Media in the United States Global Issues
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In recent years, the American media has been plagued with all sorts of problems including, sliding profits, scandals about manipulation, plagiarism, propaganda, lower audiences, dumbing down, and so on.
Media omissions, distortion, inaccuracy and bias in the US is something acknowledged by many outside the USA, and is slowly realized more and more inside the US. However, those problems have made it very difficult for the average American citizen to obtain an open, objective view of many of the issues that involve the United States (and since the United States is so influential culturally, economically, politically and militarily around the world, they are naturally involved in many issues).
Those with power and influence know that media control or influence is crucial. A free press is crucial for a functioning democracy, but if not truly free, paves the way for manipulation and concentration of views, thus undermining democracy itself.
An essay from the prestigious journal, Columbia Journalism Review, notes the crucial role of free media and the need for public education in society to maintain democracy:
In recognition of the role that the press played in the nations founding, and in appreciation of the crucial role it plays in maintaining a free society, the press was granted special protections under the First Amendment.
But the founders knew that a free press would be worth little if the people could not read it, so public education became one of the great obsessions of the leaders of the early republic. [The problem in Europe at that time] was restricting education to the wealthy, in the mistaken belief that knowledge is the parent of sedition and insurrection. Instead, he wrote, education was vital to the maintenance of a free society. This concern with education was widespread in the founding generation, and Thomas Jefferson famously listed the establishment of the University of Virginia as one of the three great accomplishments of his life (he omitted his presidency from the list).
Evan Cornog, Lets Blame the Readers, Columbia Journalism Review, Issue 1, January/February 2005
The idea of citizenship education grew from these ideals stressing the education of the American institutions, the value of democracy, thinking critically about their society and their roles in that society etc. But with business groups looking to schools essentially to educate workers for a complex industrial society an inherent conflict was brewing.
Thus, the traditional and primary collective goal of public schools building literate citizens able to engage in democratic practices [also the goal of Americans founders] was replaced by the goal of social efficiency, that is, preparing students for a competitive labor market anchored in a swiftly changing economy. In addition:
This redefinition of citizenship has been part of a larger push toward privatizing much that used to be public and, in particular, governmental in American society. For decades the Republican Party and allies in the business community have worked to reduce governments role in American life. It is a measure of their success that faith in democratic government has largely been replaced by faith in the market. It was the senior President Bush who urged upon the nation a less expansive model of civic engagement Implicit in this was the notion isolated individuals should try to do good in isolation. Earlier generations had expressed different ideals. In his inaugural address in 1941, as the threat of world war drew ever closer to the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt said that American democracy was strong because it is built on the unhampered initiative of individual men and women joined together in a common enterprise. Sixty years later, after the September 11 attacks had shaken the nation, President George W. Bush urged Americans to pull together by going out and spending money, or taking a trip to Disney World. Consumerism had become the common cause.
Evan Cornog, Lets Blame the Readers, Columbia Journalism Review, Issue 1, January/February 2005
(See also this sites section on the rise in consumerism detailing how politically active citizens in the 1960s were dumbed down and diverted to consumerism.)
The mainstream media too have seen similar transformations. Pressures to make profit require more and more avoidance of controversial and sensitive issues that could criticize aspects of corporate America or reduce the buying moods of readers.
In doing so, much of the agendas are driven by government and business interests, with less criticism. Over time, as people unwittingly get accustomed to a lower quality media, propaganda becomes easier to disseminate.
a principle familiar to propagandists is that the doctrine to be instilled in the target audience should not be articulated: that would only expose them to reflection, inquiry, and, very likely, ridicule. The proper procedure is to drill them home by constantly presupposing them, so that they become the very condition for discourse.Noam Chomsky
Quoted by Scott Burchill, The Limits of Thinkable Thought, February 4, 2000
The media is therefore one avenue by which such support and, if needed, manipulation, can be obtained. The US is no exception to this. As the following quote summarizes, the role of the media from the view of politics is often less discussed:
George Seldes, a reporter for over seventy years, points out that there are three sacred cows still with us today: religion, patriotism, and the media itself Patriotism, defined as taking pride in ones country, allies the masses with the ruling powers. The media refuses to discuss its consistent failure to inform the masses of this ongoing control. It has been in place for so long that few are aware of how it came about or that it is even still there. But many people are intelligent, moral, and idealistic; if the media would discuss the true history of these three sacred cows, that control would quickly disappear.
J.W. Smith, The Worlds Wasted Wealth 2, (Institute for Economic Democracy, 1994), p. 11.
There are many ways in which the media is used to obtain such support and conformity. The U.S., often regarded as one of the more freer countries with regards to its media, is therefore worth looking at in more detail. This is a large topic so this section will be updated from time to time.
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As detailed further on this web sites mainstream media introduction, the USs rankings in the Press Freedom Index from Reporters Without Borders is a lot lower than it is often assumed.
It is normally thought and expected that US press freedom would rank top in the world. Yet, for many years, it has been a lot lower than the high expectation. For 2011, the US ranked just 47th. It has been around these low numbers for a number of years, especially during the Bush Administrations War on Terror.
For a while, under the Obama Administration it was looking better, but recent events such as the various Occupy protest movements and how journalists have been treated has resulted in the recent drops in the rankings. As Josh Stearns from Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund worries, the cherished US First Amendment is being taken for granted.
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Many US policies, especially foreign policies, have come under much sharp criticism from around the world as well as from various segments within American society. As a result, some fear that they are running the risk of alienating themselves from the rest of the world. A revealing quote hints that media portrayal of issues can affect the constructive criticism of American foreign policy:
One reads about the worlds desire for American leadership only in the United States, one anonymous well-placed British diplomat recently observed, Everywhere else one reads about American arrogance and unilateralism.
Jonathan Power, America is in Danger of Alienating the World, March 3, 1999
The quote above also summarizes how America is viewed in the international community and how some of their actions are portrayed in the United States. Yet, the international community, often for very valid reasons, sees Americas actions differently.
International news coverage from US media is very poor. As noted by the Media Channel and Huffington Post, According to the Pew Research Centers recent study of American journalism, coverage of international events is declining more than any other subject. In the study of 2007, 64% of participating newspaper editors said their papers had reduced the space for international news. In a strict sense, the American media did not in 2007 cover the world, says the Pew report. Beyond Iraq, only two countries received notable coverage last year Iran and Pakistan.
This non-coverage of global issues is worrying because so many American citizens end up getting a narrow view of many important world issues. In such a situation, it is easier for propagandists to say things that are harder to question and seem real.
The majority of US citizens still get their news from television, where limited headlines and sound-bites reduce the breadth, depth and context available. And while the Internet has surpassed traditional newspapers as a prime source of news, the diversity of news is still small; a lot of content for Internet sites come from a few traditional sources, usually those working in struggling newspaper companies and media outlets.
As a side note, although the Internet may be surpassing traditional newspapers as information sources, television news still dominates; some 2/3rds of Americans get their news from TV:
Surveys by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press among other polling and research groups show that about two-thirds of the general public cite television as their main source for national and international news, more than twice the number of people who rely on newspapers, and about 50 percent more than the growing number of U.S. residents who rely on the Internet (43 percent).
Jim Lobe, Arab Spring Dominated TV Foreign News in 2011, Inter Press Service, January 2, 2012
A year after the war on Iraq had started, March 2004 saw a large poll released by the Pew Global Attitudes Project (GAP) from the Pew Research Centre for the People & the Press. It looked at views in a number of countries, including some in western Europe, and some in Muslim countries, and found in all of them a growing mistrust of the United States, particularly President George Bush.
On many issues there was a wide gap between respondents in the U.S. versus respondents elsewhere, including key ally, Britain. And as the diplomat noted above in 1999, this poll also noted that 61 to 84% of respondents in other countries found the U.S. motives in foreign policy to be self-interested, while 70% of respondents in the United States thought their country did take others views into account. This divide in perceptions is large to say the least. But why is there such a gap?
Dr. Nancy Snow, an assistant professor of political science describes one of her previous jobs as being a propagandist for the U.S. Information Agency. In an interview, she also describes how Americans and the rest of the world often view the American media:
[P]ublic diplomacy is a euphemism for propaganda. In the United States, we dont think of ourselves as a country that propagandizes, even though to the rest of the world we are seen as really the most propagandistic nation in terms of our advertising, in terms of our global reach, our public relations industrywe have more public relations professionals and consultants in the United States than we do news reporters. So theres an entire history of advertising, promoting, and getting across the message of America both within and also outside of the United States.
Dr. Nancy Snow, Propaganda Inc.: Behind the curtain at the U.S.I.A., an Interview with Guerilla News Network
Australian journalist John Pilger also captures this very well:
Long before the Soviet Union broke up, a group of Russian writers touring the United States were astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and watching television, that almost all the opinions on all the vital issues were the same. In our country, said one of them, to get that result we have a dictatorship. We imprison people. We tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. How do you do it? Whats the secret?
John Pilger, In the freest press on earth, humanity is reported in terms of its usefulness to US power, New Statesman, 20 February, 2001
While many countriesif not allin some way suppress/distort information to some degree, the fact that a country as influential in the international arena such as the United States is also doing it is very disturbing. The people of this nation are the ones that can help shape the policies of the most powerful nation, thereby affecting many events around the world. For that to happen, they need to be able to receive objective reporting.
An integral part of a functioning democracy is that people are able to make informed choices and decisions. However, as the 2000 Election testified, there has been much amiss with the media coverage and discourse in general.
The inappropriate fit between the countrys major media and the countrys political system has starved voters of relevant information, leaving them at the mercy of paid political propaganda that is close to meaningless and often worse. It has eroded the central requirement of a democracy that those who are governed give not only their consent but their informed consent.
Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly, Sixth Edition, (Beacon Press, 2000), p. 192.
(Note that in the above quote, the book was originally published in 1983, but is still relevant to today and applicable to the 2000 Elections in the United States and the various controversies that accompanied it.)
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Since the terrible attacks by terrorists on September 11, 2001 in America and the resulting war on terrorism, various things that have happened that has impacted the media as well as the rest of the country.
One example was the appointing of an advertising professional, Charlotte Beers as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. As writer and activist, Naomi Klein pointed out in the Los Angeles Times (March 10, 2002), Beers had no previous State Department experience, but she had held the top job at both the J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather ad agencies, and shes built brands for everything from dog food to power drills. Beers' task now was to work her magic on the greatest branding challenge of all: to sell the United States and its war on terrorism to an increasingly hostile world where many nations and people have been critical of American policies. (Beers eventually stepped down in March 2003 due to health reasons.) As Klein also pointed out, the trouble has been that the image to be portrayed is not seen by the rest of the world as necessarily being a fair portrayal:
Most critics of the U.S. dont actually object to Americas stated values. Instead, they point to U.S. unilateralism in the face of international laws, widening wealth disparities, crackdowns on immigrants and human rights violations The anger comes not only from the facts of each case but also from a clear perception of false advertising. In other words, Americas problem is not with its brand which could scarcely be stronger but with its product.
Naomi Klein, Brand USA, LA Times, March 10, 2002
The media frenzy in the wake of the war on terror has on the one hand led to detailed reporting on various issues. Unfortunately, as discussed on this sites propaganda page, this has been limited to a narrow range of perspectives and context leading to a simplification of why terrorists have taken up their causes, of the USs role in the world, world opinions on various issues, and so on.
One of the most famous media personalities in American news, Dan Rather of CBS had admitted that there has been a lot of self-censorship and that the U.S. media in general has been cowed by patriotic fever and that accusations of lack of patriotism is leading to the fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions.
Under the Bush Administration, the US government has been increasing its secrecy as Inter Press Service reports. More and more documents are being marked classified and more propaganda and fear has been employed (as discussed on this sites war on terror section) to scare the population to support a cut back in their own civil rights for a war on terror. In that context, the lack of mainstream media courage risks further government and corporate media unaccountability.
For more about the war on terror and the attacks on the U.S., see this sites war on terror section.
But deeper than self-censorship, has been the systemic and institutional censorship that goes on in the media on all sorts of issues. This has been going on for decades.
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There is no formal censorship in the USA, but there is what some call Market Censorship that is, mainstream media do not want to run stories that will offend their advertisers and owners. In this way, the media end up censoring themselves and not reporting on many important issues, including corporate practices. For some examples of this, check out the Project Censored web site.
Another effect of these so-called market forces at work is that mainstream media will go for what will sell and news coverage becomes all about attracting viewers. Yet the fear of losing viewers from competition seems so high that many report the exact same story at the very same time! Objective coverage gets a back seat.
A friend of mine [of journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski] was working in Mexico for various US television channels. I met him in the street as he was filming clashes between students and police. I asked Whats happening here, John? Without stopping filming he replied: I dont have the faintest idea. I just get the shots. I send them to the channel, and they do what they want with them.
Ryszard Kapuscinski, Media as mirror to the world, Le Monde Diplomatique, August 1999.
Even honest journalists from the major networks can find that their stories and investigations may not get aired for political reasons, rather than reasons that would question journalistic integrity.
This highlights that market censorship isnt always a natural process of the way the system works, but that corporate influences often affect what is reported, even in the supposedly freest press of all. Some journalists unwittingly go with the corporate influences while others who challenge such pressures often face difficulties. John Prestage is also worth quoting on this aspect too:
Even some mainstream journalists are sounding the alarm. Henry Holcomb, who is president of the Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia and a journalist for 40 years, said that newspapers had a clearer mission back when he began reporting. That mission was to report the truth and raise hell. But corporate pressures have blurred this vision, he said.
Janine Jackson of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a news media watchdog group, told the American Free Press that 60 percent of journalists surveyed recently by FAIR admitted that advertisers try to change stories.
Some advertisers kill some stories and promote others, she said, asserting that there is an overwhelming influence of corporations and advertisers on broadcast and print news reporting.
The trends are all bad, worse and worse, Nichols said. Newspapers and broadcast journalists are under enormous pressures to replace civic values with commercial values.
He labeled local television news a cesspool. Local broadcasters are under pressure from big corporations to entertain rather than to inform, and people are more ignorant after viewing television news because of the misinformation they broadcast, he said.
Jon Prestage, Mainstream Journalism: Shredding the First Amendment, Online Journal, 7 November 2002
It is not just corporate pressures that can impact the media, but political and cultural pressures, too. For example, Dan Rather was mentioned above noting that journalists were pressured by patriotic fever following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to resist asking tough questions that might criticize America too much.
At a media conference in March 2007, Dan Rather reiterated his concerns regarding the state of journalism in the US. An article from CNET summarized some of Rathers key points:
So many journaliststhere are notable exceptionshave adopted the go-along-to-get-along (attitude), he said.
So, because of this access game, journalism has degenerated into a very perilous state,
[Rather] thinks many people have lost faith in journalists [because] questioning power, especially at a time of war, can be perceived as unpatriotic or unsupportive of Americas fighting troops.
Daniel Terdiman, Dan Rather: Journalism has lost its guts, CNET News.com, March 12, 2007
As Amy Goodman noted many years ago (linked to further below), the press corps that accompanies the White House is often too cozy with the officials, and it is hard to ask tough questions. Dan Rather notes that it is a general problem:
Rather reiterated his feeling that many journalists todayand he repeated that he has fallen for this trapare willing to get too cozy with people in positions of power, be it in government or corporate life.
The nexus between powerful journalists and people in government and corporate power, he said, has become far too close.
You can get so close to a source that you become part of the problem, he added. Some people say that these powerful people use journalists, and they do. And they will use them to the fullest extent possible, right up until the point where the journalist says, Whoa, thats too far.
[Journalists] shouldnt be willing to water down the truth to protect their access to power.
Daniel Terdiman, Dan Rather: Journalism has lost its guts, CNET News.com, March 12, 2007
And, as also detailed further on this sites corporate media concentration section, Dan Rather sees consolidation of power as a major problem:
Rather also said that the consolidation of power in a small number of media companies has hurt the search for the truth in newsrooms across the country. As media conglomerates get bigger, the gap between newsrooms and boardrooms grows, and the goal becomes satisfying shareholders, not citizens, he said.
Therefore, Rather supports increased competition between media companies and between journalists.
Daniel Terdiman, Dan Rather: Journalism has lost its guts, CNET News.com, March 12, 2007
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Political bias can also creep in too. Media watchdog, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) did a study of ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News in 2001 in which they found that 92 percent of all U.S. sources interviewed were white, 85 percent were male and, where party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were Republican. While of course this is not a complete study of the mainstream media, it does show that there can be heavy political biases on even the most popular mainstream media outlets.
A year-long study by FAIR, of CNNs media show, Reliable Sources showed a large bias in sources used, and as their article is titled, CNNs show had reliably narrow sources. They pointed out for example, Covering one year of weekly programs [December 1, 2001 to November 30, 2002] with 203 guests, the FAIR study found Reliable Sources guest list strongly favored mainstream media insiders and right-leaning pundits. In addition, female critics were significantly underrepresented, ethnic minority voices were almost non-existent and progressive voices were far outnumbered by their conservative counterparts.
In the United States, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is seen as a public-funded alternative to the commercial stations. FAIR claims they have debunked the idea that PBS as a whole leans to the left; corporate and investment-oriented shows have long made up a large chunk of PBSs news and public affairs programming, while more progressive content has frequently met resistance and censorship at the network, they say. And this is from an introduction to a September/October 2006 report where they describe the results of a study of PBSs flagship news program, News Hour, to see if it had any bias or slants, as conservatives often accuse it of having a liberal bias.
They found that PBS was consistent with commerical stations in their biases; 76% of sources were official or elite sources; women and people of different ethnicities were far under-represented; Republican sources outnumbered Democract sources by 66% to 33%; issues such as Iraq, Katrina, and immigration all followed conservative leanings.
In a radio discussion about these findings of PBSs conservative biases, the researchers for the study further noted that those statistics actually did not reflect an even wider bias, whereby for example, most African American people in the period of study were usually discussing Hurricane Katrina, and even then were usually presented as people on the street, whereas, they noted, it was typically the white male that would be presented as the experts with solutions.
The discussion also noted that PBS is not like a public service as it is understood in most countries; it requires the program request funding from wealthy individuals and companies that give it backing. Indeed, PBS requires major corporate funding to keep going, and so, the media experts in that discussion implied, did not offer the counter-balance to commercial stations, as they are often believed to provide.
All this also comes out shortly after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had reports on media concentrations negative impacts on local news destroyed.
At the same time, it was also revealed that the FCC never released another damaging report that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 had similarly reduced the diversity of radio stations throughout the United States.
This concentration results from commercial ownership through buyouts and dominance by the most powerful entities and when those media interests reflect the interests of those in power, as they clearly do, has serious implications for diversity of views, and for a healthy democracy.
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Concentrated ownership of media results in less diversity. This means that the political discourse that shapes the nation is also affected. And, given the prominence of the United States in the world, this is obviously an important issue. However, politicians can often be hesitant about criticizing the media too much, as the following from Ben H. Bagdikian summarizes:
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Media in the United States Global Issues