So you did. However, you have presented nothing but opinion that failures in Bush’s domestic agenda have been insufficiently reported, particularly in comparison to past administrations.
As to tax cuts, environmental regulation, No Child Left Behind funding etc., I have seen repeated coverage of Bush messes in regard to all these things (covered continually in such Corporate Media as the N.Y. Times).
It “appears to you” that the coverage is too skimpy. Likely it is - just as in the case of election coverage, much too little attention has historically been given to actual issues in favor of highlighting the polls and horse race aspects of a campaign.
Given Bush’s poll numbers, this is an interesting claim. What’s your evidence that media coverage has dramatically shifted in comparison to past administrations?
I have to agree with this. All of the “complaints” that **David *has are things I’ve read about many times in my local paper, the San Jose Mercury News. But the fact of the matter is, the economy is doing pretty well, and there is no environmental catastrophy looming, except maybe the issue of Anthropogenic Climate Change, and that is a common news story (including a piece on 60 Minutes just last week).
*a term I prefer over “Global Warming” because I think it more accurately describes the phenomenon.
As to just one claim (that the media give scant attention to the effect that Bush tax cuts have had on ballooning the deficit), here are a few readily found stories in the national corporate press.
And let’s not forget that most loathsome of all corporate vipers, Fox News.
Guess these corporate stooges just didn’t get the message to hide the effects of the Bush tax cuts. And all the lesser corporate media including my hometown paper and radio/TV outlets (let’s not overlook National Public Radio, which blatantly lists its corporate sponsors on a frequent basis) are unaccountably reporting this stuff too.
There seems to be an impression on this board that if the TRUTH were adequately reported, the PEOPLE could not fail to arise in RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION and OVERTHROW THE BUSH REGIME, and the fact that they have not yet done so must be proof that the news media whitewash Bush Administration failures.
If that’s your standard of evidence, no facts are required.
Good points. I would be delighted to be wrong. The thing I see is a constant drumbeat of one-sided propaganda on various topics from the administration countered by sporadic coverage of the same topics with an attempt at a relatively even-handed, both sides views presented sort of coverage by the news media. The official government view gets double exposure, its own and that of the news media and there is little followup and analysis.
For example if the tax cuts resulted in “the economy is doing pretty well” why are tax collections still so low that we run deficits of what? 300 billion or so? Isn’t there something askew with GW’s claims about the tax cuts’ benefits with that being the case? Just how good does the economy have to be in order to reduce or eliminate that part of the deficit not resulting from the Iraq situation? Where is the commentary about that in the news or opinion pieces?
Imminent environmental disasters aren’t the problem. The continued, steady reduction of enforcement of things like the clean water act and logging regulations, the short sighted sale or opening to mineral prospecting and over logging of national lands in order to satisy immediate needs spells trouble down the road.
What I do find a little puzzling is a lack of outrage at the continued half-truths, evasions and secrecy. My example is the Drug Program. The story of the vast understating of the cost was virtually a one day wonder. Few news organization seem to have pointed out how exceedingly unlikely it is that such a gross mistake resulted from an innocent oversight.
Yes, the news outlets do mention most of these things once or twice, but they they go chasing after the political games aspect of most of the stories and don’t seem to emphasise the effect on their common good.
Of course, governmental mismanagement of its finances to extent we now have isn’t good for corporations either. I guess we could expect them be alarmed enough to alert the public so as to try to halt the sort of things that are a danger to them.
Where have they been for the past 5 years while this situation has been building?
According to some folks, there was more coverage in the mainstream media about Bill Clinton’s LAX haircut (the one that’s been falsely accused of shutting down the airport for several hours) than the Downing Street Memo.
If that’s not a case of screwed-up press priorities, I don’t know what is.
*don’t miss the hilarious quote from White House budget chief Mitchell Daniels, predicting that there would be a federal budget surplus again by 2005 and maybe even 2004.
Ooops.
If what is truly desired is a constant major media reminder to the American people of the perfidies of Bush, how about a perpetual crawl across the bottom of the TV screen during all news shows (hell, why not entertainment too?). It’d function like severe weather warnings:
BUDGET DEFICIT CONTINUES UNABATED THANKS TO BUSH TAX CUTS…BUSH STOLE THE ELECTION…PLAMEGATE…CIVIL LIBERTIES KEEP ERODING…BUSH LIED ABOUT IRAQ…GLOBAL WARMING THREAT CONTINUES THANKS TO GWB…GUANTANAMO AN INTERNATIONAL EMBARASSMENT…BUSH DAUGHTERS MISBEHAVED…
I’m talking about the point of view that Jefferson and Madison had in mind when they singled out the press for special constitutional protection. Jefferson wrote this: " The only security of all is a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." They’re talking about an important role. What the press did to, say, Scott Ritter prior to the invasion of Iraq was to pretty much silence him in the name of the administration, rather than permit him to gain public access, and vice versa. Afterward, when he was shown to be not only honorable, but absolutely correct, the press dropped him like a hot potato and forgot about him, never acknowledging their complicity with the neocons in charge. The role of the press is to hold the government open to public scrutiny and to allow the public to ask all the questions it can of its government. The press is not an arm of the government. It is not present “only” to report the facts. It is protected by the constitution so it can protect us from governments abuses. Jefferson also wrote," Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the later." I’m asking why they have increasingly abandoned this role. It seems to me that they have become less and less aggressive with the leaders - less so now than ever. I do not understand it. I’m wondering why this would be so.
To you who defend the corporate press: I think it is naive in the extreme to expect corporate officers to not further the interest of their corporation in all of its business enterprises including their news subsidiaries. Their interests are more aligned with Republican policies than with Democratic.
I realize that the corporate form has many advantages. I can’t think of any other way to raise the large amounts of capital needed for something like a steel mill. My principle difficulty with corporations is that their officers hide behind the corporate structure to do reprehensible things that they would be loath to do as sole proprietors or partners in a partnership.
Example: Ford executives deciding that it was cheaper to let the Pinto kill people and fight the lawsuits than it would be to correct the fuel tank location.
On the average the executives running corporate news divisions are merely the Ford executives in different suits.
Why yes, if a corporation runs something, it must have right-wing characteristics. Take the film industry, for example.
Syriana. The Rainmaker.Erin Brockovich.The Constant Gardener.
These are just a few current or recent movies to come out of an industry dominated by huge corporations like MCA. They all have themes relating to the evils of corporations and/or the reprehensible policies of America. All have been made, distributed and/or promoted by big corporations. And shown in corporate chain theaters.
But how could this possibly be?
Because it’s good business.
It’s for the same reason that corporations that run big news media operations generally don’t mess with decisions made by reporters and editors, including the generation of stories showing corporations and corporate policies to be evil/detrimental. If the news operation either makes money or garners prestige, that’s good business.
Why did a corporate studio make Brokeback Mountain, when Republicans are not generally seen as sympathetic to gay rights? Why are more American corporations trying to attract and keep gay workers, partly through liberalized benefit packages? Because it’s seen as good business.
This Corporate-Media-Automatically-Means-Right-Wing-Media refrain is intellectual laziness at its most profound.
In earlier days, it looked as if left wing complaints of right-wing media bias were a means of taunting right-wingers obsessed over their own claims of bias. Increasingly now, it looks as if certain lefties are dead serious about their increasingly ludicrous allegations.
One of the press’ biggest failings is their lazy substitution of “he said-she said” reporting for actual objective reporting. That is, on any controversial issue, rather than going after the facts, reporters consistently just report whatever’s in the press releases from advocacy groups or get quotes from spokesmen for advocacy grops on both sides of an issue. Got a story on pollution to report? don’t bother investigating the facts, just get a quote from the Sierra Club and from a Corporate Media Rep. and call it even. Thus you have stories whose “objectivity” consists of, “Chicken Little says the sky is falling, but Red Rooster says it’s just a temporary meteorological phenomenon which does no harm.” Completely eliminates the need to stick your hand out the window and find out.
Spinmeisters like Karl Rove have noticed this phenomenon and taken full advantage of it, using the technique of False Equivalency. The most egregious example of this is Swiftboating. The people who backed the Swift Boat Veterans for Lying Their Asses Off knew that their claims would be swiftly and easily debunked by anyone who cared to look, but they figured no one would. It took a website to debunk the living shit out of them, but even that didn’t help. Long after the Swift Boat Liars had been exposed as shameless liars, news organizations still used the Swift Boat Liars to make their stories look balanced. You’d hear things like, “Kerry’s supporters claim his record remains intact, despite the allegations of the Swift Boat Veterans that he did not serve as he claimed he did.” The fact that Kerry’s record was accurate – he did indeed serve in combat, he did indeed get shot – while the fact that the Swift Boat allegations had been proven to be lies – was not reported in all these he said/she said marathons. A false equivalence between allegations that were proven lies and a completely verified service record was thus created in the media. Bush, who very likely was AWOL and in any event served in the National Guard and was never in any danger of seeing combat, was a guy with a disputed service record – just like John Kerry who actually went to Vietnam and was shot at by Viet Kong, in fact, was shot by them.
Even the normally alert NPR did this – a lot – in the runup to the 2004 election. Swiftboating proves that in the modern media environment, truth is indeed irrelevant.
So part of the reason that the press has abandoned its role as reporters is sheer laziness, though it’s hard to see how reporters get away with this shit if their editors don’t let them. It’s rather obvious. I suspect their editors train them to report this way – for whatever reason.
I think you’ve hit on perhaps the best example of the abdication of the press - the “he said, she said”, which at times even includes just “he said.”
You’re absolutely right to note that NPR is an offender in this regard. In fact, it was one word that finally led me to stop paying NPR - “controversial.” They described Kerry’s military record as “controversial,” when in fact whatever controversy might have existed was only about the media, including NPR, treating the charges as legitimate and all claims as equivalent. They can still go to hell, for all I care.
You are the one identifying corporate support as “right-wing.” I never said anything about that. And now you are dragging in extraneous entities like the movie industry. This thread is about the news media.
All I am saying is that the press has gone easy on GW. Evil Captor hit upon one gross failing of the press, that of reporting competing claims as if both were equally valid, as in his example of the Swift Boad affair. I alluded to the same fault earlier. TV news is particularly bad in this. The news divisions are now required to show a profit and so have cut staffs and hired mere news readers and as a resi;t. in many cases, they have fallen back on accepting and using press releases with no further investigation.
Do the news organizations actively promote the administration’s policies? I don’t think so. Do they fail to examine them critically and keep the pressure on an inept group of ideologues represented by GW? I think so. I don’t think the corporate managers have any incentive to practice good jounalism. They are personally doing well under this administration so why should they call attention to its numerous failures?
When Nixon left, the first time, you’ll remember (some of you) that he said to the press, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around.” Can you conceive of anyone in public office, e.g. Bush, ever saying such a thing? The press is not PERMITTED to kick him around. They don’t DARE to. They appear to not DESIRE to. They don’t want to kick him around. They don’t want to even ask him to support his claims. They quiver in his presence. What has caused them to buy his line? What has caused them to adopt the position of co-conspiritor?
Nah, you just claimed that corporations must favor Republicans and the current “government”. A completely different suggestion. :rolleyes:
Could you be failing to see the point? The film industry is a relevant example of large corporations putting out a line that seems to go completely against their interests, if one ignores the fact that the corporate bottom line is profits, not politics. And if that corporate-Republican-right wing linkage is so obviously flawed, what does that say about similar claims for the “corporate news media”???
I understand that you are upset that in your view, the news media are not sufficiently harsh on Bush as compared to their supposed adversarial stance of the past. As long as you continue to claim this on the basis of opinion rather than facts, there’s little to debate.
Being a member of the White House press corps is a plump assignment, and you are apt to lose it if you ask tough questions. If not lose it, at least no longer be called upon.
As far as locations other than the whitehouse, I too think it’s all about budget and cost cutting. Good effective reporting costs money, and spending money angers the share holders.
I don’t agree that Bush was AWOL, and I am pleased that the media (in general) never treated this as fact… CBS and the forged memo being an exception, I guess. I agree that Kerry’s service record was honorable and included combat wounds. I disagree that Bush’s service record was not honorable, although I certainly acknowledge it did not include combat.
Could it be that you’re happier when the media slants a way you like, and not so happy when they slant a way you don’t like?