The trouble with your press

Liberals are stupid, throw rocks at them.
usually followed by
Conservatives are stupid, throw rocks at them.

Weren't there talks going on to stop the kindergarden battle over christmas?

Haha! That is hilarious. A great example of just what Nimh was talking about.

Censored 2004: The Top 25 Censored
Media Stories of 2002-2003

#1: The Neoconservative Plan for Global Dominance

#2: Homeland Security Threatens Civil Liberty

#3: US Illegally Removes Pages from Iraq U.N. Report

#4: Rumsfeld's Plan to Provoke Terrorists

#5: The Effort to Make Unions Disappear

#6: Closing Access to Information Technology

#7: Treaty Busting by the United States

#8: US/British Forces Continue Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons Despite Massive Evidence of Negative Health Effects

#9: In Afghanistan: Poverty, Women's Rights,
and Civil Disruption Worse than Ever

#10: Africa Faces Threat of New Colonialism

#11: U.S. Implicated in Taliban Massacre

#12: Bush Administration Behind Failed Military Coup in Venezuela

#13: Corporate Personhood Challenged

#14: Unwanted Refugees a Global Problem

#15: U.S. Military's War on the Earth

#16: Plan Puebla-Panama and the FTAA

#17: Clear Channel Monopoly Draws Criticism

#18: Charter Forest Proposal Threatens Access to Public Lands

#19: U.S. Dollar vs. the Euro: Another Reason for the Invasion of Iraq

#20: Pentagon Increases Private Military Contracts

#21: Third World Austerity Policies: Coming Soon to a City Near You

#22: Welfare Reform Up For Reauthorization, but Still No Safety Net

#23: Argentina Crisis Sparks Cooperative Growth

#24: Aid to Israel Fuels Repressive Occupation in Palestine

#25: Convicted Corporations Receive Perks Instead of Punishment

BBB
In the United States, we are all aware of the right wing conservative's 40 year successful campaign to take over radio, television, and the print media and to use this dominance to achieve political power at the local and national level.

I would be interested to learn if A2K members in other countries have observed a similar organized movement by right wing conservatives, especially right wing religious parties. If so, are the tactics the same? How successful have they been?

I'm curious to learn whether their efforts are largely confined to the US or if it is a world-wide movement. We can see the obvious religious right movement in Muslim countries. But how widespread is the revolution?

BBB

Excellent post, George, couldn't have articulated these points better myself. Thank you.

Re: BBB

A movement by right wing religious parties to take over the media? No, don' think I've seen anything like that. The most read newspaper, The Telegraaf, still is the scandalmongering, populist rag it always was, to Dutch standards anyway (it was already "wrong in the war", the ultimate litmus test here), and all the other papers are timidly centrist or centre-left. I posted an overview of our newspapers the other day. One of the smaller ones is Christian, but it leans left.

Additionally the "small right", as the parties of the orthodox "black-stocking" Protestants used to be called (having hovered between 5 and 8 seats in parliament, out of 150, since 1981) also have their own newspapers, the Dutch Daily and the Reformed Daily, with limited but stable printruns.

If anything, the rightwing parties - or any parties, rather - have much less of a stranglehold on the media than they did in the past. Up till the late sixties or so, most every national newspaper represented the "voice" of a specific political party. Trouw spoke for the protestants, de Tijd and de Volkskrant for the catholics, the NRC for the right-wing liberals, het Vrije Volk and het Parool for the social-democrats and de Waarheid for the communists.
Only some of them, like de Waarheid, were party organs outright, but they were all kept on a pretty tight rein by their respective socio-political "pillar". After the war, for example, Catholic People's Party leader Romme was also an editor-in-chief of de Volkskrant, and Bruins Slot, the parliamentary leader of the protestant Anti-Revolutionary Party, was also editor-in-chief of Trouw. Their position highlighted a tradition that went back to 1869, when liberal statesman Thorbecke, one of the fathers of modern Dutch democracy, stated that all daily newspapers should be party organs, and that the party leaders should determine in this what would serve party interest.

It was an approach that guaranteed diversity in the media landscape, but, needless to say, hampered journalistic independence. And since catholics were told by their priests that they would go to hell if they read a socialist newspaper, and socialists could not afford their neighbour to see that a liberal newspaper was delivered, the ideological diversity of the media landscape as a whole did nothing to detract from the jealously guarded narrow info spaces in which each of the religious-ideological communities was constrained (with the possible exception of the slightly more free-minded liberals).

But since the so-called de-pillarisation of the sixties and seventies, all that is gone now. The papers have long since wrestled themselves out of any political control, and those that didn't, perished. Each newspaper now has become much more of a varied container of opinions, its slant evidenced only by a more diffuse, less homogenous general thrust of reporting. Journalistic independence has increased a lot compared to those bad old days - even if, in return, it has (ironically) made the newspapers resemble each other all the more. They're all now more or less in the same broad, "standard" centrist or centre-left playing field.

Television

The same pretty much goes for our highly complicated public broadcasting system, now consisting of three TV channels divided up between eight large and a host of smaller broadcasting organisations. Those broadcasting organisations were originally founded on the basis of political and religious persuasion. The idea was that each religious and political persuasion should have access to its own broadcasting time, and thus catholic, protestant, liberal, socialist and free-thinking broadcasting associations were founded. Each is assigned broadcasting time proportionally to the number of members they have.

A few things happened after the war, notably from the 60s onwards, to undermine the system. For one, as "depillarisation" set in and audiences became more fleeting, less delineated, broadcasters started to compete with each other for the same groups. They started member drives based on their TV guides: all the way up till this year, it was the broadcasting associations that collectively held the right to programming info, and so the only way to get a detailed overview of what's on the tube was by becoming a member of one or the other association (or, more expensively, buying their TV guide). One's guide was cheaper, the other more colourful, and thus conviction and membership started to diverge.

Then came the "pirate" stations, Veronica broadcasting from a ship in the North Sea. Eventually, such wholly non-political newcomers were incorporated into the system, even though they did not represent, as the law prescribed, any political or religious persuasion. Timeslots for commercials were expanded and became an ever more important source of income for the broadcasters and that, too, stimulated them to let audience ratings rather than ideological principles drive their programming decisions. The resulting liberation from ideological constraints yielded newly independent news and background reporting, but also ever more bland commercialised programming.

The emergence of commercial Dutch-language television in the late eighties, initially broadcast from Luxemburg to avert the legislation banning it, heralded a second wave of the same sort of development. By now, the three public channels are left with about 30-40% of the audience, with some five or six mainstream commercial stations taking another 40-50% and specialised and foreign stations taking the rest.

What this has lead to is, on the one hand, a range of commercial stations that do not seem to represent any specific or divergent political orientation. The main differences are between those that cater to Joe Average with the regular game shows and soap series, and those that push the envelope ever further, pioneering ever more daring shows. Note that Big Brother was originally invented in Holland - for which my apologies - and that we've since moved on to shows in which couples are separated and tempted to cheat on their partner and shows in which teens are taken to Mediterranean beach resorts and encouraged to get pissed and misbehave. Nothing all too pleasant, but no political slant to be detected, or it would have to be the hedonist, materialist, egoist neo-liberal one, in a subtext kind of way.

On the other hand, there's a range of public broadcasters that in name are still "political", but in practice work ever more together as simply three different stations; Netherlands 3 (where the erstwhile socialists and free-thinkers went, along with a host of tiny broadcasters like the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Humanist associations), for news, culture, alternative and in-depth programming and multicultural programmes; Netherlands 1 (where the erstwhile protestants, catholics and liberals went), for the somewhat more sedate programming that appeals to a mostly older audience; and Netherlands 2, an awkward mix of broadcasters trying to outcommercialise the commercial stations and the Evangelical Broadcaster.

The Evangelical Broadcaster (EO) is indeed the only thing I can think of here that approaches your question about the religious right taking over. It's a relatively young broadcaster, but its emergence and heyday still dates back to a decade or two ago. It started broadcasting in 1970 with a modest "C-status", but achieved "B-status" in 1983. Unlike the already depillarised catholic and 'regular' protestant broadcasters, it still held (and holds) stringently to its religious identity. With its membership quickly outpacing those of the "regular" broadcasters as the 1980s came round, the EO sure caught a lot of attention back then, organising huge National Days full of gospel and other entertainment for its fast-growing youth club.

Nevertheless, it too eventually was relatively co-opted by the broadcasting system, as its further growth (eventually achieving "A-status" in 1992) coincided with the convergence of broadcasters within the three stations. Its programming is still markedly religious, but it now co-produces its current affairs, for example, with the secular TROS. Furthermore, the massive emergence of commercial TV in the 90s has reduced the impact of any public broadcaster significantly, in any case. Last year, the EO had to actually shrink its operation for the first time ever.


<nods, liking and agreeing with the "religious right" definition for Muslim fundamentalists>

I'm always captivated when nimh delves into political history. Great post nimh.

Thanks Einherjar. It sure was a long post, but I guess, if anyone was interested, somehow, in the Dutch media landscape and its history, he now got a one-stop summary ... ;-) Glad you appreciated it.

Nimh
Nimh, ash a question and you get the most marvelous answer. Thank you for taking the time to post such a definitive example of the media in the Netherlands. I learned much and enjoyed it.

I've had several Dutch immigrant good friends in the US, which has caused me to think well of the Hollanders as enlightened people. In the 1980s, I spent five days in Amsterdam and loved the land and its people.

BBB

so whats the latest going down with Thiijs van Leer?

I believe the notion that there is a substantial right wing conspiracy in the United States (or any other developed country) to take over the media establishment is quite inconsistent with the facts and absurd in its underpinnings. There is no doubt that there have arisen a few commercially successful media forces (Rush Limbach, Fox News, and two or three newspapers) that have had a substantial impact on the public mind. These new elements in the media are generally dwarfed by opposing voices, Whether this is a cause of something or merely the result of a lack of dissenting voices, I will leave to others to explain.

The more or less equivalent bias of other media institutions, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Broadcast Networks - and many others is different in that most of them adopt the pretense (or act from the conviction) that they have no bias at all - they merely deal objectively with the facts. Unfortunately their record over many decades confirms beyond doubt that in their selection of stories and in the context in which they put their descriptions of events, they have a decidedly left wing (in the American sense of that term) bias and viewpoint.

I believe that all of them, left and right share more or less equally in the defects that we have been discussing here. Though I suspect that BBB will focus more on the faults of (say) Fox news and I, perhaps, on the establishment papers and the broadcast networks. We would both be equally right and equally selective in such a recitiation.

My knowledge of the European media is less, but I suspect the bias there is more or less equivalent that what occurs here - the differences are more stylistic than substantial. Like most things American, ours are bold, brassy and often overplayed. Europeans manifest less of these qualities, and reveal their biases more in the context in which they present things and the topics they choose to discuss. However lies and distortion remain lies and distortion whether they come with loud talk and hype or are delivered in a polite monotone. The stakes in political discourse are often high, and few people , given a role in its expression, can resist the opportunity to advance their views - as is demonstrated by those of us on these threads. Some journalists would have us believe theirs is a priesthood that has exceeded all others known to man in maintaining integrity and dispassionate objectivity. A very credulous and inexperienced mind is required to accept that proposition.

Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News
Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News
David Mindich

Description: David Mindich talks about his book, "Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News," at the Overseas Press Club of America in New York City. The author interviewed young Americans from different parts of the country regarding how they receive their news and concluded that in general, they know, care, and vote less than older generations. He cites the root of the problem as entertainment, specifically music videos and sports programs. In order to start a new trend, he is urging every channel to carry news as part of its children's programming. After the discussion, the author answers questions from the audience.

Author Bio: David Mindich is the chair of the Journalism and Mass Communications Department at Saint Michael's College in Vermont. He is the author of "Just the Facts: How 'Objectivity' Came to Define American Journalism" and a former assignment editor for CNN.

Publisher: Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America
The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America
Adrian Wooldridge

Description: Adrian Wooldridge is the co-author, along with John Micklethwait, of "The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America," and he spoke about it recently at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC. It takes a look at the conservative movement in the United States and compares it to the conservative movements in other countries. The authors write that conservatism in the United States is far more conservative than conservatism in other countries, namely European. The book also takes a look at the history of conservatism in America, from its roots to speculation about the future of conservatism.

Author Bio: Adrian Wooldridge is an editor for The Economist in Washington, D.C. He co-wrote "The Company" and "Right Nation" with John Micklethwait. Wooldridge and Micklethwait are also the co-authors of "A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Promise of Globalization" and "The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus."

Publisher: Penguin Press 375 Hudson Street New York, NY 10014

Rep. Noise Machine:Right-Wing Media Corrupts Democracy
The Republican Noise Machine : Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy
by David Brock
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The author, once notorious as a conservative attack-journalist trashing the likes of Anita Hill and the Clintons, repudiated his past in the confessional Blinded by the Right. In this blistering j'accuse, Brock mounts a less gossipy and more systematic assault on the right-wing media juggernaut of think tanks, publishers, talk radio shows, Web sites and cable networks. He treats it as a disciplined political movement, inspired by Communist subversion techniques, bankrolled by a handful of right-wing zillionaires through corporate and foundation spigots, tightly yoked to the Republican policy agenda and masterminded by arch-conservative Grover Norquist at weekly strategy meetings. By Brock's account, it constitutes a seamless propaganda machine conveying dubious scholarship, Republican talking points and antiliberal smear campaigns from think tanks and Internet rumor mills to the FOX News and talk radio echo chambers and thence through a network of conservative pundits into the quality press. Meanwhile, Brock charges, the mainstream media, cowed by spurious charges of "liberal bias," have abandoned their role as objective arbiters of truth in favor of an uncritical airing of partisan ideology in the name of "balance." The result, he says, is a public discourse in which the line between fact and opinion is blurred, poorly funded liberal voices get shouted down, "no issue can be honestly debated and no election can be fairly decided." Brock's critique echoes that of other liberal media critics like Eric Alterman and Al Franken, and cannot be accused of nonpartisanship. He is dismissive of the conservative nostrums whose purveyors he pillories, and his biting takedowns of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and their ilk show he hasn't lost his taste for blood. But Brock's incisive, well-supported analysis and his street cred as an apostate from the conservative press make this a spirited challenge to the contemporary mediascape
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From the Inside Flap

In The Republican Noise Machine, David Brock skillfully documents perhaps the most important but least understood political development of the last thirty years: how the Republican Right has won political power and hijacked public discourse in the United States.

Brock, a former right-wing insider and the author of the New York Times bestseller Blinded by the Right, uses his keen understanding of the strategies, tactics, financing, and personalities of the American right wing to demonstrate how the once-fringe phenomenon of right-wing media has all but subsumed the regular media conversation, shaped the national consciousness, and turned American politics sharply to the right.

Brock documents how in the last several decades the GOP built a powerful media machine--newspapers and magazines, think tanks, talk radio networks, op-ed columnists, the FOX News Channel, Christian Right broadcasting, book publishers, and high-traffic internet sites--to sell conservatism to the public and discredit its opponents. This unabashedly biased multibillion-dollar communications empire disregards journalistic ethics and universal standards of fairness and accuracy, manufacturing "news" that is often bought and paid for by a tight network of corporate-backed foundations and old family fortunes. By dissecting the appeal, techniques, and reach of the booming right-wing media market, Brock demonstrates that it is largely based on bigotry, ignorance, and emotional manipulation closely tied to America's longstanding cultural divisions and the buying power of anti-intellectual traditionalists.

From the disputed 2000 presidential election to the war with Iraq to the political battles of 2004, Brock's penetrating analysis of right-wing media theories and methodology reveals that the Republican Right views the media as an extension of a broader struggle for political power. By tracing the political impact of right-wing media, Brock shows how disproportionate conservative influence in the media is integrally linked to the Republican Right's current domination of all three branches of government, to the propping up of the Bush administration, and to the inability of Democrats to voice their opposition to this political sea change or to compete on an even playing field.

As only an ex-conservative intimately familiar with the imperatives of the American right wing could, David Brock suggests ways in which concerned Americans can begin to redress the conservative ascendancy and cut through the propagandistic fog. Writing with verve and deep insight, he reaches far beyond typical bromides about media bias to produce an invaluable account of the rise of right-wing media and its political consequences. Promising to be the political book of the year, The Republican Noise Machine will transform the raging yet heretofore unsatisfying debate over the politics of the media for years to come.

About the Author

DAVID BROCK is the author of four books, including Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, a New York Times bestselling political memoir. He is the founder and president of a nonprofit media watchdog organization in Washington, D.C. He serves on the advisory board of Democracy Radio, Inc., and is the recipient of the New Democrat Network's first award for political entrepreneurship. He can be reached at [email protected].

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION

THE REPUBLICAN NOISE MACHINE

SINCE DEFECTING FROM THE REPUBLICAN PARTY in the latter half of the 1990s and publishing a confessional memoir in 2002, I've discussed my right-wing past with politicians, political activists and strategists, academic scholars, student groups, fellow writers, and hundreds of readers of my book Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative. I'm rarely asked anymore why I changed, or about the baroque intricacies of the anti-Clinton movement, which I once participated in and then renounced and exposed. After a presidential election decided by the Supreme Court, the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the war with Iraq, politics has moved to a different place.

Nowadays, when I talk about Blinded by the Right, people want to know not how I was blinded by the Right, but how so much of the country seems to be in that position. For the first time since 1929, the Republican Party controls all three branches of government. Fewer people identify with the Democratic Party today than at any time since the New Deal. Conservatism seems the prevailing political and intellectual current, while liberalism seems a fringe dispensation of a few aging professors and Hollywood celebrities. People ask me, a former insider, how the Republican Right has won political and ideological power with such seeming ease and why Democrats, despite winning the most votes in the last three presidential elections, seem to be caught in a downward spiral, still able to win at the ballot box but steadily losing the battle for hearts and minds.

While it is not the only answer, my answer is: It's the media, stupid.

When I say this, in a more respectful way, to folks outside the right wing, I usually get either of two responses. Those who receive their news from
the New York Times and National Public Radio give me blank stares. They are living in a rarefied media culture?-one that prizes accuracy, fairness, and civility?-that is no longer representative of the media as a whole. Those who have heard snippets of Rush Limbaugh's radio show, have caught a glimpse of Bill O'Reilly's temper tantrums on the FOX News Channel, or occasionally peruse the editorials in the Wall Street Journal think I'm a Cassandra. They view this media as self-discrediting and therefore irrelevant. They are living in a vacuum of denial.

Those who understand what I mean are either members of the media itself, have read media-criticism books or Internet sites devoted to the subject, or are in the political trenches every day dealing with the media. The gap between those who recognize right-wing media power for what it is and those who don't is wide and deep, as if they inhabit parallel universes. The gap is dangerous to democracy and needs to be closed.

When I came to Washington fresh out of college in 1986, I got a job at the Washington Times, the right-wing newspaper bankrolled by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the Korean-born leader of a religious cult called the Unification Church. Though Moon's paper was said to be read in the Reagan White House, nobody paid much attention to it. We were the proverbial voice in the wilderness. Considering that the paper was governed by a calculatedly unfair political bias and that its journalistic ethics were close to nil, this was a good thing. That was eighteen years ago. Today, the most important sectors of the political media?-most of cable TV news, the majority of popular op-ed columns, almost all of talk radio, a substantial chunk of the book market, and many of the most highly trafficked Web sites?-reflect more closely the political and journalistic values of the Washington Times than those of the New York Times.

That is, they are powerful propaganda organs of the Republican Party. For our politics, this development in the media represents a structural change: a structural advantage for the GOP and conservatism, and, I believe, the greatest structural obstacle facing opponents of the right wing. I therefore think it is one of the most important political stories of the era. I have sought to tell this story in The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy.

I know there is a Republican Noise Machine because I was once part of it. From the Washington Times, to a stint as a "research fellow" at the Heritage Foundation (the Right's premier think tank), to a position as an "investigative writer" at the muckraking magazine The American Spectator, and as the author of a best-selling right-wing book, I forwarded the right-wing agenda not as an open political operative or advocate but under the guise of journalism and punditry, fueled by huge sums of money from right-wing billionaires, foundations, and self-interested corporations.

By the time I said good-bye to the right wing in 1997, what was once a voice in the wilderness was drowning out competing voices across all media channels. The most influential political commentator in America, Rush Limbaugh, and his hundreds of imitators saturated every media market in the country, providing 22 percent of Americans?-not only conservatives but independent swing voters?-with their primary source of news. Conservatives had changed the face of the cable news business with the establishment of the top-rated FOX News Channel, a slicker broadcast version of the Moonie Washington Times. Pundit Ann Coulter and her fanatical ilk topped the best-seller lists, becoming superstars in the world of political punditry. The Spectator juggernaut?-which had a circulation of three hundred thousand per month at its height in the early 1990s?-had been replaced by Internet gossip Matt Drudge, who gets more than 6.5 million visitors to his site every day. Although enormous subsidies were still being pumped into right-wing media that did not turn a profit, right-wing media also had become a multibillion-dollar business, a development that powerfully affected all other commercial media.

The lies, smears, and vicious caricatures leveled against Bill and Hillary Clinton by this right-wing media, and then repeated in virtually every media venue in the country, have now been well documented, not least in Blinded by the Right. In that book, I compared the anti-Clinton propaganda to a virus as it seeped off the pages of the Spectator into the minds of every sentient American. My memoir ended in 2000; what I did not fully comprehend then, but what is apparent to me now as I have watched the politics of the last few years unfold, is that the virus was not Clinton-specific. In fact, it had nothing to do with the Clintons per se; rather, in different strains, it would afflict any and every political opponent of the right wing, including Al Gore, Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, and the mourners of Senator Paul Wellstone, every major Democrat seeking the presidency in 2004, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org. What we have here, as a criminal investigator might say, is a pattern.

In the 2000 presidential campaign, the Republican Noise Machine, which worked for years to convince Americans that the Clintons were criminally minded, used the same techniques of character assassination to turn the Democratic standard-bearer, Al Gore, for many years seen as an overly earnest Boy Scout, into a liar. When Republican National Committee polling showed that the Republicans would lose the election to the Democrats on the issues, a "skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy" was adopted, the New York Times reported. Republicans accused Gore of saying things he never said?-most infamously, that he "invented" the Internet, a claim he never made that was first attributed to him in a GOP press release before it coursed through the media. Actually, Gore had said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet," a claim that even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich verified as true.1

The right-wing media broadcast this attack and similar attacks relentlessly, in effect giving the GOP countless hours of free political advertising every day for months leading up to the election. "Albert Arnold Gore Jr. is a habitual liar," William Bennett, a Cabinet secretary in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, announced in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. "...Gore lies because he can't help himself," neoconservative pamphleteer David Horowitz wrote. "liar, liar," screamed Rupert Murdoch's New York Post. The conservative columnist George F. Will pointed to Gore's "serial mendacity" and warned that he is a "dangerous man." "Gore may be quietly going nuts," National Review's Byron York concluded. The Washington Times agreed: "The real question is how to react to Mr. Gore's increasingly bizarre utterings. Webster's New World Dictionary defines ?'delusion' thusly: ?'The apparent perception, in a nervous or mental disorder, of some thing external that is not actually present...a belief in something that is contrary to fact or reality, resulting from deception, misconception, or a mental disorder.'"

This impugning of Gore's character and the questioning of his mental fitness soon surfaced in the regular media. The New York Times ran an article headlined tendency to embellish fact snags gore, while the Boston Globe weighed in with gore seen as "misleading." On ABC's This Week, former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos referred to Gore's "Pinocchio problem." For National Journal's Stuart Taylor, the issue was "the Clintonization of Al Gore, who increasingly apes his boss in fictionalizing his life story and mangling the truth for political gain." Washington Post editor Bob Woodward raised the question of whether Gore "could comprehend reality," while MSNBC's Chris Matthews compared Gore to "Zelig" and insisted, "Isn't it getting to be delusionary?"

The well-orchestrated media cacophony had its intended effect: The election was far more competitive than it should have been?-and, indeed, was decided before the Supreme Court stepped in?-because of negative voter perceptions of Gore's honesty and trustworthiness. In the final polls before the election and in exit polls on Election Day, voters said they favored Gore's program over George W. Bush's. Gore won substantial majorities not only for his position on most specific issues but also for his overall thrust. The conservative Bush theme of tax cuts and small government was rejected by voters in favor of the more liberal Gore theme of extending prosperity more broadly and standing up to corporate interests. Yet while Bush shaded the truth and misstated facts throughout the campaign on everything from the size of Gore's federal spending proposals to his own record as governor of Texas, by substantial margins voters thought Bush was more truthful
than Gore. According to an ABC exit poll, of personal qualities that mattered most to voters, 24 percent ranked "honest/trustworthy" first?-and they went for Bush over Gore by a margin of 80 percent to 15 percent. Seventy-four percent of voters said "Gore would say anything," while 58 percent thought Bush would. Among white, college-educated, male voters, Gore's "untruthfulness" was cited overwhelmingly as a reason not to vote for him, far more than any other reason.

Two years after the election, Gore gave an extraordinary interview to the New York Observer that could be read as an explanation of what happened to his presidential campaign. Gore charged that conservatives in the media, operating under journalistic cover, are loyal not to the standards and conventions of journalism but, rather, to politics and party. Gore said:

The media is kind of weird these days on politics, and there are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party. Fox News Network, the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh?-there's a bunch of them, and some of them are financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations and the rest of the media.... Most of the media [has] been slow to recognize the pervasive impact of this Fifth Column in their ranks?-that is, day after day, injecting the daily Republican talking points into the definition of what's objective as stated by the news media as a whole....

Something will start at the Republican National Committee, inside the building, and it will explode the next day on the right-wing talk-show network and on Fox News and in the newspapers that play this game, the Washington Times and the others. And then they'll create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they all start baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they've pushed into the zeitgeist. And then pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and lo and behold, these RNC talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist....

True to form, the right-wing media greeted this factual description with yet another frenzy of repetitive messaging portraying Gore as crazy. Speaking of Gore on FOX News, The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes said, "This is nutty. This is along the lines with, you know, President Bush killed Paul Wellstone, and the White House knew before 9/11 that the attacks were going to happen. This is?-I mean, this is conspiratorial stuff." Also on FOX, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said of Gore, "I'm a psychiatrist. I don't usually practice on camera. But this is the edge of looniness, this idea that there's a vast conspiracy, it sits in a building, it emanates, it has these tentacles, is really at the edge. He could use a little help." "It could be he's just nuts," Rush Limbaugh said of Gore. "Tipper Gore's issue is what? Mental health. Right? It could be closer to home than we know." "He [Gore] said it's a conspiracy," Tucker Carlson said on CNN's Crossfire. "I actually think he's coming a little unhinged," The Weekly Standard's David Brooks, now at the New York Times, said of Gore on PBS.

As I write in early 2004, the Republican Noise Machine is primed to run the same campaign of personal vilification in the 2004 presidential election, no matter which Democrat wins the nomination. An op-ed piece in the Washington Post by Charles Krauthammer has pronounced former Vermont governor Howard Dean "the Delusional Dean." Krauthammer's "diagnosis" rested on a transcript of a Dean appearance on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews. Through the use of ellipses, Krauthammer doctored the transcript to make his point.2 As Gore's experience demonstrated, Democrats ignore these attacks at their peril: Not only do such attacks confirm the preconceptions of Republicans but they shape the thinking of undecided voters and even of Democrats. One of the most frightening experiences I have had in recent years in talking with rank-and-file Democrats is the extent to which they unconsciously internalize right-wing propaganda. To add insult to injury, too many Democrats have a tendency to blame the victims of these smears?-their own leaders?-rather than addressing the root of the problem. For instance, when Senator Daschle made the factual statement that "failed" diplomacy had led to war with Iraq, right-wing media accused him of siding with Saddam Hussein. The ensuing controversy caused many Democrats to think Daschle had put his foot in his mouth.

With the right-wing media now a seemingly permanent and defining feature of the media landscape, if Democrats cut through the propaganda and win back the White House in 2004, they still face the prospect of being brutally slammed and systematically slandered in such a way that will make governing exceedingly difficult. There should be no doubt that the right-wing media's wildings of 1993?-which led to Clinton's impeachment four years later?-will be replayed over and over again until its capacities to spread filth are somehow eradicated.

Does anyone read these incredibly long cut and pastes?

Compared to the few that follow the url's/links: yes, a lot more, I think.

FAIR and Mediaresearch are opposite ends of the spectrum and illustrative of how even the analyzers come to differences of opinion on this issue.

Both referring to ?'scientific research projects' come to entirely opposite opinions as to the results of that research. Then people without access or ability to do their own study will tend to trust the data of the organization that most closely reflects the views they wish to hold.

http://www.fair.org/reports/journalist-survey.html

http://www.mediaresearch.org/specialreports/2004/report063004_p1.asp


While I do not disagree in the least with Nimh's view that true journalism doesn't just report what both sides say but does its research to see what the facts actually are, I am leery of taking my news from an ?'expert' without knowing that ?'expert's' own ideology and whether s/he has an ax to grind.

The ?'experts' of the American media are the op-ed writers who provide analysis for the current events and findings of the day. And still we have to check their facts in order to be able to trust them until they have established a reputation for reliability for accuracy in their analysis. Even then there is room for their ideology to color their analysis. George Will is one such writer on the conservative side. William Raspberry is one who tilts left. I have complete respect for both and yet using the same data and information, they can arrive at entirely different conclusions.

Perhaps a lot has changed in journalism today compared with ... let's say, 25 years ago.
(And perhaps and additionally, there are the differences between here and there.)

When I studied journalism (actually "Communication Sciences") at university in the 70's and worked at a regional paper, we made reports. Our analysis were printed -if- at a different page/column.
(It was a 'mortal sin', when you mixed up both - as well at university as "in real life".)

Well me too Walter as I have stated elsewhere. The reporter was to report the facts and give direct quotes. Only in the more extreme circumstances would an 'anonymous source' be quoted and I do mean extreme. These days it is common place. And woe be to the reporter who used a quote to create a particular slant. It just wasn't done. Quotes were to present the facts only.

But, in the op-ed world, with a by-line identifying us as the writer, we had a bit more leeway to mix analysis with facts, but again we darn sure better be able to back up our conclusions or you received a severe tongue lashing at best or a pink slip from the city desk.

In the print media at least, this touches on a complaint that has been being voiced here for some time now. Many of the major papers have gone to a format where they include both "news" and opinion pieces on the same pages.

After tons of complaints the Boston Globe changed to adding a picture of the writer at the heading of all opinion pieces to try and distinguish them from actual news stories. After finding that doing that didn't really work they added "By Columnist ________" as a byline. I still hear people referring to these columns as "fact" though. Their own ombudsman has put out columns mentioning all the things they have been trying to correct the misperceptions but for some reason it hasn't occurred to them to go back to putting opinion pieces in the Opinions section. For teh last few months it's been even more confusing because they've started attributing most of their stories on the 1st few pages with "By REPORTER's NAME; Boston Globe Staff" so now you can't tell if it's supposed to be "news" or a columinist piece again.