According to Media Matters, “In recent weeks, several prominent journalists have publicly acknowledged that the U.S. media accorded President Bush too much deference following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman and NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams both noted that it was only in observing government failures in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort that journalists began seriously to challenge the administration. NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell conceded that reporters have been "less challenging" since the attacks. Friedman wrote that the 9-11 attacks created in the media a "deference" towards the administration. Williams described the press corps as "settling in to too comfortable a journalistic pattern," a phenomenon he described as the "9/11 syndrome."
This, of course is nothing new. Back in 2003, “CNN's top war correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, says that the press muzzled itself during the Iraq war. And, she says CNN "was intimidated" by the Bush administration and Fox News, which "put a climate of fear and self-censorship."
Anecdotally, people I know who worked for or interned at various media outlets such as CNN tell me that since FoxNews dominates the ratings, they are the station most emulated and watched by producers of other networks, and of course anyone who has seen Michael Moore’s controversial film, Fahrenheit 9/11 cannot deny the overt bias he documented in the media in the lead-up to the war.
As the Guardian pointed out in 2003, “views that offer an informed critical analysis of the Bush administration's foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Middle East, are not part of the national conversation in the United States. And until Americans can have that conversation with themselves they will not be equipped to converse with the rest of the world about the relative legitimacy or otherwise of their government's actions but will instead continue to retreat into a combination of belligerence, bemusement, defensiveness and demagogy.”
Also in 2003 was MSNBC correspondent Ashleigh Banfield's statement that “so many voices were silent in this war. We all know what happened to Susan Sarandon for speaking out, and her husband, and we all know that this is not the way Americans truly want to be. Free speech is a wonderful thing, it's what we fight for, but the minute it's unpalatable we fight against it for some reason."
What makes this information “news” at all rather than a statement of the obvious is the disparity between the media’s recent coverage of hurricane Katrina and their coverage of the Iraq war. Although government officials lament what they call the “blame game” (or what others might call “accountability”), the media has been tremendously critical of government response to the hurricanes. Although knee-jerk outrage is certainly no better than knee-jerk acquiescence, critical analysis is almost always preferable than blind (and inevitably bias) reporting.
Again, nothing you didn’t already know, but still thought I would point it out.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
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2 comments:
Cram --
What makes this all the more remarkable is that people still insist upon trying to find left-right media bias in order to enforce their conspiracy theory that the world is against their chosen ideology. The new favorite among right wong pundits is to decry the "Main Stream Media" (MSM) which they then define to include 'liberal" media. yet as you point out, Fox is the highest rated cable news show and as i have often pointed out, and which consevratives always ignore, is that the Wall Street Journal's circulation outpaces that of the NYT AND The Washington Post -- combined! Mainstream indeed.
The "media bias" nonsense is a big lie perpetrated by people too lazy or dumb to make an actual argument. there is all soprts of media for anyone who cares to look -- conservative, liberal, far right, far left, liberatarian, anarchist. As far as "main stream media" goes (whetever it is) an ideological agenda is far behind what is in the self-interest of the media itself. "The Media" certainly did not give Clinton a free ride in the 90s, nor should it have. But that it did not is pretty solid evidence that the "media bias" foolishness is just that.
dc
This brings uip another question about which I was going to post, but have not had the opportunity -- lots of conservatives simply see Fox as a corrective to CNN, which they see as liberal. But here is the difference, and I do not think this is a minor point -- there is a difference between earnestly trying to be balanced and being PERCEIVED to skew left, and then coming on and intentionally being conservative. Because the latter inevitably means that you possess an editorial slant, and it is a preconceived one. that is worse than simply ending up on the perceived left, as CNN apparebtly does. example -- CNN almost always bends over backward to get a legitimate conservative voice -- Buchanan, Novak, and others are all guys who have earned their biggest tv stripes on CNN. Fox does not do as good a job of balancing guests, and they simultaneously have an agenda. This is problematic, and moreso than whatever biases emerge in a station like CNN that I think honestly tried hareder not to skew one way or the other.
I also think that Richard's comment to Rogers last post is instructive here -- for all of then handwringing on the right, the Beeb and other allegedly lefty sources oftentimes were biased toward the administartion's/Blair's view of the war. We can aregue if this is good or bad. But it takes a damned big hunk out of the liberal bias argument.
of course along those lines, it is quite clear that none of the people who set the Times or WaPost up as their straw man actually read those papers in the run up to the war -- neither took an even remotely ardent anti-war stance, the Times was centrist, and the Post supported the war. Keep this last point in mind in particular when some know nothing uses the WaPost as a liberal whipping boy.
dcat
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