- Some of the protesters at the Republican National Convention
took a moment to head over to Fox News Channel headquarters to make a point.
Among all the things they chanted, one particularly stands out: "The
more you watch, the less you know!"
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- As of late, the news business, primarily television,
has become a medium in which to sell lies. That sounds harsh, but the type
of journalism practiced as of late doesn't allow for nuance, and the less-scrupulous
public-relations professionals and spin artists know this. TV news as a
medium exists, since the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine under the
Reagan administration, to attract eyeballs. They don't much care about
quality, as long as you're watching.
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- It's easier and cheaper to put loudmouths and losers
like Joe Scarborough and Bill O'reilly on the air than it is to employ
fact checkers, and then hire thinking reporters and give them time to sort
out all the charges and countercharges. Television revels in immediacy,
and its idea of accuracy is to put on one guy from one side and one guy
from the other side, let them fight it out, and then declare that the truth
exists somewhere in the middle.
-
- This type of journalism experienced its total breakdown
when, in the last month, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth spent
a few hundred thousand dollars to spread a bunch of lies about Sen. John
Kerry's service in Vietnam, and captured the media's attention for weeks
on end. Scurrilous charges were aired without question, and it was weeks
before newspapers finally began pointing out that virtually every charge
made was misleading, false, credulous, or made by someone whose claims
were not backed up by even his own past assertions.
-
- The New Republic put it rather simply: "CNN and
MSNBC did their parts to sustain the controversy by running the Swift Boat
ads repeatedly during their news segments . . . the effect was to spread
lies rather than scrutinize them, in a precise perversion of journalism's
supposed purpose."
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- False claims made during the Republican National Convention
-- Kerry's supposed "98 votes for tax increases" are entering
the culture as a meme, repeated as shorthand over local news summaries
all over the country, preceded only by attribution, in this case Massachusetts
Gov. Mitt Romney. News operations run this GOP talking point without bothering
to mention that it, and its predecessor, a claim that Kerry had voted some
350 times to increase taxes, failed to take into account the Annenberg
Public Policy Center's finding that the Republicans counted some votes
twice, counted procedural votes, and generally "exploit[ed] the complexity
of the parliamentary voting system to pad the number . . . More than once,
the 98-vote total counts half a dozen votes on a single bill [emphasis
per original]."
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- In one of the most repeated instances of distortion-verging-on-untruth,
Kerry's use of the word "sensitive" is taken completely out
of context. In Dick Cheney's convention acceptance speech (one again, widely
excerpted in broadcast news segments), the vice president said, "Even
in this post-9/11 period, Senator Kerry doesn't appear to understand how
the world has changed. He talks about leading a " more sensitive war
on terror,, as though al-Qaida will be impressed with our softer side."
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- As Thomas Lang posted last Thursday, Sept. 2, on Columbia
Journalism Review's Campaign Desk blog, "As we (and others) have pointed
out about 157 times now, on August 5 Kerry actually said, " I believe
I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive,
more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings
them to our side." When newspapers print misquotes like this without
any correction or context, can you imagine how few time-stretched, journalism-challenged
TV news operations, local and national, bothered to correct the inaccuracies?
-
- Articles in The Washington Post and Slate.com have pointed
out other examples, such as claims that Kerry opposed or voted to kill
numerous weapons systems -- when it turned out that Cheney himself opposed
them as the secretary of defense under the previous President Bush. And
in the most egregious of examples, Cheney and Georgia Sen. Zell Miller
cited a statement Kerry made in 1970 to the Harvard Crimson as if it were
made this campaign season. No TV news program will give the time or the
resources -- or, for that matter, the care -- to rebut complex examples
like this.
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- Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, "The TV business
is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves
and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. And there's also a negative
side." Now we're seeing it.
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- http://www.citypaper.com/columns/story.asp?id=8751
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