate that is essential to the maintenance of genuine democracy, Americans have seen the prologue to tragedy or farce. It is done. And we have been left with both, in the form of a horrific war and an absurd president.

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Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816

"The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves, nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe."

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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.

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... our media system has become a liar's paradise, where the cost of misrepresentation has become so low that it is now open season.

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A partisan press can degenerate into shameless lying and blatant propaganda, the purpose of which is to depoliticize the citizens rather than engage them. The key to having partisan journalism promote democratic values, rather than repress them, is to have a wide range of partisan viewpoints available, and for it to be feasible to launch a new partisan newspaper or magazine if one is dissatisfied with the existing range of options. One way to view the freedom of the press clause in the First Amendment is to see that it protects the right of citizens to launch their own publications, even if they are opposed to the political views of those holding political power at the time. That radical idea was mainstream thinking at the time of the country's founding.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, massive postal and printing subsidies assured that there was a range of newspapers and magazines in circulation far beyond what market forces would have permitted. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as publishing became an increasingly lucrative sector, market competition generated innumerable new newspapers, with publishers seeking profit as much or more than political influence. This was a classic competitive market, where new entrepreneurs could enter the field and launch a newspaper with relative ease if they were dissatisfied with the existing publications. Major cities like New York or Chicago or St. Louis tended to have well over a dozen daily newspapers at any given time, reflecting a fairly broad range of political viewpoints. The system was far from perfect, yet it worked.

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It was one thing for newspapers to be stridently partisan when there were numerous competing voices and when it was not impossible to launch a new newspaper if the existing range was unsatisfactory. It was altogether different when there were only one or two newspapers and it was impossible to start a new one. Moreover, as the papers were larger and the owners were always wealthy, the politics tended to be antilabor and probusiness. In community after community, newspapers were in bed with those who owned and controlled the community. In this context partisanship reeked of the heavy-handedness one associates with authoritarian regimes, or, to be more accurate, company towns.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, the crisis spawned by sensationalism and right-wing crony partisanship reached a boiling point. In the 1912 presidential race, all three challengers to President William Howard Taft-Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Theodore Roosevelt, and Socialist Eugene Debs-criticized the corruption and venality of the press. It was in this cauldron of controversy that professional journalism was spawned. A driving force was the publishers themselves who understood that partisan and sensationalistic journalism was undermining their business model. They had to accept self-regulation to protect their profits and to ward off the threat of organized public-reform efforts.

Professional journalism was the solution to the crisis.

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The strengths of professionalism are self-evident. It gives editors and reporters a measure of independence from the owners' politics and from commercial pressures to shape the news to please advertisers and the bottom line. It places a premium on being fair and upon being accurate. It makes it a cardinal sin, a career killer, to accept bribes or to fabricate stories.

(... Instead of objectivity, the preferred terms today are fairness, accuracy, and balance.

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As Ben Bagdikian famously put it, the core problems with professional journalism as it developed in the United States are threefold: 1) reliance on official sources; 2) fear of context; 3) a dig here, not there, built-in bias concerning what areas of power are fair game and what are off-limits.

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Professional journalism places a premium on legitimate news stories based upon what people in power say and do.

... Simply place reporters near people in power and have them report on what is said and done. It also gives journalism a very conventional feel, as those in power have a great deal of control over what gets covered and what does not. Reporting often turns into dictation as journalists are loathe to antagonize their sources, depending on them as they do for stories.

... the reliance on official sources has a tremendous disciplinary effect on the range of legitimate news stories. It also means the public is at the mercy of those in power to a far greater extent than was the case under partisan journalism.

Context is often eschewed by professional journalism because it opens the door to the charge of partisanship. It is awfully difficult to contextualize a story well without showing some partisan inclinations or making some controversial value judgments. So professional journalism tends to pummel people with facts, but rarely pummels people with a nuanced appreciation of what the facts might mean. This helps explain the numerous studies that show that sustained consumption of the news on a particular subject often does not lead to a better understanding of the subject and sometimes leads to more confusion. Which means that professional news can have the ironic effect of making public life more confusing and less interesting and attractive, thereby promoting depoliticization.

... our news media have internalized the notion that corporate power is largely benevolent, capitalism is synonymous with democracy, and the United States is a force for good in the world. So it is that corporate malfeasance gets barely a sniff of investigative journalism, unless blatant transgressions affect investors, while stories concerning governmental malfeasance, especially in programs intended to benefit the poor and working class, are stock-in-trade.

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As the legendary expression goes, journalism should "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted:'

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On television, journalism is replaced by uninformed punditry and pointless prognostication, an inexpensive and entertaining way to maximize profit, but nothing remotely close to journalism. Indeed, the real revolution brought on by the FOX News Channel is less its turn to partisanship as it is its replacement of costly journalism with relatively inexpensive pundit blowhards.

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Journalists spend much more time evaluating whether politicians can successfully spin the public-i.e., lie, than they do holding politicians responsible for lying. Our journalistic environment today is a liar's paradise.

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"The conventional rules of beltway journalism," as Bill Moyers put it in May 2005, "divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news .... Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers, sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background, or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading."

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Surveys continue to show local TV news is a leading source of information for a high percentage of Americans.

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Commercial pressures and the influence of ownership prerogatives go a long way toward shaping what is news. Newsrooms are not hippie communes where decisions get made beneath a waft of bong smoke. Owners control the budgets and set the priorities, and the top people they hire internalize the owners' values if they wish to have successful careers. It is Organizational Sociology 101. In some respects the situation is not unlike the newsroom in Pravda or Tass in the old Soviet Union. There was rarely explicit state or Communist Party repression of journalists in those newsrooms-journalists often did what they did without overt pressure-but no one claimed journalists actually had ultimate control over the Soviet media.

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By the end of the 1990s, the long conservative campaign against real reporting had combined with the commercial pressures on professional autonomy to produce a journalism that was basically putty in the Right's hands. As the Republicans gained greater political power, and as the Democrats became considerably more probusiness under Clinton, the official sources that play such a large role in shaping what news is moved rightward too. The right-wing media often became the agenda setters for what would be talked about and what would be ignored.

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The Right now controls the news cycle in the United States, and there is little independent journalism challenging it.

Tragedy & Farce

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