BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
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Sunday, July 25, 2004
THE RIGHT WING AND THE NETWORK
NEWSCASTS. Do the major network newscasts bend in the face of
conservative and corporate pressure? At a panel discussion on Sunday
at Harvard's Kennedy School, the Big Three news anchors - Dan Rather,
Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings - all said no. But they admitted that
the pressure is real, and is something they feel.
It was Rather who broached the
topic. As he put it, there are certain types of stories where "you
can't afford to be wrong," adding, "That can be a positive or it can
be a negative." If it means more checking or possibly holding a story
for a day, he explained, that could be a good thing. But, he warned,
someone inside the network might kill it, saying, "You know what?
This story is going to be trouble with a capital 'T.'"
NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw followed
Rather by observing that the pressure has always been there. But now,
he said, it's easier to apply that pressure - "just flip a switch"
and the e-mails come flooding in, spurred by conservative media activists
like Brent
Bozell. Brokaw added that
he has someone screen his e-mails for him - he deliberately avoids
wading through all of them himself lest he be overly
influenced.
Which led Jennings to walk up
closest to the edge of admitting that, yes, conservative groups
do influence the news. "I hear more about conservative
concerns than I did in the past," Jennings said. Just recently, he
said, a man walked up to him and yelled, "America-hater, leave the
country immediately!" This "wave of resentment," Jennings said, has found
its way to "the corporate suite" and to advertisers, which these days
are urging greater caution.
It was an enlightening moment. But
the crack Jennings had opened was closed quickly. Rather responded to
Jennings's remarks by saying that he has never gotten any
pressure to change the content of his newscast. "At CBS I have not
felt this one iota," he said. To which Jennings chimed in, "My boss
has been terrific, too ... 100 percent supportive.... But I feel the
pressure of the anger all the time."
And Brokaw slammed the door shut by
observing that conservative voices were almost never heard in the
1960s, leading to the culture of resentment that prevails among those
on the right today. So there you have it: the conservatives are
angry, and they attempt to use their power to influence the evening
newscasts. America's best-known anchors acknowledge the anger, feel
the pressure, and, in Jennings's case, admit that the corporate
bosses and the advertisers would rather appease the right-wingers
than tell them to shut up and go away. But none of this, we are to
understand, actually has an effect on the nightly news.
What's frightening about this is the Big Three might actually be right. It may be that their
prestige and long record of accomplishment allows them to protect
their newscasts from the crassest of market and political pressures.
Once they pass from the scene - and Brokaw's retirement has already
been scheduled, with Rather and Jennings perhaps to leave before the
2008 election - who's to say whether their successors will be able
(or be allowed) to take the heat?
Sunday's event was sponsored by the
Kennedy School's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and
Public Policy. Center director Alex Jones moderated, and pushed the
participants hard. Jones began by asking whether they should do a
better job of pointing out when politicians and public officials are
not telling the truth. You can't do "he said/she said," Jones noted,
when people are saying things that "aren't true."
"It's not my job to say, 'Candidate
Y is lying,'" Rather replied, explaining his job is to report that
one person said this, one person said that, and here are the
facts.
But is that really the case? As
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and others have noted,
major news organizations in 2000 repeatedly allowed then-candidate
George W. Bush to deny Al Gore's claim that Bush's proposed tax cut
would disproporationately benefit the wealthy. The problem, of
course, was that Gore was right on the mark and Bush was - well,
lying.
If anything, Jim Lehrer, the anchor
for PBS's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, was even more emphatic
than Rather. The mild-mannered Lehrer said, "I am never tempted to
yell, 'Liar!'", making his point so loudly that the audience burst
out laughing. He added, "I am not a lie-detector machine, that is not
my function.... There are very few things that are black and
white.... For journalists to declare, 'This guy is a liar and that
guy is not a liar' is risky business, and those of us in the
mainstream don't do it."
The fifth member of the panel, Judy
Woodruff, anchor of CNN's Inside Politics, expanded on
Lehrer's point, saying, "Politicians have always shaded the truth."
Her examples: Franklin Roosevelt's promise to balance the budget,
John Kennedy's fear-mongering about a phony "missile gap," and
Richard Nixon's "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War. Much of what
politicians say is "shaded," she said, noting that a point about the
economy will be made on the basis of wages or household income
depending on which is more supportive of that point.
To which a somewhat exasperated
Jones replied, "If everything is true, then where am I?"
What Jones was driving at, though
he didn't say the word, was that there are real limits to that
old-fashioned concept of "objectivity." Journalists are used to covering
"both" sides (as if there was always a duopoly when it comes to the
matter of sides), and letting the reader or viewer or listener sort
it out. But what qualifications does a news consumer have to sort
things out? If Bush - or, for that matter, John Kerry - is clearly
lying, isn't it better for Dan Rather to tell his 10 million
or so viewers rather than to require that they figure it out for
themselves?
Another way of getting at this was
articulated by Democratic congresswoman Anna Eshoo, of California,
who asked whether the networks could have done anything differently
in the run-up to the war on Iraq. Rather replied that when the
president tells the public that there is a direct threat to their
security, there is "heavy prejudice" to take him at his word. "I'm
not apologizing" for that presumption, Rather said, but allowed that
tougher questions should have been asked. Added Brokaw: "It was our
responsibility to put up more caution signs than we did."
Jennings, by contrast, said that
ABC News - and especially Nightline - repeatedly pointed out
how little evidence there was that Iraq possessed weapons of mass
destruction and had ties to Al Qaeda.
Granted, there is no way the
network newscasts could have prevented Bush from going to war, even
though, with their combined audience of 20 million to 30 million
viewers per night, they remain the largest, most influential news
media in the country. And as Rather properly observed, this was not a
story that could have been reported independently: reporters could
not travel to Iraq and determine whether Saddam Hussein had WMD.
Remember, the UN had an entire team of inspectors swarming across the
country, and they were unable to reach any definitive conclusions in
the short time that Bush gave them before going to war.
But even the New York Times
has acknowledged that it was too credulous in its coverage of the
White House's claims about Iraq. It was not a shining moment for the
media.
BUSH TO FOREIGN REPORTERS:
SCREW! The international media have been notably critical of the
Bush administration for thumbing its nose as the world before,
during, and after the war in Iraq. Well, the Bushies know how to get
even.
According to MediaNation - a
joint project of Harvard's Nieman Foundation and UMass Boston - the
White House has cut
the $15,000 to $25,000 normally budgeted for helping some 400 foreign
reporters navigate the two political conventions.
The story, by Seth Effron, will
likely appear in MediaNation's print debut, in tomorrow's
Boston Globe. But you can read it now.
IS THIS ANY WAY TO RUN A
CONVENTION? After getting my credentials, I decided to check out
the media center at the DNC this afternoon. Big mistake! I couldn't
get my umbrella through security; an apologetic guard told me
umbrellas have been classified as contraband, but that I could get it
back at a table on the way out. (Wrong.)
Then, no one seemed to know how to
find the media filing center for reporters who are not affiliated
with large organizations that are renting their own space. A few of us
finally located it, on the third floor of the FleetCenter (nice,
actually, since the big orgs are stuck in a tent outside), but some
techs were still setting up the Ethernet network.
So my plan to blog earlier today
was put off till this evening, when I was able to get onto the Net
from a Starbucks in Harvard Square.
Tomorrow will be different. I
hope.
posted at 8:12 PM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
