Eric Alterman: Journalism's Age of Shame

[babylonsister]

http://www.thenation.com/article/38026/journalisms-age-shame

Journalism's Age of Shame
Eric Alterman

July 29, 2010 |
This article appeared in the August 16/23, 2010 edition of The Nation.


The black political art of "working the refs" with constant and vociferous complaints of "liberal bias" in the media has a long and distinguished history. Few of its practitioners, however, have succeeded so frequently—and nakedly—as the ex-Drudge drudge and Arianna acolyte Andrew Breitbart. The estimable E.J. Dionne terms Breitbart to be the MSM's virtual "assignment editor" and, indeed, it's hard not to be impressed. Breitbart has already been exposed as a provocateur who cares not a whit for honesty or accuracy in his self-declared war on all things liberal. Yet reporters, editors and producers remain so frightened by his accusations that they continue to trumpet them as they search their souls to purge themselves of the bias that prevented them from seeing the world from a Tea Party point of view.

Remember, the very same techniques deployed to defame Shirley Sherrod and discredit the NAACP were employed to destroy ACORN, albeit aided by the idiocy of a couple of low-level ACORN employees. Breitbart's underlings, the admitted criminal James O'Keefe and his associate Hannah Giles, lied to ACORN about their respective identities for the purpose of surreptitiously taping their words and actions and then releasing a doctored version of the tape to the credulous media. They misrepresented their own dress and demeanor in this visit—they were not dressed up as a comic-book pimp and ho—and O'Keefe also claimed that an undercover video campaign was a "nationwide ACORN child prostitution investigation" implicating numerous ACORN employees. In the heavily edited videos Breitbart released of their encounters at eight ACORN offices, he (and they) failed to note that in at least six of these, they did not get their desired result. (Some ACORN employees contacted the authorities.) Of course, we did not learn any of this until after the MSM conspired with Breitbart and company to help destroy ACORN based on this false and defamatory narrative.

Recall, again, that vis-à-vis ACORN, media machers could not flagellate themselves fast enough for their previous failure to follow Breitbart into the gutter. Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism explained, "Complaints by conservatives are slower to be picked up by non-ideological media because there are not enough conservatives and too many liberals in most newsrooms." Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli worried, "We are not well-enough informed about conservative issues. It's particularly a problem in a town so dominated by Democrats and the Democratic point of view." Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander added that "traditional news outlets like The Post simply don't pay sufficient attention to conservative media or viewpoints." New York Times managing editor Jill Abramson admitted "insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio." Meanwhile, on ABC News, George Stephanopoulos thought the ACORN fable worthy of being raised in a rare one-on-one interview opportunity with President Obama, who replied that he wasn't following the story very closely and, by the way, had more important problems to address. (US grants to ACORN, already suspended at the time, accounted for less than one-thousandth of 1 percent of annual US government spending.)

In the now infamous case of Shirley Sherrod, Breitbart deployed doctored video again to falsely accuse Sherrod of discriminating against whites as a federal employee, pretending that a story about overcoming racism was really one endorsing it. When that lie was exposed, he insisted that his real target had been the NAACP, for allegedly cheering on Sherrod's alleged racism. This too was a lie. There was no applause in the undoctored video for any racist statements. Nothing Breitbart said about the story checked out once the full video became available.

And the MSM machers? Well, they can't help but notice that they got taken this time, but they prefer to chalk it up to "ideology." "There's been this proliferation of partisan media—whether it's MSNBC and Fox at night, or it's Breitbart on the right or Huffington Post on the left," complains Politico executive editor James VandeHei, and it makes honest folk like MSM reporters "overreact." Writing with Politico editor in chief John Harris, VandeHei pronounces the dawning of an "Age of Rage," equating Breitbart and company's perversion of the truth with the fact that some liberal journalists and academics participated in occasionally less than polite discussions about conservatives (and one another). The private discussions of this listserv, called "Journolist"—discussed in my previous column—were either hacked by or leaked to Tucker Carlson's right-wing website, The Daily Caller, and, as with the Sherrod tape, edited for the purposes of deception and false accusation. In the careless reasoning of the Politico honchos, these discussions deserved equation with Breitbart's nefarious techniques because both "featured sharp personal attacks against political opponents. Both revolved around indignant claims from people claiming to be victims of bias and the corrupt ideological agendas of their opponents—all the while stoking and profiting from the bias and conspiratorial instincts of partisans on their own side." As a result, they worry, "Responsible people in power and in the mainstream media are only beginning to grapple with this new environment—in which facts hardly matter except as they can be used as weapon or shield in a nonstop ideological war."

Talk about facts hardly mattering. Do the Politicos even notice that they are embracing yet another false narrative put forth by right-wing ideologues? If this is how "responsible people in power and in the mainstream media" distinguish between truth and falsehood, no wonder Breitbart and company feel empowered to lie and manipulate data to suit their ideological agenda. Call it journalism's "Age of Shame."

Eric Alterman

[Triana]

1. You know, the media (ALL OF IT) has been doing this for decades..

...M$NBC, Fox, CNN, ABC, CBS - you name it. It's not a partisan thing and it's not NEW. They can destroy ANYONE, ANYTIME for ANY reason, just the same way. And they DO. It's how the media operate. Completely unregulated in regards to integrity and completely renegade.

The facts don't matter to them. MONEY does. And perhaps secondarily, owning and controlling public perception. DUers have been blinkered by it. Most still are. Time to wake up and smell the LIES from the lame$tream media. And it ain't just Breitbart slicing and dicing and re-assembling facts to portray a different story - it's ALL of them.

[Doctor_J]

5. Wow. Have you been watching Fox?

"It's not a partisan thing"

I can't believe how deluded this statement is. Big Media is extremely partisan. If they just wanted to destroy someone for ratings, they could have had a field day with Bush and Cheney.

You've bought into a right-wing lie, just like Alterman explains in this article.

[grasswire]

7. your word "unregulated" makes me nervous

The last thing I want for America is a "regulated" media.

How would you "regulate" integrity?

And why would you want the nation's press to not be "renegade"?

A free and unfettered press is all that stands between the people and tyranny. Free of regulation. Free to be renegade in any way it chooses to be.

Now...

The people and the president hold the power to diminish the influence of the vast right-wing conspiracy (and it does exist and it does hold us in a stranglehold).

The key is in regulation not of reporting, but of ownership of media outlets. It was under Bill Clinton that media conglomerates flourished and attacked diversity of reporting. The deregulation of the media was a stab in the heart of democracy. It should be repealed by the Obama administration.

Another weapon the people have against the media is in supporting media watchdog organizations such as mediamatters.org and FAIR.org. But the left is going to have to put its money to the effort to roll back the press to the middle. It is well noted that the left tends to fund ecological and social justice entities while the right funds to propagandize opinion. On the left: Greenpeace, Sierra Club, etc. On the right: Heritage Foundation, etc.

The war against the press by the right is actually traceable. It was a concerted and organized effort funded largely by Richard Mellon Scaife. You can read all about it.

And it's not just a war by corporatists. It is a war by propagandists -- hard core ideologists.

[Uncle Joe]

2. The corporate media is not liberal nor are they conservative, they're just corporate.

That's all 90% of them give a shit about, they're worried about their good life, fame, pay checks, influence, power and they know if they don't toke on the corporate bong of propaganda, they will be out.

So they kiss up, brown nose, bullshit, lie, slander, libel, obfuscate, omit, project, coopt and dangle inane, shiny objects all to keep the American People, confused, divided, distracted and stupid.

There are a very few exceptions but even they can only push the tiny ass envelope so far.

Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, babylonsister.

[depakid]

3. distinguish between truth and falsehood- something that the American people are no longer

capable of doing.

[The Wizard]

4. Breitbart, the Republicans and the corporate media

are all exploiting the great dumbing down. With critical thinking on the back burner in education and learning how to make a dollar at the forefront, scumbags like Breitbart succeed without "refudiation" because journalism and the free press are no longer Democracy's watchdog, but rather a lapdog for corporate interests whose bottom lines are all that matters, truth and integrity be damned.
The Fourth Estate has become a Fifth Column only serving the hostile corporate takeover of the government.
Breitbart and his ilk at Pox News are the enemy, and if we treat them as anything other than the enemy we're doomed.
Why did we fight WW II defeating the Nazis only to allow them unfettered access to our media all these years later?

[Doctor_J]

6. Spot on, Wiz

the other posters in this thread are as deluded as the right-wingers. Big Media is the enemy of the American people. Until we start fighting them, we will continue to live in fascism.