Eric Alterman: What's Really Wrong With the MSM?

[marmar]

from The Nation:



the liberal media | posted December 6, 2007 (December 24, 2007 issue)
What's Really Wrong With the MSM?
Eric Alterman



Of course, far more is wrong with the mainstream media than can be described, or even enumerated, in one column. But let's give it a shot, using only items that have come up since my last column, all of which speak to the issue of why its members have forfeited our collective trust.

1. Its members consistently defer to conservative Republican Presidents with a history of deliberate deception, allowing them to define their terms. "One of the reasons for not was, you know, honestly, a concern that because the White House has contended that this is not a civil war, that using the phrase amounted to a kind of unnecessary political statement."--Bill Keller, executive editor, New York Times.

2. Its members invite Republican Congressmen, known to be not merely unreliable but delusional, to lie about Democratic Congressmen. When challenged, they reply that they cannot be bothered to discern the truth: Time's Joe Klein, a pundit who terms the Democratic Party "a party with absolutely no redeeming social value," one whose members "make fools of themselves even when they speak the truth," recently informed the magazine's readers that "tone-deaf" Democrats in the House had passed legislation that "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only," and thereby "give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." The liberal blogosphere, led by Salon's Glenn Greenwald, demonstrated that this statement was categorically false, as the bill reads: "A court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States." Time eventually printed a correction but refused to adjudicate between truth and falsehood, claiming merely that Democrats and Republicans interpret the bill differently. Klein shrugged off criticism by saying, "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." Later Republican Peter Hoekstra, who is also on record insisting that the United States had discovered a WMD program in Iraq but that the CIA had conspired to cover it up, revealed that he had been a key source for Klein's reporting.

3. Its members invite conservative Republican individuals known to be insane, unbalanced and unconcerned with the truth to lie about Democratic presidential candidates on the front page of their newspapers and when confronted respond that it is not their job to determine the truth. The Washington Post's Perry Bacon published a recent front-page article giving voice to right-wing paranoids, racists and assorted hatemongers who insist that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim. Sources included the Moonie-financed Insight online magazine, Human Events (home to Ann Coulter), demagogues Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh, and some guy who posted on the Internet somewhere. Beyond the Obama campaign's denials, nowhere in the piece did Bacon inform readers that these allegations are demonstrably false. In an online chat, the paper's Lois Romano explicitly defended the practice, claiming that "airing some of this and giving a chance to deny its accuracy could be viewed as setting the record straight." ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071224/alterman

[The Magistrate]

1. An Excellent Piece, Sir!

A pleasure to give it its first recommendation.

[MADem]

2. SECOND rec--great article. NT

[BrklynLiberal]

3. So their defense is that lying by omission is not reallly lying???

Excuse me while I puke up my lunch....

[DURHAM D]

4. Another recommendation and on the subject of the msm -

check out today's The Daily Howler.

In fact, read it every day if your blood pressure can take it.

[durrrty libby]

5. K for later

[blm]

6. Media is doing the job its owners WANT it to do. Prop up fascist agenda and target

any anti-corruption, open government lawmaker who seeks to uncover the illegal operations by government officials that have been pursued to benefit that agenda.

[Joe Fields]

7. Nice article.

[NewJeffCT]

8. Good article, but

is it just that Republicans are willing to lie, slander, use & abuse the media, and make up shit out ouf thin air, without consequence etc whereas Democrats at least have some standards and don't stoop to that level?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

9. she is trying to go cold turkey on that stuff

but Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson keep convincing her otherwise.

[in_cog_ni_to]

10. "Its members invite conservative Republican individuals known to be insane, unbalanced and

unconcerned with the truth"....:rofl::rofl: See! We aren't the only people who know these people are INSANE and UNBALANCED!:rofl:

Great article! K & R!

[Hidden Stillness]

11. The Problem is Consolidation of Ownership

The real problem with the current corporate media, is that it is not "mainstream" at all anymore, but is almost completely consolidated and centralized. (The FCC has been having some extremely contentious meetings lately, and a House hearing, on some of these issues.) It is now completely removed from the population and society, narrowed down to a corporate-boardroom flow of propaganda representing only a few corporations, and all things nowadays, told from a corporate persepective. There are no longer any reports ON corporations; now everything is told exclusively FROM the corporation.

Because of consolidation, they are able to narrow down, and "dumb down," all issue coverage, to a few endlessly repeating stories, all with the same angle, the same slogans, the same premises, and the same commentators on it all, as if there are only about 10 people in the world. The corporate perspective is so complete, that issues of media itself are killed by it: anyone who criticizes the media is laughed at or treated as "pathetic" or as "having an agenda"; the issue of media consolidation is treated exclusively as "consumers" getting "choice" ("great!"), or "investors" and "competition" ("great!"), and never as complete lack of access of the public to the public airwaves or the complete death of local coverage, talk shows, etc. All "economic" issues are treated as corporate executives or stockowners or investors--only--discussing "confidence" and "taxes" ("bad"), and "opening markets," things which relate to almost no one; middle class and poor employees or those on fixed incomes are never on (they are nuisances, of course), and their wages are only referred to as losses of corporate profit; unemployment rates are never quoted anymore.

Only Republicans are quoted at all anymore, whether pro- or against Bush. They are like corporate executives and bankers--they are the only "experts"; only they exist. There is a stifling claustrophobia about the media nowadays; it is not at all a "window on the world" anymore. It is like being shoved into a narrow little box, with the same stories, the same propaganda slogans, the same people talking, over and over and over, a smaller and smaller scope of things, like the voice of your corporate employer piping in propaganda all day and night, and us unable to even answer or change it, anymore.

[EV_Ares]

13. Yes, you are on the right track. It is the consolidation of the corporate media

that we need to be concerned about. I would hope the democrats if they are able to build on their majority would take a look at thhis and see if there are cases where it needs to be broken up.

[dysfunctional press]

28. don't count on the corporatist/dlc/clinton wing of the democratic party for that.

bill clinton was the one who signed the Telecom Act into law.

[Dulcinea]

12. The job of the news media isn't to report news.

It's to SELL AD TIME.

As we all know, the major media in the USA is all owned by huge conglomerates, who expect it to turn a quarterly profit like all the company's other divisions. Their only loyalty is to the stockholders. Therefore, there are many stories that go unreported, because they won't make the money that celebrity drivel, disasters or car chases do.

Follow the money, as always.

[AndyTiedye]

15. Even Ratings and Ad Revenue Take a Back Seat to Catapulting the Propaganda

If it were all about ratings and ad revenue, surely the MSM would have done more with the Watergate hooker scandal.
That has sex, corruption in high places, and it was happening at the WATERGATE!
For some reason the Mighty Slime Machine wasn't all that interested.

Compare that to the All-Monica-All-the-Time coverage we got less than a decade ago.

They will happily sacrifice ratings to push their parent corporations' agenda!

[EV_Ares]

14. Kick this.

[DeepModem Mom]

16. K&R

[Beetwasher]

17. The So-Called "MSM" Needs To Be Permanently Put Out Of It's Misery

And bludgeoned to death w/ a heavy blunt instrument. If I could, I would murder the so-called "MSM". It needs to die violently, spectacularly and painfully (figuratively speaking of course) as a lesson to those that would follow and repeat it's egregious crimes.

[Supersedeas]

18. Joe Kliens career will forever be marked by that piece

[marmar]

19. Yup.....

Not exactly the career-defining piece you want.

[tom_paine]

20. Succintly said. That's the "nuts and bolts" of it.

That's basically it. It's insane, upside-down, and it is very real.

How did this happen, is another question, but not nearly as pertinent as where do we go from here?

Can something like this be changed back. In many ways, our news process has been gleichschaltung, which is the Nazi term for taming their MSM and ultimately controlling it.

Our MSM needs no such brutal measures to perform almost identically, along with being far more subtle to the disinterested observer, which gives the Bushies their beloved Plausible Deniability.

[Beetwasher]

23. You Don't Go Back, You Move Forward, Around, And Past The Obstacle

And we're doing it right here. The "MSM" is becoming irrelevant in a very, very rapid fashion. It took conservatives what? 30 years to get their strangle hold on traditional media. The internets are bypassing it in what? 7 years maybe? We will only get stronger as the "MSM" either adapts and changes in response to the superiority and soon to be complete dominance of the internets, or becomes completely irrelevant and bypassed.

[tom_paine]

25. I hoep you are right. But DU is the tiny minority of the generally forward-thinking.

What percentage of our fellow Imperial Subjects still accept MSM half-truths and disinformation (let alone the 24/7 framing of an anti-democratic (small and large 'd' both) commercial, essentially.

40%? Higher. 60%? Some might say in the absence of harrd data that 60% os a reasonable number.

My guess, even at this late date, when many dislike Bushler (he is the most hated since polling was started), it is IN SPITE of their uncritical acceptance of MSM lies, half-truths, omissions, and Bushie frames, that they arrived at their conclusions, not because of it.

70%? 80? Still too low, I think.

I hope you are correct, Beetwasher, and I certainly am not advocating giving up to anyone.

But I just do not see it. People grumble, but that's ok, as long as they don't interfere or take any active role, verbal or otherwise, against the serial-felonies of the Royal and Loyal Bushies, then they can grumble all they want, make all the jokes they want.

Yours is a sunny and optimistic view, which to my mind is not reflective of current trends at all, though I understand we will have to agree to disagree. It may yet come true, I just don't see any real motion (like the bitter jokes of the opponents of the bushies and Nazis alike, seemed to be the biggest form of true resitance in both regimes...Daily Show, anyone?) towards something like that.

Again I say, perhaps the single thing I have repeated lo these seven long years.

I hope I am wrong and you are right.

[Beetwasher]

26. Oh, Trust Me, I'm Not Overly Optimistic

I'm only pretty sure that Traditional Media is a dying medium and is on it's way out. That doesn't mean it's happening IN TIME or the internet WILL be the "savior" IT CAN BE. But it IS an antidote, though it might be to little, too late.

[NJCher]

27. Beetwasher's position supported by academic research

Yours is a sunny and optimistic view, which to my mind is not reflective of current trends at all, though I understand we will have to agree to disagree.

I don't know if Beetwasher is a media scholar, but his position is supported by media research. I'm an academic who has been following this issue for years--have even taught entire courses on it--and I concur with him.

If you want to read more lively reports on it (rather than academic journals), read the blog "The Longtail" by Chris Williams, Wired Magazine. He took time off from his job to write a book on the topic.

http://www.thelongtail.com/



Cher

[iamahaingttta]

21. What to do about it?

How about start by not giving them your eyeballs.
It's so easy to complain about all this, and then go over to CNN.com to see what's going on.
Stop giving them the hits!

[pretzel4gore]

22. could it be the media's 'carrion necktie'?

in old days, when a normally good dog suddenly began killing the chickens, the farmer would tie a dead chicken to dog's neck and leave it there...after a few days, the dog was whining to the farmer, begging to be freed of the chicken, which then began to really smell as it turned hideous. The dog simply couldn't get away from its chicken (and by then no one and nothing would allow the dog to be near) so it suffered by itself out in the fields. Finally, the farmer took pity, cut the bonds, and the dog went back to being the trusty farm hand it used to be.
The dead 'chicken' is george bush, the 'dog' is the newsmedia/bush voters/supporters, and the 'farmer' is we the people....but the problem in this scenerio is that the chicken, though a hideous rotting maggot infested horrorshow, tied securely to the neck of the bushmedia and bush supporters, IS STILL ACTUALLY ALIVE! And the 'farmer' is so wary of the dog, which has historically torn farmers apart, that the farmer has no idea how to cut the bonds tying bush to the media! And of course the media itself can't get ridda bush, in part because bush the chicken is right by the bird's jugular vein! (this presupposes everyone agrees the media aided/abetted the nov7/00 coup when bush stole election, by presenting it next morning to the farmer ie we the people, as a 'fait accompli' The bushies then mihop/lihop'ed 911 to make clear to media that there's no going back for them, etc) Or else!

[UpInArms]

24. when we cancelled our Time subscription, we cited specifically

that piece of shit, Joe Klein.

Will never ever help this POS buy any groceries as long as I live

Time's Joe Klein, a pundit who terms the Democratic Party "a party with absolutely no redeeming social value,"