Jeff Cohen’s piece published on The Huffington Post yesterday is of import…
“In the fall of 2002, week after week, I argued vigorously against invading Iraq in debates televised on MSNBC. I used every possible argument that might sway mainstream viewers — no real threat, cost, instability. But as the war neared, my debates were terminated.
In my 2006 book Cable News Confidential, I explained why I lost my airtime:
“There was no room for me after MSNBC launched Countdown: Iraq — a daily one-hour show that seemed more keen on glamorizing a potential war than scrutinizing or debating it. Countdown: Iraq featured retired colonels and generals, sometimes resembling boys with war toys as they used props, maps and glitzy graphics to spin invasion scenarios. They reminded me of pumped-up ex-football players doing pre-game analysis and diagramming plays. It was excruciating to be sidelined at MSNBC, watching so many non-debates in which myth and misinformation were served up unchallenged.”
It was bad enough to be silenced. Much worse to see that these ex-generals — many working for military corporations — were never in debates, nor asked a tough question by an anchor. (I wasn’t allowed on MSNBC unless balanced by at least one truculent right-winger.)
Except for the brazenness and scope of the Pentagon spin program, I wasn’t shocked by the recent New York Times report exposing how the Pentagon junketed and coached the retired military brass into being “message-force multipliers” and “surrogates” for Donald Rumsfeld’s lethal propaganda.
The biggest villain here is not Rumsfeld or the Pentagon. It’s the TV networks. In the land of the First Amendment, it was their choice to shut down debate and journalism.
No government agency forced MSNBC to repeatedly feature the hawkish generals unopposed. Or fire Phil Donahue. Or smear weapons expert Scott Ritter. Or blacklist former attorney general Ramsey Clark. It was top NBC/MSNBC execs, not the Feds, who imposed a quota system on the Donahue staff requiring two pro-war guests if we booked one anti-war advocate — affirmative action for hawks.
I’m all for a Congressional investigation into the Pentagon’s Iraq propaganda operation — which included an active-duty general exhorting ex-military-turned-paid-pundits that “the strategic target remains our population.”
But I’m also for keeping the focus and onus on CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC, CBS, even NPR - who were partners in the Pentagon’s mission of “information dominance.” And for us to see that American TV news remains so corrupt today that it has hardly mentioned the Times story on the Pentagon’s pundits, which was based on 8,000 pages of internal Pentagon documents acquired by a successful Times lawsuit.”
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Good piece. The football analogy is painfully accurate. It’s puzzling to me, though, why the networks WOULDN’T want debate and challenge, if not to be fair and balanced (which I guess is too idealistic in today’s media world), then at least to produce more compelling television. Don’t they swarm all over controversy and altercation? Isn’t that better, even from their point of view, than a bunch of party-line cheerleaders?
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Do people actually watch that stuff? About 5 minutes is all I can stomach.
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Well, you also have to remember that, at the beginning of the war, something like 70% of Americans polled were in favor of the war and/or how the war was being handled… and the 30% who disapproved were usually accused of giving comfort to terrorists. The media simply gave more coverage to the side of the story that the people wanted. And while the media is SUPPOSED to report both sides of the story, in a fair and unbalanced fashion… their advertising revenues require viewers. So they gave the people what they wanted–glitzy and glamorous depictions that had little basis in reality.
(And now that the numbers have flip-flopped, I’d like to find one of those 70% who approved and are now are among the 70% who DISapprove and smack them around for being such sheep.)
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News should not be dictated by ratings!
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very well written…
this doesnt suprise me one bit; and i wont be suprised to hear more stories like it…
just another reason to avoid those programs at all costs…..i am totally convinced that MSNBC and/or CNN (and any sort of affiliate channels) not only knowingly broadcast rightwing propaganda AROUND THE CLOCK, but the channels themselves are propaganda.
blech.
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Quoting revisited:
AGREED!
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Sensationalism at its best – and worst (whichever way you look at it).
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Why is the First Amendment so sacred that we may not tolerate the minimal self-regulation of the practice of journalism? I would argue that the First Amendment rights of attorneys in the U.S. are just as fundamental to our freedoms, and the regulation of the right to practice law is just as dangerous a prospect as regulating the right to practice journalism would be. Yet, the practice of law, in fact, is regulated, and, as far as I know (and I would welcome being corrected), the right to practice journalism for a profit seeking organization is not regulated in any way.
Is minimal self-regulation of journalism such a grievous infringement of free speech that we must simply abandon our national political discourse (which has, I might remind you, disproportionate effects internationally) to the oxymoronic concept of “good faith of profit-seeking news corporations”?
The slide is slippery when it comes to journalism, but it is not when you’re talking about practicing law. Everyone will object that you simply cannot regulate the right to practice journalism because you would be giving states the regulatory capacity to filter out unwanted viewpoints. No one argues, however, that regulating the right to practice law gives states the capability to cultivate a legal profession which depends for its livelihood on assuaging state government. Why do we - immediately - see the doomsday scenario when it comes to regulating for-profit journalism but ignore it when it comes to for-profit practice of law? The irony, of course, is that deregulation - or, our protection of First Amendment rights of journalists - has brought us exactly what we say we fear from regulation.
I had a professor once who introduced himself this way: “Journalists are unaccomplished ne’er-do-wells who sit by the sidelines of life and whine”. I guess he was right, and wrong.
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Once again, I do have to register my objections to use of the term “the media” in this context. Criticize “the TV networks” or even “mainstream news media” as much as you care to. I’ll help. But the generalization “the media” is a catch-all that encompasses the entire industry and anti-industry. Yes, I am being nit-picky about language. But as a journalist who strives for objectivity - though it may be a myth - and grates against any sort of editorial pressure from the outside, I’d like to think there are more of us out there. We just don’t get hired by MSNBC.
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Let us not forget that the major media networks in the US are owned by a very small group of people, who in reality probably have very similar political leanings to the neo-cons currently residing in the executive offices of the US administration. So in addition to keeping their revenues flowing by airing programing that they perceived people would watch (and thus, generate maximum exposure for the commercials they run), they were most likely already subscribers to the Bush agenda. Hell, they were probably even eager to participate in the tub-thumping rhetoric after the near 24-hour viewership of the news that followed the events on the 11th of September, 2001 and the resulting invasion of Afghanistan.
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Quoting peters:
This is a fair point. It is television that is the primary culprit here. Moreover, it’s the news “talk shows” (which are pseudo-news at best) that rely upon military experts. It’s not the evening news or headline news, it’s the shows like “Hardball” and “Meet the Press” that are the most guilty; shows that are heavy on the editorializing and light on the reporting.
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Quoting P. Martini:
i guess you can look at it this way; the government already ‘regulates’ journalism in the sense of using it as a vein for propaganda…