The Decline and Fall of the American Media Empire
Posted by Jeff Goldstein
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Among the Washington Press corp today, talk is centering nearly exclusively around the “timing” of the information flow that followed Vice President Dick Cheney’s non-lethal Saturday hunting accident (the VP sprayed buckshot into one of his party)—watching the White House press briefing right now, I find myself mesmerized by the interest reporters are showing in this story, from the tenacity of their questioning of Scott Mcclellan to their desire to turn the delays of the release of the full details to the national press into a cover-up that rivals Watergate.
The reason for the press’s agitation is clear, of course: they are the loop, you see, and when the White House delays getting the loop in the loop (even if doing so is matter of getting all their ducks in a row, so to speak—which could involve simply piecing together details and a time line, or perhaps picking embarrassing bits of stray buckshot out of the narrative, I don’t know the particulars), the press as a whole rises is great disdain.
To be clear, the White House probably should have released information piecemeal as it became available, if only to stave off an entire Monday’s worth of coverage. But that they did not signifies nothing more than bad judgment and hints that they hoped to delay the embarrassment they knew would likely ensue.
Of course, the importance of the hunting accident story is nil. The investigating sheriff determined what everyone present during the incident knew: an accident had taken place; the VP (as one reporter put it, was “the shooter"); and the victim, Harry Wittington, was not seriously injured. One of the local papers in Corpus Cristi had the story very quickly, but in was not until early Sunday morning that the story broke nationally.
So in order to keep alive what is essentially no more than a minor embarrassment to the Vice President and gin up as much controversy as possible, the press has determined to make it a story about why they weren’t more immediately and breathlessly—and in advance of the full details—informed of the hunting accident, which would have given them an extra day to beat a non-story into important news.
Why the reaction of the press (and even now, FOXNew has cut away from the McClellan press briefing, the press secretary having moved off the topic of the hunting accident, and is now showing execrable new “Dayside,” where talk is about...the hunting accident) is so troubling to me is that this story (which is quickly becoming nothing more than a meta-story) is now taking all the oxygen away from far more important stories breaking from this weeking—from Iran’s escalation of threats and rumors of the mounting of a possible US offensive, to Kofi Annan’s solicitation of US military in Darfur, to Al Gore’s remarks in Wahabbist Saudi Arabia that told of his own country’s post-911 “abuses” of Muslims.
Each of thes stories deserves its own post—and I hope to be able to accomplish that today—but the point of this partcular post is to highlight how the majority of our mainstream media has become so self-important and self-referential that they now officially consider themselves actors in stories rather than simpy conduits of stories (there is a time and place for both, I should think, but in general, they should be sticking to the latter so long as they are clinging to the pretense of “objectivity” and “neutrality”—and even “reporting,” rather than narrating).
It took the Washington White House press corp at least 20 questions before anyone even broached Iran’s threat to walk away from the NPT—and their President’s call to Iran’s citizens to brace themselves for battle—and when they finally did, FOXNews broke away from the story in favor of more “analysis” of the VP’s hunting accident (this included helpful scrolling factoids such as “Harry Truman liked to hunt” and “Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton famously blah blah blah").
Saturday I wrote of how the framing of a particular story will drive public perception, and that—consequently—when the spotlighting of such framing is removed, the story will evolve into its natural form. When I wrote this, I never thought it a controversial statement, but one of my progressive commenters took issue even with that bland assertion—suggesting to me that we have truly reached a point in contemporary political discourse where, from those at certain points on the political spectrum, some of every single assertion is to be perfunctorily challenged as a way to forestall debate, and make the exchange of meaningful ideas glacial if not impossible.
In a society that relies upon an informed populace to elect officials who represent our interests, we rely on the press to report—and in its editorial function to arrange the news by dint of importance—so that we can use the facts of that reporting to inform our own interests, and elect the people we think will best serve them. The system breaks down when the media becomes an advocate whose positions align with a particular political ideology, or when rhetoric becomes about the rhetoric, and about those espousing the rhetoric.
At least, so long as the media is allowed to keep up its pretense of being information conduits who behave evenhandedly in their adversarial role as skeptics of “power” (which does NOT, I submit, mean siding with the party out of power, as some people seem to interpret this mandate, but rather to treat all elected officials as the “power").
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