by CKR
What do science and journalism have in common? As I’ve been trying to learn journalism—that’s what blogging is, of course, journalism—I find a fairly straightforward correspondence of objectives and techniques. The point of both science and journalism is to uncover the facts and put them into a recognizable, understandable story. Preferably that story will allow us to see glimmerings of possible futures.
Journalism is slipperier than science, although not as much as a nonscientist might think. Interrogation of matter by setting up experiments isn’t as much a part of journalism, while interrogation of people isn’t as much a part of science, but both have their moments. To begin in either, you have to decide what’s important and how to go about finding out about it. You have to be careful that the stories you weave don’t eliminate other possibilities.
Eric Boehlert, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, looks at press coverage of the Bush administration in Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush. He’s interrogating press coverage of comparable stories on George W. Bush and Democrats. His objective, he says is to “cut through incessant rhetoric about a liberal media bias.” He does a good job of amassing facts on what was covered and how, including quotes and numbers. He finds that the coverage has been wildly different for George Bush than for his electoral rivals or for past presidents. By the end of the book, he has developed strong arguments that the press has given George Bush everything he could want and more while ignoring or trashing his opposition.
National discussion of the issues the United States faces has fared badly over the past decade or so, perhaps dating to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A celebratory mood and the expectation of a peace dividend in more than money gave way to a president getting blow jobs in the Oval Office and the political exploitation of that misjudgment through impeachment. The terrorist attacks of 2001 put the country on what we thought was a war footing, even if the home front’s duty was to go shopping and keep traveling to Disneyland. Then came torture at Abu Ghraib, wiretapping on the home front, and “I’m the decider.”
For those of us old enough to remember, there once was a link, sometimes slow and sometimes diffuse, between the will of the people and the actions of the government. Richard Nixon eventually decided to leave office when prosecutable crimes in his administration threatened him. Lyndon Johnson eventually realized that Vietnam was causing irreversible damage to the country. Congress held hearings on CIA surveillance of US citizens and passed laws to prevent future misuse of suchpowers. Congress held Ronald Reagan and his administration responsible for the Iran-Contra scandal.
Through all of this, arguments from multiple viewpoints surfaced in the press; governmental officials in all three branches took note and took action. That link appears to be broken.
I’ve been seized with a distemper recently; it’s been particularly hard to write the last week or two, which may be attributable to all the stuff that piled up while I was traveling, but the sense of heaviness has been increasing since early this spring. The country is careening toward war and never-ending weapons buildups, damaging human rights, subsuming scientific judgments under the political, and there seems to be no way to stop the spiral down. It’s not the country I grew up in.
I am an experimentalist; I believe what I see, and I am aware of the tricks one’s own mind can play and the potential uses of those tricks by others. But some of what I see must necessarily be mediated by the press; I can’t be in San Francisco, Chicago and Washington to see demonstrations against the war; I can’t be in the halls of Congress to hear the discussions taking place. When press reports are conflicting or bizarre, far too often over the past several years, I have to wonder what is happening. Sometimes the conflicts come so quickly and I am sufficiently inattentive that I wonder if I actually read or heard what I thought I did.
Boehlert examines the record on some of those events: the Swiftboating of John Kerry, George Bush’s service in the National Guard, and the Downing Street Memos, to list three that have stuck in my mind. On a personal level, I am grateful to him for a sanity check. I really did read reports that fundamentally undermined the integrity and motives of the Swifties. George Bush really did get a rich boy’s place in the National Guard and then didn’t bother to show up but never got into trouble for it. John Kerry really did serve in Vietnam and deserved his medals. The Downing Street Memos really do say that “the evidence was being fixed around the war,” and that really was a statement of George Bush’s determination to have war no matter what.
But what, more broadly, do we do about the press’s recent rollover? Boehlert gives us ammunition for questions. If the press has been following an explicit strategy, it’s an effective one. Psychologists tell us that behavior that is ignored tends to extinguish. I’ve used that principle in teaching classes and managing my projects; it works beautifully. Demonstrations against the war are ignored and die out. Pesky evidence of wrongdoing disappears, the lowest in the hierarchy are branded bad sorts and put in jail, and no more questions are asked. Recent discussions with friends suggest that this is the source of the distemper that is afflicting many of us: nothing makes sense, nothing works.
In order to do something, we need to understand what is wrong. Why has the press rolled over for Bush?
Boehlert touches on this question, but doesn’t develop it beyond a vague concept of “timidity.” It’s not clear whether he intends to lump many causes into this concept or if he is focusing on the unwillingness on the part of the press to take the slings and arrows of the Bush administration, greatly amplified by rightwing thinktanks, talk radio, and blogs.
He supplies a number of possible causes, including many of the usual suspects. Many news reporters have personal relationships with the newsmakers. Boehlert lists surprising friendships of news personalities (Gwen Ifill and Bob Schiefer, for example) with administration figures. This sort of involvement would seem to mandate removing oneself from reporting a story, but this apparently doesn’t happen.
Then come corporate pressures. Boehlert gives examples of stories that were killed by editors or severely cut and relegated to page seventeen. The MSM’s explicit objection to the Downing Street Memos was that they were old news and therefore not worth covering. The misuse of the ability to define what is news may be the most dangerous of the malfeasances that Boehlert reports.
Unfortunately, his last chapter dribbles out several more examples without clearly summarizing the mass of material he’s worked over.
It will be interesting to see how the reviews fall. If they follow the pattern that Boehlert documents, they will dismiss what he has to say as too biased or not news at all; or the MSM may just ignore this untoward investigation of the stories they didn’t report.
Update: Michael Getler, former Washington Post ombudsman, has reviewed the book. He begins the review with a variety of attacks on Boehlert (“joins the pounding,” the mindless demand for an opposite point of view, “appears overtly political” ) before admitting that the book has something to say. I’ll agree that the book’s ending is weak, but so is Getler’s argument that there is something wrong with Boehlert’s "makes the conclusion -- that the press rolled over for Bush -- inescapable." Boehlert’s is standard rhetoric: “I am presenting an ironclad argument.” So ignore it unless there’s too much of it, which there isn’t. Getler:
But there is no way to prove that this is "inescapable," which would mean knowing what was inside the heads of producers and editors at the time their news decisions were made.Getler seems to be reading Boehlert’s rhetoric to say that it’s inescapable that the press rolled over for Bush. No; it’s his conclusion that Boehlert is claiming is inescapable. I’d like to know what was inside those heads too. So we need to form our theories and watch very carefully, particularly the reaction to this book.