Posted on 03/22/2005 11:01:14 PM PST by NutCrackerBoy
For ideas that illuminate the rage out there journalists have to go outside their comfort zones, including the "liberal" zones in press thought. They have to find other sources of insight, and listen to explanations that may at first sound alien. Here are a few from the New Criterion...
"At a public meeting in Jackson, Miss., last week, a listener to NPR programs on Mississippi Public Broadcasting asked me if I had detected a sense of outrage growing in the country," wrote Jeffrey Dvorkin, ombudsman for NPR (March 8). "If my inbox is anything to go by, I certainly have."
Not just Dvorkin, but probably every ombudsman (male and female) could give the same report: a rising hostility pours in through the inbox. "The reasons for this cyber-outrage might be worth pondering," he said.
Yes, the reasons. Who really knows how to explain the kind of rage and discontent--primarily about "bias"--that visits the ombudsman's inbox anywhere there is such a box in the American news media today? If it's deserved, how did journalists come to deserve it? If it's not, how did so many Americans come to believe it?
Dvorkin's reasons are semi-plausible-- and totally familiar: "AM talk radio and cable television slugfests have given many the sense that this is what journalism should be." Or: "E-mail makes our natural sense of impatience more pronounced." These I would call factors. They are a long way from an understanding of causes, a long way from any why.
Calling for a more civil dialogue, as Dvorkin does, is perfectly well-intentioned. But it is not a reply to a sense of outrage growing in the country. Complaints about bias have mutated into something far more serious today: a campaign to discredit the liberal media, marginalize the national press, and deny professional journalism any hold on the public interest. I've been writing about it-- and objecting. So have others. David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times says we're paranoid.
A whole front in the Culture War is now devoted to these activities of disqualifying the traditional press, and raising substitutes like Jeff Gannon. That is action from the Right, but the Left often feels equally enraged at the failures of Big Journalism, and it is stupified by the success of the "liberal media" charge. What Liberal Media? as Eric Alterman put it (2003). Oh That Liberal Media, as the "reply blog" says back.
How did things get to this point?
For ideas that might illuminate the matter journalists have to go outside their comfort zones, including the "liberal" zones in current press think. They have to find other sources of insight, and listen to explanations that may at first sound alien. Better ideas to explain the rage about bias aren't going to come from the ombudsman's inbox because they aren't revealed in the rage. You can listen forever to that and not know why it's coming.
In the matter of how did we come to be attacked for being biased? I have an excursion to recommend. It's not topical. It's not typical. The tone is in fact classical; the frame of reference is the whole history and literature of the West. Journalism: Power without responsibility is an essay by Kenneth Minogue, who writes in the old school style of the learned man taking in a large subject and tracing things back to their roots. I found it in an obscure corner of the publishing world, Hilton Kramer's literary and cultural magazine, New Criterion, "a monthly review of the arts and intellectual life." (UPDATE, March 15: As I explained, "obscure corner" was a dumb way of introducing the magazine. Austin Bay agrees.)
Minogue's excursion is a challenging read. It will not sound familiar to working journalists, unless they took a great books curriculum in college. He writes in a tradition of culturally conservative criticism (you could also say high-mindedness) that looks with disdain on "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll." Liberation into appetite is not his idea of social progress. But then progress is not his idea of what to expect from life.
This is not my tradition-- at all. But today it has powerful voices speaking for it, and it always has. (The ur-text is Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses in 1930.) For a journalist wondering, "where is this rage coming from?" Minogue offers a unique vantage point. To caricature it, but only slightly: It's like a Western Civ course in what went wrong in the press.
If we go back as far as we can without losing the thread, where do the roots of today's bias wars lie? This is the matter Minogue spreads out on the table.
Critics conservative about culture let it be known that they mistrusted the modern media (as they distrusted the modern mass) well before the 1960s. They were reacting in part to the media diet of sensationalism, novelty, news, and scandal, which promised a kind of daily revelation. This was a false claim, they felt. Revelation was the business of religion, of the Church.
The ancient conservative complaint about the media is not liberal bias. It is the rising power of an institution celebrating novelty and change, and promising to reveal the secrets of the world through news reports about it. This conflicts with "the religious assumption that the essential truths of life have been revealed, but that the human world is dark and devious, and the connection between events is obscure."
Does anyone recall that jingle for Time magazine?
Throughout your world
Throughout your land
Time puts it all
Right in your hand
Read Time and understand!
"We might sometimes imagine that it is merely the stuff we read in the newspapers every day, but actually journalism is a mode in which we think," Minogue writes. "It indelibly marks our first response to everything."
But religion was supposed to do that: indelibly mark our first response to everything. Now it's the news. Now it's Katie Couric. "A passion to follow the actual events of the world seems to have continually grown," he writes of the period from 1600s to now. "The steady diffusion of a journalistic interest in what is going on affects our consciousness of the world we live in."
People sense this about the news, its effect on consciousness just by being all around us. But what language do they have for discussing it with members of the press? None. There is no language and there is no place. There's only "bias," and what is by now politicized rage.
Hegel said it: in his time, the newspaper habit was replacing morning prayer. The conservative mind began hating journalism right there. "Journalistic consciousness is imperialistic," Minogue writes, in echo of this moment. "It invades every sphere of life and takes it over."
He is trying to explain, to a much finer point than out current debates permit, the disdain that he and others of like mind feel for Big Journalism today, which in his view "has lost such integrity as it ever had and is being used to nudge us towards some version of right thinking." What's different is that he never--or almost never--simplifies. And in old school fashion he goes back many times to origins:
Historically, journalism emerged from the specific interests of princes, merchants, and administrators. A prince needed to know something of foreign powers, and his ambassador sent him back reports, just as a merchant needed to know of profitable opportunities and conditions of trade.
This is accurate. Among the first correspondents was "the ambassador writing to his prince." What's different today is that the part of prince is played by the national public. Rather than a specific interest, it is thought to have a general stake in news (which is where "the public's right to know" comes from.) Minogue realizes how modern a generalized demand for news is:
No life can avoid gossip, ritual, and response to overriding events such as war or famine, but most people, especially if they are illiterate, have hitherto been interested in little beyond what affects them directly. Journalism is the cultivation of concern for things that are for the most part remote from us.
And there is a connection between that remoteness and the willingness to rage at the news criers.
Here, however, I have to point out that political business transacted at court or in the capital has always affected people directly and indirectly, regardless of whether they knew much about it. Literate and informed, or illiterate and out of touch, the great mass of people do have an interest--a very legitimate one--in things that are "for the most part remote from us" because they take place within the power structure that runs our world, allegedly on our behalf.
Suppose we believe in "trustee" government. How else can we know if it's behaving responsibly, if not through news reports from an independent source? There's an interest in following "remote" events that is inseparable from a modern citizen's duty to hold elected government accountable. It can't be "wrong" unless popular sovereignty itself is wrong.
But the conservative temper trusts little in what the mind loves immediately to know. An appetite for news involves a "lust to see and know things of no concern to us," says Minogue (who would smile knowingly at a pop term like "news junkie.") But he also says that the kind of curiosity modern journalism satisfies is "a distant relative of the 'wonder' thought to be the source of philosophy and science." The DNA of the Enlightenment is thus involved.
And he further says that journalism is essential; we feel we can't live without knowing of distant and nearby events. We depend on news to get our bearings in the world. But this is not incompatible with rage and may even increase it. Thus: "our addiction to journalism is virtually inseparable from our dislike of it."
Contrary to what most are taught in journalism school, Minogue sees disaster in the "social responsibility" theory of a professionalized press. (A flash point.) He would name that a wrong turn. It was a disaster, he thinks, when it happened in education. "Teachers came to think that, because they were custodians of the minds of the rising generation, they held the key to social progress."
Something similar happened in journalism, which began to acquire "the affectations of an elite possessed of saving knowledge."
The Salvationism in this doctrine consisted in the belief that in being skeptical of all universal claims, the journalist as critical thinker was revealing a sophistication superior to that of the average voter. The test of such critical sophistication was that the journalist held opinions liberated from the influence of his or her milieu...
That's true, I think. But here the argument takes one wrong turn and gets lost in a critique of academic fashion--the "everything's a construction" school of thought--which is a whole chapter in the Culture Wars, and in the American university's recent past. And while that chapter is important in the world of the New Criterion (and important generally, I believe) it has little to do with professional training or identity in journalism.
His theory: because journalists became university-educated after World War II, and universities allegedly fell captive to social constructionists and tenured radicals who "took over" the campus, the ideas absorbed in college help explain liberal bias in the press.
Plausible from a distance. The truth is most journalists remained hostile to those ideas, and to reading the books in which they were found. The J-School, throughout the entire post-war period, remained a "boot camp" experience-- the opposite of a book club. The professional culture of the press generally despises "academic" ideas about itself, reacts to jargon as if it were an S.T.D., and treats a name like Michel Foucault as a synonym for gobbledygook. Many times in my career I have been asked, by college-educated journalists, what I could possibly know about journalism since I never worked in a newsroom.
If Minogue was more familiar with that creature Newsroom Joe he would be quite impressed with how much overt loathing and intelligent resistance there is for "academic sophistication." The reason is simple. Journalists like facts. They're empiricists in the sense that currency, for them, is the verifiable fact not yet publicly known. They don't want to become social constructionists and lose that.
And so journalists in the United States held on to ideas about objectivity and factuality that were under assault in other disciplines because in those ideas they found refuge from the criticism they knew would come their way. The notorious example is the mechanical "He Said, She Said" formula in newswriting. (See my post about it.) Useless for truthtelling but not bad in serving as refuge.
So Minogue gets it wrong about journalism and "academic sophistication." The professional model for training young journalists, coupled with their introduction to workaday attitudes in internships and student newspapers, reinforced by the professional culture they immediately find on the job, prevented the "fall" of objectivity and old fashioned ideas like accuracy, verifiability, balance, fairness. At times Minogue seems to realize this.
The crudest way of formulating our dislike would be to say that the picture of the world presented in newspapers and television programs jars with our political opinions. The discontent is greater among those on the right than those on the left but both share it. And here the discontent must seem odd, because journalists pride themselves on covering, or trying to cover, all points of view.
Here at the "crudest" level, the bias wars rage indefinitely, filling the inboxes.
Minogue tries to explain the anger as a reaction to another cultural "formation" in mainstream journalism. Sometimes called the watchdog press, it's the image of an adversarial system pitting journalists against officials and authorities. Included are the heroic figure of the investigative reporter, the pride taken in the "crap-detecting" skills that are native to the reporter's craft, and the battle to reveal secrets that reaches its historic and dramatic high point in Watergate.
All were supposed to be "innocent" methods (and fair) because the skepticism applied to both sides, one's friends and one's foes. But this ignores the way skepticism of that type takes sides against authority itself, which always has something to hide-- even when legitimate. Not even the most pious man fully practices what he preaches, and so there is always something to "reveal."
And so the kind of revelation offered in journalism ("...further revelations today in the story of...") is a degraded form-- to some. A cultural conservative might be highly aware of this, while the mainstream journalist remains oblivious.
Minogue slows things down. He tries to pick out the point where suspicion becomes a pose and loses contact with political realities, with the situation of the ambassador writing to his prince. After pointing to some "philosophers of suspicion," (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud) he says that "in journalism we find suspicion as the constitutive passion of an entire practice." Journalists will thus fight for their chosen identity as society's free-range crap-detectors. He says:
The rational basis of modern journalism, its claim to our attention as bringing us knowledge of the world, thus turns out to be the practice of revealing what other people want to hide from us. This is, of course, particularly true of what authority wants to hide.The First World War was a watershed in the growth of cynicism about authority. People came to think that the official account of almost anything was generally wrong. Here then we find the beginnings of the journalistic posture of indignation as the reporter demands full disclosure of whatever the public might be thought to have a right to know.
That posture, he suggests, has hurt the press. And indeed there are journalists (I've met them) who define news as "what somebody wants to keep out of the papers." Minogue traces the mythology of exposure back to the 19th Century realists in literature:
Novelists such as Dickens and Zola were certainly not the first to explore low life, but they extended the boundaries of social understanding in order to incorporate the experiences of socially insignificant people into the materials of drama, and also to reveal some of the realities -- usually poverty, vice, and oppression -- behind the facades of the time.The crucial ideas of this literary movement were those of journalists themselves -- indeed both Dickens and Zola had been journalists in their time. The basic idea of literary realism is that life is a theater put on for show, and that reality is what you find when you go behind the scenes. Reality, in other words, is something concealed by those whose interest lies in concealment. The posture of the journalist is thus that of the investigator debunking institutions by exposing secrets.
After Watergate, this became a method for generating authority in journalism. One of its most stylized forms is, of course, the CBS program Sixty Minutes.
Indeed, journalism exposes things that perhaps ought to be exposed, and prevents evils, but by that very token, it becomes a practical player in the world, and thus finds itself in contradiction with its own posture as a critic above the battles of partisans.
True. And that contradiction, left unresolved, has been a big factor in the rage. Now we come closer to where the power of the essay lies. It begins with a strange observation about pleasure and pain, opinion and news:
To hold an opinion is to mortgage a certain amount of pleasure and pain to the turn of events. What confirms one's opinion gives pleasure, what seems to refute it, pain.
Maybe it explains some of the inbox: Those people are in pain! This idea resembles the explanation most popular with journalists: "your anger is with a world that refuted your hopes, but you've directed it at us, the news criers, because we delivered the message."
For example, one day the new criers might say: "Sorry, Republicans, but a new and credible study doesn't support your hope that Charter Schools deliver a better education. Turns out the kids in Charter schools aren't doing any better than kids in other schools, and some are worse off. Now here are the facts..."
And what Republicans then interpret as a contest of opinion (their own vs. the journalist's) the journalist treats as a conflict between opinion and actual knowledge -- reality in the form of a news report based on it. The critics, cast as true believers, cannot accept reality (bad news); that is why they rage at media "bias," according to this view.
There was a deadly complacency in this attitude, for it gave a warrant to ignore what critics were saying. Minogue remarks on the dangers of what I have called the View From Nowhere, which only seems to be the safe position for a mainstream journalist to hold. It hasn't turned out that way. (On this see my recent post, The Abyss of Observation Alone.) Minogue:
The journalist, living amidst opinions, knows by instinct the pains of being caught out holding a vulnerable opinion. The first move in his professionalization, as it were, must therefore be to evacuate any position that might be explained by others as arising from his own interest: anything having to do with class, nationality, or civilization: all such inherited baggage must be abandoned by the journalist. The problem is that whoever abandons interests -- which have about them a certain discussable reality, where compromise is possible -- finds that his stock of opinions consists of abstract ideas. These will usually take an ethical form, and that impels them towards righteousness. Any such package of opinions is likely to irritate patriots and partisans of all kinds. The holder of such a position is usually enormously self-satisfied, because, having arrived there by the process of identifying extremes as things to be challenged and questioned, he fancies himself as having all the rationality of an Aristotelian mean.
"Reality is what you find when you go behind the scenes." The self-satisfaction in being the skeptic to everyone else's true believer. The righteousness among society's free-range crap-detectors. The self-image as balancer while "you and him fight." The tendency to shout out abstractions when asked, "what are your interests in the matter?" "A sophistication superior to that of the average voter." The hollowness of the view from nowhere. The arid rationality in trying to be an Aristotelian mean.
These are some of Kenneth Minogue's suggestions for how things got to where they are between the cultural right and journalism. I don't buy all of it, but then I am not a cultural conservative in the New Criterion mold. I do recommend reading Journalism: Power without responsibility. In fact, I recommend struggling with it.
And after that, go here to struggle some more.
Way too complicated.
The bias is more than mere logical faults; it is a snooty, patronizing, condescending, blatantly lying, personally insulting, double-speak load of B.S. that comes across.
No other way to put it.
The MSM's problem is the same as that of the tobacco companies. When the tobacco companies said that there was no proof that smoking harmed you, everyone knew they were lying. And because of that, people eventually came to despise the tobacco companies for their lies. With the MSM, the lie is that they are objective, impartial presenters of the news. Conservatives (at the least) know that that is a lie and as a result conservatives, along with a great many other people, have come to despise the MSM for their repeated and ongoing lies about their alleged 'objectivity'. At this point, it is probably too late to undo the damage they have done to their profession, but they might make a start by coming completely clean on their obvious and overwhelming liberal biases that pervade almost every story they present.
The coverage of the Schiavo case is in itself a case study of what is wrong with the mainstream press. They did no independent investigation whatsoever, they simply decided which side they liked (the one conservatives aren't on) and took all their statements at face value, and printed them as fact.
I would generally disagree that there is a liberal bias in the press. Personally, I think that the media is guilty of two different biases: a bias towards conflict, and a pack mentality bias.
The MSM definitely needs to change it's SOP if it wants to be respected fully by the American people again. I'm not sure what it is, but something definitely needs to change, and it may need to be a major overhaul of certain things. Personally, I would love more international coverage, and fewer shows where people yell at each other.
They can't do that because they really and truly don't understand it.
Of course the media is biased. There has never been an objective media in the history of America. And there is nothing wrong at all with the media being biased. What is wrong about it is the facade of objectivity masking the bias.
He didn't commit a crime, but there was a controversy over whether or not he had a concealed relationship with administration officials.
His first question basically started the whole controversy because it contained a factual error (Harry Reid never talked about soup lines), and it was later found that he was able to get into the press briefings using an assumed name. He was also found to have a connection to the Plame case, which added suspicion over his relationship with the administration.
Had you read my whole post, you would have found that I did not argue that the press was unbiased.
Laziness is one of the major problems with journalism today. They simply don't bother to look for truth. They want it fed to them and the ones they trust to feed them truth (other liberals) then get their version reported.
The author (or the person he is quoting) makes a valid point about professionals turning into social engineers - concerned more with whether a story would aid them in their quest for liberal utopia than whether it was actually fair or true. Through it "advocacy journalism" was born in the 1980s that cared less about whether a reporter was factual or fair, rather whether it advanced a cause.
The other major problem is that America once had a singular perspective that allowed journalism to report through that prism without challenging it. America was a good God-fearing people whose sworn enemy first was Nazism and then Communism. Americans rooted for America and believed that God was on our side. Somehow, though, enough revisionism and cultural self-loathing have seeped into our system that when somebody at Fox News wears a US Flag lapel pin on the air, the other networks (notably CNN and PBS) recoil in horror that someone could sully their objectivity so. When someone like Judy Woodruff asks her viewers to pray on the afternoon of 9-11, it rings hollow as her network goes out of its way to bash Christians the rest of the time. So even a proper comment is received with resentment. How dare she ask her viewers to pray?
Journalists are caught in the crossfire of the increasing polarization of our country - a divisiveness so intense that we can't even show support for our own brave soldiers without some people getting into a snit over it. Yes, their bias is evident (particularly in their selection of stories and the words they use to characterize what they describe), but the media almost can't be anything else in today's culture because we have lost our common ground. There is almost nothing you can say now which won't cause somebody to viscerally disagree with you. Keep the feeding tube in place while courts decide if a woman is fit to live? Hell no, say some. Keep a rescued child in this country rather than send him back to Communism? Hell no, say some. Allow homosexuals to be legally married? Hell yes, say some. I can't fathom our people wrestling with these issues 30 years ago, can you? The thought would have been dismissed as the musings of lunatics.
That doesn't excuse the blatant lying and mischaracterizations often made by the media but it hopefully points out why so many are so sensitive to it today. We just aren't "one nation" anymore. It's not easy to broadcast to a country that can no longer share one voice on even the easiest of topics.
I'm tempted to say: "Uh, Jay, why not read try reading the words on those emails? What do they say? Respond to them. Use a little of that old-fashioned dialectic method."
"Hegel said it: in his time, the newspaper habit was replacing morning prayer. The conservative mind began hating journalism right there."
He may be, as you say, a "thoughtful liberal," but he's taking the easy way out by blaming the so-called "religious right."
The side show element is indeed strong, but so is the leftist bias. It is a fact, beyond question.
Allright, if I concede that there is some liberal bias, would you also concede that there is some right-wing bias appearing as well?
The right wing bias is among the punditry: newspaper columns, talk shows, etc., and that bias is not hidden. People like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Steyn are completely honest and straight forward about their points of view.
The actual news reporting is very nearly 100% left wing bias under the guise of objectivity.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.