Policing the Primaries,
Media and the November Election
excerpted from the book
Tragedy & Farce
How the American Media Sell Wars,
Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy
by John Nichols and Robert W.
McChesney
New Press, 2005, hardcover
p91
The political elites of Washington know that big media plays a
well-marked role in defining the choices from which America's
two major parties select their nominees for president. The United
States has an informal two-party system-it exists without Constitutional
mandate or legal parameters at the federal level-that is maintained
in large part by the determination of major media outlets to treat
Democrats and Republicans as the only political players who matter.
Third parties, as Ralph Nader discovered in 2000 when he mounted
a serious national campaign but was not allowed to set foot on
the stages of the fall debates, are dismissed as spoilers at best,
nuisances and cranks in general, and downright un-American at
worst. The news media police the boundaries of the political system,
and they do so very effectively.
But even within the two existing parties
it is not a level playing field. Where once political bosses decided
which candidates would be considered viable, now a pack of political
journalists-most of whom live in Washington and spend non-election
years covering the White House and Congress-do the vetting. And,
as with the coverage of policy debates in the nation's capitol,
the coverage of the campaigns for the respective presidential
nominations of the two major parties are carefully choreographed
to reflect the biases of the Washington elites. Those candidates
who have the most money, and who are most closely connected to
power, tend to receive not only more attention but also more favorable
coverage than dissidents mounting populist challenges. The established
candidates flood the corporate media coffers with huge checks
to purchase mostly asinine TV ads; this establishes their credibility
as serious candidates in the minds of the media. Indeed, TV advertising
often comes to set the agenda for what journalists write about
and pundits bloviate about. The degree of difficulty for a grassroots
candidate to win a national election in the United States would
be high under the best of circumstances; with the wholesale resistance
of the news media the chances have become astronomically difficult.
p93
Rick Salutin, Canadian playwright
"The media are the ushers and the security guards of politics.
They maintain decorum."
p93
More than a century ago, the populists and progressives who sought
to wrestle control of the country from the oligarchs of another
age recognized that they could not count on newspapers, the dominant
media of their day, to cover political insurgency with the impartiality,
let alone the sympathy, that it merited. If anything, the complaints
voiced by contemporary media critics are tepid compared with those
of the author Theodore Dreiser, who observed that, "The American
press, with a very few exceptions, is a kept press. Kept by the
big corporations the way a whore is kept by a rich man."
The kept press of Dreiser's day may have been on a short leash,
but it was always given enough slack to rip apart presidential
contenders who upset the decorum of America's parlor politics,
as supporters of William Jennings Bryan, Eugene Victor Debs, Robert
M. La Follette, and other insurgent candidates who fell afoul
of the owners of the nation's largest daily newspapers learned
in the bitter campaigns of 1896, 1900,1908,1912, 1920, and 1924.
p94
The number of daily newspapers in the U.S. actually peaked in
19 10 at two thousand six hundred, and among their number were
dozens that advocated for radical reform. By 1912, Socialists
were publishing more than three hundred daily, weekly, and monthly
publications, including Julius A. Wayland's Appeal to Reason,
which reached a circulation of seven hundred sixty thousand in
1913 and was the first place of publication for Upton Sinclair's
novel The Jungle. The great muckraking newspapers and magazines
of the day found their way into more than twenty million American
households and inspired movements for workplace safety, food quality,
and clean government, and were more radical than anything seen
in recent decades in the U.S. Indeed, Indiana senator Albert Beveridge
credited the "people's literature" of the muckrakers
with inspiring a wave of reform that was "almost a mental
and moral revolution."
The word "almost" was well chosen,
as government repression during and after World War I, as well
as pressure from advertisers who did not take kindly to exposés
of corporate misdeeds, soon began to kill off dissident and questioning
publications. As community after community witnessed the death
of newspaper competition, the modern model of a one-size-fits-all
media that sets the parameters for debate and punishes those candidates
who dare to step beyond the lines of limitation, even when they
do so in interesting and thought-provoking ways that ought to
excite red-blooded journalists, took shape. Where the policing
of the process was once idiosyncratic - "Mr. Hearst doesn't
like this guy, so we're going to smear him," or even "Wall
Street doesn't like this guy . -it has now become systemic. Afraid
to be accused by the Right or the Left of bias, media managers
and their employees simply head for the safe ground of conventional
wisdom and insider preference.
p96
With the passage of each decade of the twentieth century, the
discourse in the United States has narrowed, so that today it
is virtually unimaginable that a proponent of radical reform could
get the hearing that even Robert M. La Follette did in 1924 when
he won almost five million votes, carried Wisconsin, ran second
in eleven Western states, and swept working-class Jewish and Italian
wards of New York and other major cities, providing the rough
outline for the rural-urban populist coalition that eight years
later would provide Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats
with their base of support.
p96
... it is the media, not the candidates, and certainly not the
voters, that end up defending the status quo.
p101
... in December 2003 ... Ted Koppel steered one of the most critical
debates of the Democratic presidential contest toward horse-race
questions about endorsements, poll positions, and fund raising.
The host of ABC-TV's Nightline made no secret of his desire to
silence Kucinich, Sharpton, and Moseley Braun, in what might well
have been the campaign's clearest act of media policing. Koppel
went into the debate with a set of questions deliberately developed
in order to marginalize the trio of progressive candidates. According
to the Washington Post, the Nightline host asked before the debate,
"How did Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley
Braun get into this thing? Nobody seems to know. Some candidates
who are perceived as serious are gasping for air, and what little
oxygen there is on the stage will be taken up by one-third of
the people who do not have a snowball's chance in hell of winning
the nomination."
That night, Koppel's over-the-top assault
on the candidates he had decided should not be running created
an all-too-rare opening for a serious discussion about what should
be one of the most important issues in America today: media manipulation
of the political process. And Kucinich did his best to seize that
opening even though he knew it would not endear him to the reporters
and editors who had already decided, albeit more quietly than
Koppel, to pretend that his campaign did not exist.
p103
Decades of consolidation and dumbing down had created a reality
that presented reporters with a stark choice: Keep coverage vapid
or quit. As such, the policing process accelerated, not because
the race, which had started earlier than ever, needed the heavy
hand of Washington journalists shaping its progress, but because
the media companies had placed budget and time constraints on
democracy. Media managers had made it clear that covering a long,
drawn-out nomination fight would be costly, and inconvenient.
Covering a coronation, in contrast, was relatively cheap and undemanding.
They chose the coronation. And Koppel
was dispatched to lop off the heads of the pretenders to the throne.
p103
After gently poking Koppel for starting the debate with a round
of questions regarding Al Gore's endorsement of former Vermont
governor Howard Dean, Kucinich suggested that it was wrong to
steer the debate toward process questions when fundamental issues
such as the war in Iraq, trade policy, and national health care
had gone unaddressed. Koppel shot back at Kucinich with a question
about whether he, Sharpton, and Moseley Braun weren't really vanity
candidates who would have to drop out because they had not raised
as much money as other contenders. That's when the sparks flew.
"I want the American people to see where media takes politics
in this country," the Ohio congressman replied. "We
start talking about endorsements, now we're talking about polls
and then talking about money. When you do that you don't have
to talk about what's important to the American people."
p105
The American people clearly do not want the media to be in a position
where they're determining which candidates ought to be considered
for the presidency and which ought not to be considered for the
presidency. Such practice by the media represents a tampering
with the political process itself. The role of the media in this
process has now become a national issue central to the question
of who's running our country ...
p108
Howard Dean at the John E Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University, December 1, 2003 for the taping of the MSNBC program
Hardball with Chris Matthews ... Matthews pressed Dean. "So
what are you going to do about it? You're going to be president
of the United States, what are you going to do?"
"What I'm going to do is appoint
people to the FCC that believe democracy depends on getting information
from all portions of the political spectrum, not just one,"
Dean replied.
Matthews then asked Dean directly, "Are
you going to break up the giant media enterprises in this country?"
"Yes, we're going to break up giant
media enterprises," the candidate answered. "What we're
going to do is say that media enterprises can't be as big as they
are today. I don't think we actually have to break them up, which
Teddy Roosevelt had to do with the leftovers from the McKinley
administration."
Dean explained, "You have got to
say that there has to be a limit as to how - if the state has
an interest, which it does, in preserving democracy, then there
has to be a limitation on how deeply the media companies can penetrate
every single community. To the extent of even having two or three
or four outlets in a single community, that kind of information
control is not compatible with democracy."
p112
FAIR's Peter Hart
"Running against the party establishment
is not a strategy likely to endear you to most political reporters,
who view party insiders as their most valued sources and advisors.
p115
Howard Dean in a conversation days before
the 2004 election
... Washington-based political pundits,
commentators, and reporters ... shape the discussion of presidential
politics on television and on the pages of America's elite newspapers
and on Sunday morning talk shows. "I think the media is part
of the established group in Washington. They have a little club
there," Dean explained. "If you don't go down to kiss
the ring, they get upset by that. I don't play the game. I pretty
much say what I think. That makes a lot of people uncomfortable."
p118
Howard Dean
"... what I've discovered is that,
if you complain about the media, they write that you're whiny
and complaining. So I don't complain about the media."
p118
Howard Dean
"I think democracy fails under a
variety of conditions and one of the conditions occurs when people
don't have the ability to get the kind of information they need
to make up their mind. Ideologically, I don't care much for FOX
News. But the truth is that, as long as there are countervailing
points of view available on the spectrum, it doesn't matter."
p119
Now, the last time I saw a statistic on this, I think that 90
percent of the American people got their news from a handful of
corporations. That's not very good for democracy, and that's not
very good for America.
p126
There has been an utter collapse of credible political journalism
in the United States to the point where powerful politicians are
better positioned than ever to manipulate the coverage of campaigns,
and citizens are left ill-equipped to participate in a meaningful
manner in their own elections. And, as Bill Moyers reminds us,
"the quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are
deeply entwined."
p127
Bush had no illusions about media. Where Kerry first came into
con tact with newspaper and television reporters as a young warrior-turned-protester
in the early 1970s, who found that his story and his ideas were
taken seriously and broadly disseminated by the nation's most
respected journalists, Bush never really occupied the media spotlight
until 1994. It was then that, as a candidate for governor of Texas,
the son of a recently defeated president was aught by Karl Rove
to distrust, disparage, and, above all, manipulate mainstream
media while working closely with a burgeoning network of rightwing
talk radio hosts to advance his candidacy and discredit his foes:
Kerry's experience led him to respect mainstream media and to
feel he could count on a measure of fairness and responsibility
that no longer existed. Bush expected nothing from mainstream
media except an empty balancing act that would treat any statement
he made no matter how absurd-as the equal of expressions from
his opponents. The president had been taught to disrespect mainstream
media and to believe-correctly, it turned out-that most major
media outlets could be spun, threatened, and pressured into doing
the bidding of his administration and his campaign.
p129
... the Bush presidency rarely, if ever, faced the sort of scrutiny
that past presidents have experienced. And after the September
11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, things got a whole lot easier for the commander-in-chief.
It was during that time when the president and his aides perfected
their relationship with U.S. mainstream media: The president relished
the deference that was paid by reporters to the man who was supposedly
leading a war on terror. And White House aides made it clear that
the state of affairs would not be allowed to change. White House
press secretary An Fleischer openly rebuked reporters and television
personalities who were insufficiently patronizing-suggesting after
9/11 that the few dissenters left with forums, such as Bill Maher,
the host of ABC-TV's Politically Incorrect, "need to watch
what they say, watch what they do." The president stopped
taking questions from veteran White House correspondent Helen
Thomas, one of the few prominent reporters who kept pressing him,
particularly on international issues. And the rest of the White
House press corps, showing more concern about getting the right
warm body for the next live shot than the independence of the
Fourth Estate, accepted the banishment of Thomas.
Bush's aides were never naïve enough
to believe that the United States has a liberal media, nor were
they bothered by anecdotal studies that suggested coverage of
Bush was more negative than positive at particular points during
the campaign. They recognized that, while it is true that many
reporters are liberals, their bosses tend to be classic corporate
managers. And, as media has become more corporate - with ownership
consolidating within companies that see journalism as a potential
source of revenue, rather than a mission-the potential to stray
beyond the comfort zone of the nation's economic elites has been
dramatically reduced.
p134
In a broadcast media landscape organized as it currently is, with
huge conglomerates pumping out a steady stream of random images
that can loosely be referred to as news on a 24/7 basis, the demand
for official sources-"talking heads with important-sounding
titles," as one reporter put it-invariably overwhelms concerns
about quality and content. Thus, networks compete with one another
for the opportunity to be the first to report self-serving leaks
from powerful insiders and to conduct vapid interviews with celebrity
pols - the president, the vice president, key cabinet members
such as former Secretary of State Cohn Powell-rather than go after
the sort of blockbuster news stories that cost substantial amounts
of money to report and that run the risk of upsetting the nation's
economic and political elites. Network news executives recognize
that if they produce reports that offend the White House, they
will have a harder time getting the coveted interviews and leaks
that they crave. The Bush administration recognizes this as well,
and during the 2004 campaign the Republicans artfully manipulated
the television networks with an eye toward satisfying and starving
the demand for soft w news depending on the relative friendliness
of the networks involved.
p145
When asked in the fall of 2003 by FOX News anchor Brit Hume how
he got his news, Bush said he asked an aide, "What's in the
newspapers worth worrying about?" The president added that,
"I glance at the headlines just to kind of [get] a flavor
of what's moving. I rarely read the stories .......
Instead of gathering information himself,
Bush said he preferred to "get briefed by people who probably
read the news themselves" and "people on my staff who
tell me what's happening in the world."
p155
Thomas Jefferson, 1816
"The functionaries of every government
have propensities to command at will the liberty and property
of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but
with the people themselves, nor can they be safe with them without
information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read,
all is safe:'
p161
George Orwell
"political language . . . is designed to make lies sound
truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of
solidity to pure wind."
p162
... the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Anyone who wanted to see the
Orwellian media future that the Bush administration envisioned
needed to pay close attention to Sinclair. The cobbled-together
collection of television properties was not a network but a media-holding
company that owned sixty-two of the most miserable excuses for
broadcast outlets in the country.
"Quality" has never been a watchword
for Sinclair, a firm that with waivers, nods, and winks from industry
allies at the Federal Communications Commission-pioneered the
one-size-fits-all approach to mass media. Sinclair's model was
simple: It bought TV stations in long-suffering communities, fired
in-house staffers, and began feeding the locals a steady diet
of disembodied and disengaged content spewed out of the company's
media mill near Baltimore.
Sinclair went so far as to experiment
with the so-called distance-casting of weather reports. Sinclair's
stormbots read local forecasts for communities around the country
while standing in front of everchanging weather maps at the firm's
suburban Baltimore bunker.
But the main product of Sinclair's media
mill during the 2004 campaign was a spew of right-wing dogma drooled
from the lips of Mark Hyman, the company's vice president for
corporate relations. Ideologically in sync with the bosses at
Sinclair-who contributed more than $170,000 to Republican causes
from the mid-1990s on, including close to $60,000 in the 2004
campaign-Hyman force-fed editorials to all sixty-two company-owned
stations in order to shore up the conservative cause. And a good
deal of shoring up those editorials could do, as Sinclair's stations
reach twenty-five percent of all 40 American households.
Hyman made FOX'S Sean Hannity sound like
a sensible moderate. The Sinclair mouthpiece specialized in scorched-earth
attacks on anyone who saw through the distortions of the Bush
administration. Whenever mainstream media outlets practiced anything
akin to journalism, Hyman condemned the offending outlets as the
"hate America crowd." He referred to members of Congress
who criticize the war in Iraq as "unpatriotic politicians
who hate our military." When it came to the presidential
contest, Hyman served as a one-man propaganda machine, spinning
out anti-Kerry commentaries and repeating even the most discredited
lies about Kerry's Vietnam record on stations that broadcast in
at least eleven of the year's seventeen battleground states. If
Hyman's goal was to make FOX look fair and balanced by comparison
with Sinclair, he's succeeded.
p165
Massive firms like Sinclair [Broadcasting] get lucrative monopoly
licenses (for free) from the government to do broadcasting on
the public airwaves. In fact, their entire business is predicated
upon getting these valuable monopoly licenses at no charge; it
is a million miles from a free market operation. The firm, Sinclair
in this case, then aggressively pushes progovernment propaganda
to help the government get reelected, thereby abusing the spirit
and letter of the law. The duly reelected government then proceeds
to eliminate media ownership rules so Sinclair can then gobble
up more broadcasting licenses around the country and continue
with its propaganda. A win-win situation for Sinclair and Bush;
a complete travesty for public policy and for a free press.
If George Orwell had been around, he
would have recognized that the road to 1984 has turned into the
campaign trail of 2004.
p168
According to a survey conducted during the fall campaign season
by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) - a joint
initiative of the Center on Policy Attitudes and the Center for
International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland
School of Public Affairs-a lot of what Americans know is wrong.
Despite the fact that surveys by the Gallup
organization and other polling firms have repeatedly confirmed
that the vast majority of citizens of other countries opposed
the war in Iraq, the PIPA survey found that only 31 percent of
Bush supporters recognized that the majority of people in the
world opposed the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq.
Amazingly, according to the PIPA poll,
57 percent of Bush supporters assumed that the majority of people
in the world would favor Bush's reelection, while 33 percent assumed
that global views regarding Bush were evenly divided. Only 9 percent
of Bush backers correctly assumed that Kerry was the world's choice.
That wasn't the end of the misperception.
"Even after the final report of Charles
Duelfer to Congress saying that Iraq did not have a significant
WMD program, 72 percent of Bush supporters continue to believe
that Iraq had actual WMD (47 percent) or a major program for developing
them (25 percent)," explained the summary of PIPA's polling.
"Fifty-six percent assume that most experts believe Iraq
had actual WMD and 57 percent also assume, incorrectly, that Duelfer
concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program."
"Similarly," the pollsters found,
"75 percent of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq
was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63 percent
believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty
percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion
of most experts, and 55 percent assume, incorrectly, that this
was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission."
p169
... good citizens who consume American media come away with dramatic
misconceptions about the most vital issues of the day.
p171
Walter Lippmann
"A free press is not a privilege
but an organic necessity in a great society."
Tragedy & Farce
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