How We Got Here,
The Culture of Spin,
What the Rest of the World Sees

excerpted from the book

Bad News

The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to All of Us

by Tom Fenton

ReganBooks, 2005, hardcover

p52
To some degree, Americans have always lived as though dissociated from the world beyond. Virtually every other country on the globe knows the horrors of being invaded and marauded by outsiders. The last time such a thing happened to us was 1814. The threat or memory of invasion has never much shaped our thoughts, informed our songs or myths. Others have had to learn the hard lessons of geography and history firsthand. We have never needed to. America the safe haven and America the self-absorbed, even the self-righteous America that assumes the right to impose enlightenment on foreign nations: All of these are part of the same package. Foreign correspondents coming home almost always feel that strange sensation Liebling experienced, marveling at how much better attuned to world currents are the people we meet around the world.

p53
From the collapse of communism until the attacks of 9/11, the networks showed little or no interest in the rest of the world-and even 9/11, as we shall see, caused only a temporary halt in the decline of foreign newsgathering. We are today still a long way from the heyday of foreign news, even with the addition of the CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC 24-hour news channels. The withdrawal from foreign coverage has been felt across the board in the American news media, but most noticeably in television.

p72
Lawrence Grossman, president of NBC ... He explains how in October 1987, when the stock market plunged, "Brokaw was talking about Black Monday and all of that. The next morning, I get a call from Jack Welch, who said, 'What do you guys think you are doing? You are killing this company. You are ruining our stock price.' I said, 'What are you talking about?' He said, 'You've got to get those guys of yours to stop talking about Black Monday.' I said, 'The fact is, it is the biggest drop since 1929.'

'But look what you are doing to the value of this company. My job is to keep the stock price up.'

p76
... debates over Iraq ... are aberrations. Most of the time, in truth, most of the media take their cues from the government in deciding which foreign stories to cover.

p77

Cutbacks, bottom-line fever, and CEO-mandated news-1 criteria actually reinforce groupthink in mainstream news media in ways that can wildly distort the news. You can't get a more striking example than the amazingly mistaken election day exit polling by the networks in 2004, which initially indicated pro-Kerry outcomes. Why were they so uniformly wrong? Because they all got together and pooled their resources to cut costs, sharing the same polling companies when a little competitive reporting might have kept the networks themselves on their toes.

This kind of herd-like laziness has infected the bloodstream of mainstream news organizations. It runs so deep, they don't even know it's there. No one gets fired for saying the obvious. Conventional wisdom dominates, and few news executives question received truths.

p82
Politicians spin the truth-that is what they do for a living. The news media's job is supposed to be unscrambling that spin, separating truth from lies. One of our most important jobs, actually. But it's just not working anymore. The public simply doesn't know what's going on much of the time. They don't know who to trust and what to believe. The one thing the public does seem to agree on more and more consistently, alas, is that the news media can't be fully trusted. According to a Gallup survey conducted on September 13-15, 2004, as many as 39 percent of those surveyed said they had "not very much" confidence in the media's accuracy and fairness, and 16 percent had "none at all." So when real facts do emerge, it's hard for people to recognize them as impartial and true, and even harder to allow the truth to change their own built-in biases.

p83
... politicians and the media have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public. At heart, politicians don't believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the news media, especially television news, basically agrees.

p85
... the public now believes the media to be utterly politicized and partisan-caught up in its own spin, as it were. This is not the first time in recent decades that the news media and public opinion have been at odds.

From the Nixon through the Carter administrations, the press had the upper hand. But all that changed with Ronald Reagan, the Teflon president, who consistently out-communicated the media, and grew in popularity the more he was criticized by the press. Richard Nixon may have hated the press passionately, but it was Reagan who first institutionalized scorn for journalists by cherry-picking the correspondents he allowed into White House briefings, or by simply not calling on those who dared ask provocative questions. The news outlets, anxious to keep their seats at the briefings, went along with it. It was this era that saw the birth of the "exclusive" interview-the Barbara Walters-style therapeutic talkathon in which the interviewee (often a politician) agonized over one soft, fuzzy, cozy question after another. Interviews of this kind signaled the triumph of chat show values over news values and, more insidiously, the subliminal moment when star network interviewers began to undermine their news colleagues by turning politicians into icons.

p86
Most foreign news channels regard American reporting of foreign affairs as deeply insular and self-serving, and with some reason: American television, for example, almost never shows scenes of Iraqi victims being killed by American troops, or blown up by helicopters, a standard spectacle on Al Jazeera and various European channels. Americans, in their current mood, would probably bridle at such spectacles and deem them to be vulgar anti-Bush, antiwar, even anti-American propaganda. So instead Americans get a partial view of a partial view-and even that they often choose to discount. So spin has triumphed in the worst possible way, by confusing the public's very ability inclination to recognize the truth.

p88
Vladimir Putin
"The press is not an institution, it's an instrument."'

p88
The public can see perfectly clearly that on many fronts, and for many often hidden reasons, the press cannot or will not reveal various faces of the truth. The glaring issue of corporate ownership of news media, and the conflicts that come with it, get raised often and just as often get dismissed.

p103
The Saudis have ... acted for years as clandestine proxy financiers for U.S. foreign policy objectives. In the 1980s, they helped President Reagan dodge Congressional interference by supplying funds directly to the Nicaraguan Contras. From the 1970s onward, they helped the U.S. counter communist ideas by funding madrassas around the Muslim world at a time when it made sense, when pro-Soviet propaganda dominated the region-and that was even before the Afghans' ideological gearing up against the Soviets. Remember the BCCI bank scandal in the early 1990s? Gulf and Saudi money underpinned the bank, which funneled funds to Islamic groups fighting the Soviets, all of which was allowed to unravel once the Soviets withdrew

The Saudis certainly have powerful friends in Washington, but nobody knows how much direct influence they really exert over the media. Their form of influence turns into a form of invisible spin as it filters down through protective bureaucratic layers of "friends" on the payroll, who run flak for them quietly. You will not see any news pundits, politicians, or prominent citizens stand up proudly and declare, as many do with Israel, that they are strong supporters of Saudi Arabia. Yet neither will you see much on network news about the influence of Saudi money in Washington-which is a real phenomenon indeed. Various books published in the wake of 9/11 have detailed Saudi clout in American corridors of power, from ex-CIA agent Robert Baer's Sleeping with the Enemy to Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud (which claims that the Bush family made $1.4 billion from the Saudis over the years). Yet there's still a great deal we don't know.

What we do know is that, since the 1990s, Saudi Arabia has become the leading hotbed of anti-American Islamist radicalism, with the help of some top Saudi royalty; that fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers hailed from Saudi Arabia; and that nearly three hundred elite Saudis flew out of American airspace unhindered soon after 9/11, many with special permission, some with apparent connections to al Qaeda. A great deal of the mystery centers around private flights said to have operated through U.S. airspace soon after 9/11, carrying top Saudis, at a time when the entire nation's civilian aviation was mostly grounded-or so the allegation goes. As Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 9/11 and Craig Unger's book (and his web site, www.houseofbush.com) allege, one such flight consisted mainly of bin Laden family members. In rebuttal, FBI officials and others have uniformly resorted to spin, saying that no evidence exists of flights leaving the United States during the flight ban. But they don't explain the flights within the country. Nor do they explain why, if it was all routine and legal, the exodus required permission from someone very high up in the Bush administration. Thus far, only Richard Clarke in the administration admits to giving his approval to the flights, but he would hardly have dared make that decision on his own. And here's where the spin comes in: Both the Saudis and the Bush administration have gotten away with the fudging. Despite the 9/11 Commission's (incompetent) probe into the matter, despite the Bush backers' spinning attempts to saddle Richard Clarke with the full responsibility, we still don't know who okayed those flights, on whose authority, and why. And we don't know why anyone should try to fudge the entire issue. We do know that the Saudi royal family fears a Shi'ite-dominated democratic government in Iraq based on the majority Shi'ite population: In the wake of the American counterinsurgency operation against Sunni rebels in Fallujah (November 2004), the Saudi rulers allowed twenty-six prominent Saudi religious scholars to issue a call to arms urging Iraqis to resist the U.S. occupation. The Bush administration has said nothing on the matter, and the media has largely followed suit.

p106
As my [media] colleague notes, the ritual of press room briefings is only part of the prickly relationship between reporters and the White House. "The question of access to senior administration officials and policymakers bedevils reporters in any administration, because the only access to those decision makers is by phone. They return the calls of reporters they know or like, or in whose publications they want information to appear (usually sourced to 'an administration official,' rather than by name)." Thus, in any administration-even the current one, with its well-known antipathy to the so-called liberal media elite-"it's easier to get a call returned if you work for the New York Times or the Washington Post than the Toledo Blade."

p110
... despite the access to infinite sources of information, we are surely witnessing the consistent triumph of spin over reality in our own country and elsewhere. It turns out the self-evident truth we believed in all along, that free societies get better information-or that plentiful information frees societies-isn't so simply axiomatic after all. The real world appears to work a lot more subtly than that.

Our old faith would suggest that truth triumphs over fiction in an open society because the public knows the difference. But what if, in an apparently competitive media system, the public still only gets inadequate or broadly slanted news? Is that even possible? If not, how does one explain the enormous divergence between European and American reporting on Iraq-a matter of not just opposing beliefs, but starkly opposed "factual" reporting? How to explain, for that matter, the reporting of Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya? Either they are biased or we are.

But they can't be making everything up. Take the case of Iraq: all the wounded children, the accidentally killed mothers, the homeless, the workless, the understaffed hospitals, the bad water, the sheer rage and hopelessness of many caught in the crossfire. We don't see much of that on the news here in America. But everyone else in the world does. It turns out that we're as resistant to certain kinds of truth as totalitarian countries-we who pride ourselves on our free flow of information!

p111
... the United States gets a more positive view of the war than the rest of the world-including the United Kingdom, our ally. Most of the world's media outlets differ from us in the picture they present. Why doesn't that picture get into our sitting rooms? Here is part of an email sent around to colleagues in September 2004 by Wall Street journal correspondent Farnaz Fassihi in Iraq. It was a more personal opinion than correspondents generally choose to publish in the paper-perhaps too personal-but Fassihi seemed bent on conveying to readers what it was really like:

Iraqis like to call this mess "the situation." When asked "how are things?" they reply: "the situation is very bad." What they mean by "situation" is this: the Iraqi government doesn't control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country's roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war.

p112
The freer flow of information, apparently, does not lead all societies toward the same values. Given the freedom to do so, we don't even perceive the same things. The truth gets fractured, everybody takes sides, no one knows what's going on, so people watch the news that confirms their views.

In our country, the Fox News Channel illustrates this precisely. Uncomfortable facts simply get ignored, or quickly forgotten by their commentators and the people who applaud them.

p113
... commercial exigency, rather than the old state-imposed variety, dictates that news channels don't tell viewers what viewers don't want to hear. The reason is simple: Now more than ever-anywhere in the world-viewers can simply switch to another channel, to an alternative view that makes them feel more comfortable. The profit motive can distort the news as surely as state control does. In the brave new world of media, information flows more freely, but certainly not more impartially or accurately. Around the world, more choice has meant more polarization of views, and easier manipulation of news. We, in America, who pride ourselves on our open society-the basis of our triumph over the Soviets-pioneered this system. Yet, like others, we are locked into our delusions. We are no more hearing the world than they us.

p113
... today's regimes - such as China or the Arab countries, or indeed most halfway-developed countries manipulate their public more effectively, using lessons they learned from America. Since they can no longer stop it, these nations now allow TV news competition. On one hand, it gives the illusion of variety; on the other, it generates bottom-line fever-which in turn leads to more entertainment, more gossip and scandal, and less real news. In that thin intellectual atmosphere, television news barely has the will or wherewithal to resist spin, to make a complex case for or against anything-and certainly not against strident patriotism or religion. News independence gets especially weak if corporate owners have higher business agendas. Indeed, these days governments deliberately allow corporate owners of news channels to prosper in other businesses.

All over Eastern Europe, oligarchs who own large chunks of national industries also own television channels, and many of these power brokers are cozy with politicians. State, commerce, and news work together to enrich rival elites and to spin the news for each. And ultimately the more conglomerate-owned channels there are, the more uniform the headlines become, as everyone fights for the mainstream advertising dollars. Does any of this sound familiar? Surely I'm not suggesting that this applies to the United States? Well, yes, I am. After all, the owners of Big Media now occupy more and more of the public airwaves, with less and less obligation to serve anything other than their bottom line. The state actively colludes in the process through its regulatory body, the FCC, by constantly giving away public rights to broadcasters almost unconditionally-they don't even pay a fee, as they do in, say, the United Kingdom. All of which puts the state firmly in bed with Big Media, and means that profit wins over hard news.

Does the state, therefore, control American news in any way? It's a hard one to answer. The best answer is that it doesn't need to for all the reasons we've seen ... fewer news resources, groupthink, powerful spin. The news doesn't much get in the way, these days, if the White House spin machine is firing on all cylinders.

p116
With the cooperation of former Bush White House Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Ron Suskind wrote the highly critical book The Price of Loyalty. Suskind then wrote a celebrated article in the October 17 issue of the New York Times Magazine titled "Without a Doubt," in which he reports conversing with an aide to the president:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as "people who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality-judiciously, as you will-we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

p118
from a November 2004 London Spectator book review by Jonathan Mirsky: In August 2002, Mr. Bush said, 'I'm the Commander-see, I don't need to explain. That's the interesting thing about being President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

p125
ABC News on October 2, 2004, Peter Jennings announced the release of Simona Pan and Simona,Torretti, two Italian aid workers, kidnapped on September 7 and widely reported to have been beheaded. When they returned home, Italy's press received them as heroines. Most of America's press celebrated, too.

But there was virtually no follow up in the United States when the public mood in Italy turned against the two women. In a press conference soon after their return, the "two Simonas," as they were dubbed, gave their backing to the Iraqi insurgents opposing the allied forces. "If you ask me about terrorism, I'll tell you that there is terrorism and there is resistance. The resistance struggle of people against an occupying force is guaranteed by international law," Simona Torretti said.

p126
According to a report in the British newspaper The Guardian on April 25, an estimated one to two thousand tons of DU [depleted uranium] had been dropped on Iraq since the start of the Iraq war-roughly three to six times the amount dropped in the 1991 Gulf War. On September 7, 2004, Al Jazeera claimed that the use of these "weapons of mass destruction" had caused Iraqis in the southeast of the country to have record levels of cancer and babies born with horrific birth defects.

p127
Throughout the late 1990s Internet boom, Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist, told us repeatedly that all totalitarian states were about to disappear, overwhelmed by too much truth from outside. In a September 24, 2004, opinion column in the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger predicts that the old Big Media control of "content and context" in the United States is about to disappear due to the rise of Internet blogs. So Garrick Utley's forecast still has many adherents. The reality? In fact, increasingly, we all tend voluntarily to shut out each other's truths, both at home and abroad. Likewise, in many countries governments still exercise state control over their media to one degree or another, without repercussions from their public. The Russians and Chinese openly control their many channels, but the phenomenon isn't limited to communist (or former communist) states: after all, Italy's Prime Minister Berlusconi simply owns much of Italian television. Most Arab countries have state-controlled media, and the competition from satellite channels such as Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and the U.S.-funded Al Hura, has not changed that. Indeed, if anything, the proliferation of channels has taken the pressure off state-controlled channels to make any internal change. And America's claim to the banner of free speech is not entirely pure: the United States openly closed down the Al Jazeera office in Iraq for being too negative.

p129
... the Fox News Channel has its own way of ensuring loyalty to company and country. According to one inside source, Roger Ailes had taken to interviewing even the lowest of job applicants to his company himself, and asking them point blank if they believed that Fox was indeed "fair and balanced." Since the Fox News doctrine boiled down so evidently to pro-Bush, pro-war, pro-patriotism sentiments, Ailes's question also boils down to a test of national loyalty. In other words, does the prospective employee believe that Fox News was "fair and balanced" in supporting the White House war? You don't think so? You don't get the job.

... the system of self-monitoring media, as pioneered after the Cold War in the United States, has massive flaws. The forces of spin distort the already thin news content in ways both invisible and undeniable. It's a prospect the Romans might have recognized: The populace is distracted by spectacle on television while commercial pressures hobble the news. As Ralph Nader never tires of telling us, the free market would be fine if it were truly free. Instead, corporate influences effectively curb the market in a thousand ways, whether through quiet deals inside Washington or by arrangements the conglomerates make with other governments. Who criticizes Rupert Murdoch for going easy on China in return for satellite broadcast deals there?

p130
... In France, the leading conservative daily, Le Figaro, has been taken over by Serge Dassault, the dominant French arms manufacturer. Another conglomerate, Lagardere, which makes missiles as well, presides over a large number of popular French periodicals. Together, Dassault and Lagardere own more than 70 percent of the French press.

Bad News

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