Scripted President Co-opts Media
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank has penned what appears at first blush to be the beginning of the end for President Obama’s remarkable honeymoon with the press. But Milbank takes offense not at the President’s politics or policies, of course, but his apparent manipulation of a press conference to plant a question from a leftist web site, the Huffington Post.
Those with long memories may remember the liberal outcry over the planting of sympathetic questioner Jeff Gannon during the Bush administration. Of course, even some of those who do remember and who actually purported to be outraged by the Gannon planting are spinning wildly on the President’s behalf now, calling into question whether their earlier criticisms were principled or merely partisan. This is, however, beside the point except as just another example of shameless double standards and blogosphere “inside baseball”.
No, the real issue is to note the degree of control that the administration seems to have over coverage of its policies. With ABC News even offering what amounts to unpaid and unbalanced commercial time for presentation of the President’s health care plan, it is an open question whether their still exists any meaningful source for information that is not essentially written by the White House communications staff. And given the scope of change sought by this President, the watchdog function of the press is becoming even more important at the same time it is increasingly neutered by its own partisan bias and a clever White House cooptation campaign.
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For me it is simply a continuation of a campaign style. Teleprompters, faux columns, solemn words. This past week caught him off guard; it wasn’t planned and it didn’t fit the agenda. He will grow. Oddly enough, my wife, an O’Reilly-watching conservative liked the presser. My guess, his usual “modern stentorian” style normally puts her off, “he’s talking down to me”
Teleprompters don’t bother me because I think the President is perfectly justified being hyper-careful with his words. But rigging press conferences so that pre-prepped questions are solicited from friendly left-wing web sites is a problem because it short-circuits the watchdog function of the media and works to actively misinform the public during a period of rapid change.
It is also a problem that so many in the liberal and faux moderate blogosphere raised holy hell about Jeff Gannon but either shrug or actively defend the same situation with just the ideologies reversed. As the link in the article shows, it’s not that they are unaware of their hypocrisy, its that they just don’t care that much.
With respect, Jason, I don’t think that the real problem here is one of partisan bias, so much as it is of the widespread if not now ubiquitous pro-establishment bias of the corporate media. To worry about the “watchdog function” of the mainstream media is moot at this point, as any such role has long been abandoned. The national media has been reduced to little more than mouthpieces for the politico-financial establishment years ago, with only the odd and occasional token opposition voice to whip up mountains out of policy molehills.
The virtual silence from any voice or viewpoint of opposition in the national media in the runup to the 2003 Iraqi invasion proved to me, beyond any doubt, that the “watchdog media” had been castrated, if not euthanized.
This point is repeated often, but is just factually untrue. There was a ton of focus on dissent before and after the Iraq invasion, much of it transparently in the hope of recreating the protest scenes of the 1960s that many members of the media romanticize as the pinnacle of their activist dreams.
@Jason Arvak
I would have to disagree with you on this point, Jason. I can distinctly remember reading and watching the mainstream media news prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, such sources as ABC, NBC, CNN, The New York Times, etc., and rare indeed were any voices calling the invasion into serious question. much less decrying it. I would estimate that coverage of the topic at the time was 90-95% either neutral or in favor of the military action. In most cases, the “reporters” seemed to be doing nothing more than acting as bullhorns for the official Bush administration line. I know I am not in error on this point — many friends and acquaintances noticed the same sad phenomenon. It was at that time that I finally knew what living with an effectively state-run (or to be more precise, an establishment-run media) was really like. And little or nothing has imporoved in that regard since, from all that I can see.
Well, Dulse, I was actually doing a research project at that time on protest movements and I had no trouble at all finding anti-war protesters being interviewed on the major broadcast and cable media outlets. Interestingly, at the very same time they were being interviewed, they were often complaining in that same interview about how they never got any coverage.
I think anything short of 100% coverage is inevitably perceived by anti-war activists as insufficient. That might explain why both the protesters themselves and your friends and acquaintances had an impression that was at odds with the reality.
I guess someone could do a Lexis search to verify, but I think the claim that anti-war protesters received no coverage is just a talking point concocted to explain away their complete ineffectiveness rather than a description of reality. It is common for the side that is losing an argument to claim that they aren’t being heard at all.
I also think that anti-war protesters failed as a result of their own bad arguments and bad tactics rather than a grand government/media conspiracy against them. A bunch of radical retreads trying to recreate the 1960s was very bad strategy.
It’s also interesting that people like Dulse constantly bring up the one example of the Iraq War as evidence that the media generally acted as a mouthpiece of the Bush administration. Giving slanted coverage (if one concedes that’s true- I don’t know if anyone has objectively measured the coverage and Jason presents some counterarguments) is certainly not proof of general bias toward an administration.
If anything, what strikes me about the Iraq war coverage is the recollection that CNN grew to prominence with its coverage of the first Iraq War (remember Wolf and company standing on all of those rooftops?) and if they were allowing drumbeats of war to go unanswered it may well have been for self interested reasons.
Jason, I never expressed my belief that anti-war protesters received NO coverage — if you will reread my post above, that is very explicitly stated. But that is really beside the point, as my original statement was in regard to the mainstream (corporate) media and its journalists, virtually none of whom actively or vocally opposed the Iraqi invasion, nor expressed much skepticism with the official justifications for it, as they almost assuredly would have in droves had it happened 30 years earlier. Covering a few antiwar protests does not equate to acting as responsible and real journalists — going beyond repeating the assertions of the administration and doing some independent and objective investigation would have, but was hardly evident to any significant extent.
My point was that media largely if not almost completely failed in its “watchdog” role, by not only supinely parroting the administration’s talking points regarding the war, but also and more importantly by failing to act as the journalists they pretend to be, and actually engaging in JOURNALISM, by digging into the story with objectivity and even perhaps some skepticism, instead of just rolling over for the adminstration and meekly accepting the war as a fait accompli.
As to your last point above, I did not suggest that any “grand government/media conspiracy” exists, merely that the corporate-owned media is increasingly allied with the government and its interests, and increasingly fails to act with any independence of the government, regardless of which tweedledum/tweedledee party is in power at the moment. It is not a matter of conspiracy at all, jbut an alignment of mutual self-interests that are increasingly aligned rather than adversarial toward one another.
I think I can agree that the media is lazy and ill-educated, and thus prone to simply repeat whatever they are given from ANY source rather than indpendently investigate. I can’t agree with the vaguely neo-Marxist rhetoric that ascribes the cause to it being a result of corporate ownership, however. In fact, the non-corporate source — National Public Radio — is among the most biased and intellectually lazy sources out there at times. Public ownership, it seems, is no insulation for the condition that plagues our media.
I think the real cause is bad education. Journalism as a college major usually doesn’t require a sound foundation in the social sciences or any other field of intellectual rigor. That means reporters are trained to be either stenographers or perhaps ideological activists, but they lack the knowledge about how the world actually works that would be necessary to really dig beneath the surface. Some of them just take whatever the White House spokesman dishes out. Others just take whatever the MoveOn.org spokesman dishes out. And most bloggers do pretty much the same thing, and few of them are corrupted by corporate ownership.
I’m also not sure that a media that automatically challenged the Iraq war and sought to undermine it or that purused any other ideological crusade would have been any better in an objective way. Certainly, it would have been more satisfying to anti-war activists to have the media enlisted as a passionate fighter on their side like it was in Vietnam after Tet. But bias in one’s own direction is still bias, and is still prone to error, propaganda, ignorance, misinformation, and failure in the role of watchdog. A knee-jerk anti-government orientation is no better than a knee-jerk pro-government orientation, IMHO.
Dulse- on what basis do you claim that the MSM would have been more skeptical in previous eras? Your comment to that effect got me wondering about Vietnam, for instance. While it’s widely believed among conservatives that the MSM was instrumental in turning public favor away from support of that war in the mid to late sixties, I don’t recall any claims that the media initially took a devil’s advocate role in our involvement there. And a quick perusal of Wiki led me to this page,which cites a media historian who states:
“the fundamental fact was that the American press was simply not interested in Vietnam.”[5] The American government had no independent information-gathering system in Vietnam and was forced to rely on a regime that the Pentagon Papers described as “discouraging realism”.[6] Wyatt related that “in many ways the relationship between the American press and the United States government in Vietnam during this crucial period was one of the blind leading the blind.”
Seems to me that the more things change, the more they remain the same. The media, whether due to laziness, intellectual incuriousness, or poor education, doesn’t do a very good job of vetting information that is presented by our government as pretext for war. Later in the course of a war, particularly one that is not going well, the antiwar activists begin to surface and the media takes notice and sometimes highlights their cause. It seems to me that the press has a duty to do just the opposite- look at information from the Pentagon or other govt sources with a lot more skepticism BEFORE American forces are committed, and let the public make a more informed decision on whether or not to support the mission.
I don’t see how it can be chalked up to ideology either way though, since the pattern seems to be early disengagement and regurgitation of Pentagon talking points, followed by questioning the pretext of the war after the fact. That’s not consistent with any ideology, except perhaps the ideology of what sells newspapers and ad time (since controversy sells and what bleeds, leads.)
wow, I clearly recall a very sizable percentage being quite vocal about calling it into serious question. It was – at best 50% positive.
But back to the topic at hand – I wonder how many peeps were surprised over this? This is the Democrat Primaries all over again – scripted questions, scripted people.