How many ways are our media failing?

What’s happened to the media? Something, that’s for sure. Yesterday over at Velociriot!, the brilliant Sam gave us all the lowdown on just how idiotic the coverage of the Boston Bombings really was. Sadly, she make a good case that because “the entire country sought information about what had happened” the normal process of confirming information and general values of skepticism disintegrated. Islamophobic attitudes went wild because the normal process of filtering at least a good chunk of them out went out the window – whether we’re talking about print, televised, or online media. It’s the phenomenon that gave us a stampede to call Florida for Bush in 2000 on steroids, and with numerous information networks now competing to instantly inform their audiences, it’s only going to get worse.

Today over there, the equally insightful Amanda pointed to a success story of sorts, where the Associated Press’s twitter account was hacked but was quickly called out as such. As much hope as there is in this reminder that even US media consumers aren’t as docile as we might sometimes think, it’s also a warning. The conditions in which modern media operate in the US aren’t conducive to the best reporting, but there’s also the various risks still posed by those that want to deliberately spread false information (in this case, that the White House had been attacked – following last week’s bombings, the intent to cause panic seems pretty transparent).

Of course, any such conversation about efforts to intentionally misinform the public has to acknowledge that it’s not just criminals. Sometimes these attempts are openly admitted to, and with perfect legality. Look no further than the Koch brothers’ interest in buying up the newspaper market.

(Of course, News Corporation owner Robert Murdoch proves you can have a hand in both of those cookie jars at the same time, from here.)

In this day and age, we can’t afford to not be skeptical of everything. Remember that.

Some quick thoughts on the dangers of our post-truth media

TW: references to slut-shaming rhetoric and classist anti-choice legislation

David Roberts has already the heavy lifting for me on this topic, what with his invention of the term “post-truth politics”, his documentation of how the shift towards it has destabilized our political system, and most recently how journalists face the age-old choice between collaboration with or resistance to this new political mode. As Roberts excellently summarizes it:

“Do [journalists] call them as they see them and get labeled ‘biased’ and ‘partisan’? Or do they follow the lead of The Washington Post’s The Fix and cover politics like a theater critic assessing performances? That’s been the default mode for Politico-style journalists (like, say, Mark Halperin) for a long time. It’s safe and comfortable. There’s rarely any penalty for getting things wrong. You can rise quite high among the ranks of Very Serious People in that mode. But for those like Ezra, rankled by facts, irritated by conscience, it’s not a very attractive route.”

While I think this is a great explanation of the choice that virtually all journalists today face – between advancement and decency, power and duty – it misses that not only are journalists competing for a small number of superior positions, but also their reporting impacts the feasibility of the system that rewards only a small minority of journalists. For that tiny group and those who hope to become one of them, reporting that is critical of this power structure, even of seemingly unrelated parts of it, is a threat to their elite or would-be elite status.

That’s why articles like Alessandra Stanley’s criticism of fact checking of the Republican National Convention (RNC) are written. In it, she compares MSNBC’s coverage of the RNC to a brothel, ostensibly for promoting liberal alternatives to the politics of the RNC or unduly criticizing the Romney campaign. Her coup de grâce concerns Melissa Harris-Perry’s apparently lack of decorum or detachment when she noted that Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell supported medically unnecessary and paid out-of-pocket trans-vaginal ultrasounds to gain access to an abortion. Contextualizing the RNC and its many flaws is apparently disturbingly unserious, and Ms Stanley has felt compelled to bash MSNBC for making the choice.

That’s the secondary struggle faced by journalists today – not only do they have to turn down the most lucrative positions in their field if they want to say what needs to be said, but they have to weather criticism from even the New York Times writer for televised ceremonies and programs for saying it. Even she is so invested in the existing journalism market that she cannot allow MSNBC’s hostility to a series of liars lying to them to go by without some judgment. Journalists committed to reporting the truth have to battle against the social and economic influences corrupting their field and the journalists corrupted by them.

But there’s also reason to hope here. There’s a reason the owners of the media have shrunk it down to a mere five major companies – a single concerted effort to criticize the power structure that has allowed the media oligopoly to develop could destroy it. Those companies need a media consensus to ignore the unsavory practices that affect reporters and their career opportunities. A single major channel, like MSNBC, breaking from the pack is sufficient to promote reforming the system and replacing these negative influences.

Our media needs to be more than repaired

You’ve probably recognized that I begin most posts here with a quick recap of typical coverage of an issue, to help clarify precisely what part of the larger issue is being frequently overlooked. I actually can’t write this entry with that type of introduction, as this subject is one that most journalists seem extremely enthusiastic to avoid. The only time I’ve even seen a major news outlet briefly encounter the growing problem of delocalized media was recently on The Rachel Maddow Show. The show’s host noted last week noted that an Associated Press (AP) article on the assassination of George Tiller was shockingly biased article. Consequently, not only was the article printed for the Kansans currently debating what groups or individuals were culpable for the political murder, but it was wired and published across the country.

This consolidation of most papers and other media into increasingly little more than deliverers of wire-sent texts, pictures, and other general information has been progressing for some time within the United States and elsewhere in the world. To this day, the US’s media industry prioritizes furthering those new methods, believing them to be more efficient and effective. While such advances connect distant communities to world events, they have also centralized media power to a frightening degree. Not only does misinformation (as Maddow documented) spread more easily, it spreads through a limited number of channels, arguably those of five major media corporations: Disney (which owns ABC), General Electric (which owns NBC), Viacom (which owns CBS), Time Warner (which owns CNN), and News Corporation (which owns Fox). Not only have many described the AP as medium through which those five operate as a oligopoly or cartel, but, as Ben Bagdikian’s The New Media Monopoly notes (on page 9), in early 2003 the five conglomerates shared at least forty-five “interlocking directors” who hold executive positions with two or more of those companies. In a very real sense, a small number of people effectively control the media within the United States with some influence throughout the world.

Many of the problems raised by this consolidation of power are stories being printed that are not fit to publish, as Maddow explained, but equally important are the stories or their components that I try to bring to light here – ones that aren’t published when they desperately need to be. Another depressing fact that The New Media Monopoly brings up is that-

“In October 2002, five months before the preinvasion bombing of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia, had publicized this past history of the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and placed the full details into that day’s Congressional Record [including that] the United States underwrote twenty-four American corporations so they could sell to Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction, which he used against Iran, at that time the prime Middle Eastern enemy of the United States. Hussein used U.S.-supplied poison gas against the Iranis and his Kurdish minorities while the United States looked the other way.”

Bigdikian continues on, noting that while the nonexistence of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq has become public knowledge, the full sordid story – involving the sales of those weapons as the US government’s explicit wishes, and as part of a proxy war against Iran – remains largely unknown, because of the major media outlets’ disinterest in the deeper deception involved with the invasion of Iraq. The increasingly consolidated media doesn’t just need to reform itself so that it doesn’t provide misinformation – it needs to be broken down so that vital information like this can be absorbed rather than ignored.