Munich American Peace Committee

Munich American Peace Committee (MAPC)

Radio Lora, 12. Jan. 2009

Alternative Radio

Robert McChesney

Über Macht und Ohnmacht des Journalismus in den USA
Asheville, NC, 7. Mai 2002

Robert McChesney ist Professor für Kommunikationswissenschaften an der Universität von Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Der führende Kritiker der Medienindustrie ist Autor von "Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy" und "Rich Media, Poor, Democracy"

Ich fürchte, dass ich heute schlechte Nachrichten für Sie habe. Weil man nur verändern kann, was man versteht, möchte ich Ihnen einige konkrete Beispiele dafür geben, wie Journalismus heute funktioniert.

In einer Demokratie hat Journalismus drei Aufgaben:
1.) Er muß ein wachsames Auge haben auf die Mächtigen und Möchtegernmächtigen.
2.) Er muß uns vielfältige Informationen zu den wichtigsten aktuellen Fragen liefern, damit wir uns ein eigenes Bild machen können.
3.) Die Informationen müssen zuverlässig sein. Da ein Medium allein dies nicht leisten kann, muß jeder Bürger Zugang zum gesamten Meinungsspektrum haben.

Viele glauben, dass alles in schönster Ordnung wäre, wenn nur die Medien objektiver wären. Gewiss, Objektivität hat Vorteile, aber auch Nachteile.
Heute, in Zeiten des Berufsjournalismus, fordert man fairen, genauen und unparteiischen Journalismus. Das ist nicht falsch, solange man nicht wie in den USA Unfaires, Ungenaues und Parteiisches als fair, genau und unparteiisch verkauft. Es geht um die Balance zwischen dem Berufsethos der Journalisten und den Interessen der Blatteigentümer und Anzeigenkunden. Die Geburtsstunde des modernen Berufsjournalismus war gleichzeitig auch die der PR-Industrie. Es heißt, dass heute 40- bis 70% der Nachrichten von PR-Firmen geliefert werden. So spart die Medienindustrie mit schlechtem Journalismus viel Zeit und viel Geld.

Und wie steht es um die Balance zwischen der Kritik an der Politik und der Kritik an der Wirtschaft? Der Kommunikationswissenschaftler Ben Bakdikain behauptet, dass die Politikerschelte überwiegt. Charles Lewis, der Gründer des Center for Public Integrity, liefert dafür die Beweise: lädt er zu einer Pressekonferenz über Politikerskandale ein, ist die Hölle los. Ist die Abhängigkeit der Politik von der Medienindustrie das Thema, herrscht lähmendes Schweigen. Kritik an Wirtschaftsvertretern ist tabu. Aber guter, sauberer Journalismus muß sich an den Eliten reiben. Doch damit ist es bei uns schlecht bestellt. Es gibt folgende Tabus:
Auf republikanischer wie demokratischer Seite besteht Einigkeit darüber, dass die USA und nur die USA das uneingeschränkte Recht haben, unbehelligt jedes beliebige Land, aus beliebigen Gründen, zu jedem beliebigen Zeitpunkt angreifen zu dürfen. Allerdings gelang es 1989 einer unerschrockenen Schülerzeitung, Außenminister James Baker mit der Frage nach der Legitimität des Überfalls auf Panama in Verwirrung zu stürzen. Seither hat niemand mehr diese Frage gestellt.

Kapitalismus und Demokratie werden in unseren Medien ebenfalls nicht diskutiert, denn Kapitalismus ist Demokratie, sagen die Eliten.
Venezuela ist dafür ein sehr gutes Beispiel: Hugo Chavez wurde demokratisch gewählt, aber er ist gegen die amerikanischen Ölinteressen. Deshalb hat er die Wahl gewonnen und deshalb hassen ihn die amerikanischen und venezulanischen Eliten, deshalb stürzten sie ihn. New York Times und Washington Post bejubelten die Einsetzung des IHK-Präsidenten, der sofort alle verfassungsmäßigen Organe absetzte, als demokratische Errungenschaft. So werden Kapitalismus und die Interessen der Reichen geschützt.

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Aber es ist nicht allein der Einfluß der Wirtschaft, der unseren Journalismus lähmt. Auch bei frei zugänglichem Quellenmaterial kann ein Skandal unter den Teppich gekehrt werden. So wie 2000 bei den Wahlen in Florida. Diese Wahl spiegelt das ganze Dilemma unseres Journalismus. Was war passiert? Al Gore hat die Florida-Wahl gewonnen. Wir wissen, dass die Mehrheit der Wähler in Florida ihre Stimme Al Gore geben wollte. Al Gore hat Florida und damit die Präsidentschaftswahl gewonnen. Laut unserer Medien hat jedoch George W.Bush gewonnen, in Florida und im ganzen Land. Er sei der wahre und legitime Präsident. Was ist aus dem Journalisten-Schwur, nur der Wahrheit zu dienen, geworden?
Erinnern wir uns. Es war knapp, es ging um 300 oder 500 Stimmen bei 6 Millionen Wählern. Jeder ahnte, dass das Nachzählen der 6 Millionen Wahlzettel noch lange dauern würde. Aber bereits um 3 Uhr früh erklärte Fox News George W.Bush zum Sieger. Und wer bei Fox News erklärte George W. Bush zum Sieger? John Ellis, George W.Bushs Cousin! Die Republikaner behaupteten einfach, Bush hätte gewonnen, während die Demokraten vorsichtig auf die Ergebnisse der Nachzählungen warteten. Viele der Nachzählungen waren ein Riesenschwindel oder fanden gar nicht erst statt. Aber niemand kümmerte sich darum. Die Medien berichteten das, was ihnen die Parteien erzählten, sie recherchierten nicht selbst.
Diese Untätigkeit der US-Journalisten und die mangelnde Bereitschaft der Demokraten, für ihren Sieg zu kämpfen, führte zu einer weltweiten Blamage. Es waren BBC, Mirror, Guardian und Observer die im November die Story des in England lebenden amerikanischen Reporters Greg Palast ganz groß herausbrachten.
Er hatte herausgefunden, dass Katherine Harris, die Justizministerin von Florida, erstmals in der Geschichte der USA die Erstellung der Liste, der nicht wahlberechtigten Verbrecher outgesourct hatte. Rein zufällig war die Firma, die diesen Auftrag bekam, in republikanischen Händen. Sie präsentierte eine Liste von 57,700 Namen - leider war diese Liste falsch. Sie enthielt falsche Personen, falsche Namen oder die Namen von Nichtbetroffenen, deren Namen nur so ähnlich klangen wie die Namen von Verbrechern. So wurden Tausende Wähler, meist Arme und darunter besonders viele Afroamerikaner und Latinos zu unrecht an den Wahllokalen abgewiesen. Der Clou der Geschichte ist, dass CBS bereits im November an Palasts Story interessiert war, aber nach einem Anruf bei Gouverneur Jeb Bush davon überzeugt wurde, dass an der ganzen Sache nichts dran sei!

Nach der unsäglichen Entscheidung des Obersten Gerichtshofes gingen die Medien auf Zehenspitzen, um es sich mit dem angeblichen Präsidenten ja nicht zu verderben. Unvergeßlich dann ein Jahr später die Berichte nach der Bekanntgabe des offiziellen Ergebnisses der Nachzählungen. Gut versteckt im 16. Absatz gestand die New York Times ein, dass Al Gore die Wahlen gewonnen habe. Warum erst jetzt?
Hintergrund dieser Zurückhaltung war nicht so sehr politischer Druck, als viel mehr rein wirtschaftliches Interesse. Wer, wie Sunner Redstone für CBS zwischen 30 bis 40 Milliarden Dollar bezahlt hat, der erwartet, dass sich diese Investition lohnt, der pfeift auf den journalistischen Code. Diese Leute wollen Gewinne sehen, sie sind keine Wohltäter der Menschheit. So nimmt der wirtschaftliche Druck auf die Journalisten ständig zu. Man spart Kosten, man kündigt und man stellte seit Mitte der 80er Jahre die Auslandsberichterstattung ein.

Es gibt ihn noch, den guten, ja hervorragenden Journalismus, aber leider fehlt die Resonanz.
Morton Mince von der Washington Post entdeckte in kleinen wie in großen Blättern überraschend viele gut recherchierte Berichte über Straftaten. Sie erschienen einmal, wurden aber nie weiterverfolgt, es gab keinerlei Reaktion der Politiker, höchstens glätteten
PR-Leute die eine oder andere Woge, nichts änderte sich, alles blieb beim Alten. Ich stimme Morton Mice zu, dass die Krise des Journalismus die Krise unserer Demokratie ist. Demokratie braucht Journalismus und Journalismus braucht Demokratie. Wenn von Straftaten berichtet wird und sich nichts rührt, weil das politische System so korrupt ist, dann wird Journalismus überflüssig. Das Maß der Korruption in unserem politischen System übersteigt heute alles bisher Dagewesene. Das bringt den Journalismus in eine schwierige Lage. Man recherchiert und verfaßt Exposes und niemand interessiert sich dafür. Unsere Medien sind nicht mehr ein Korrektiv der Korruption in Politik und Wirtschaft, sondern Teil des Problems.

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Nun zum wichtigsten Punkt meines: Vortrages: der Weltkrieg gegen das Böse, in dem wir uns augenblicklich befinden. Als die Attentäter am 11. September zuschlugen, sahen sich die Journalisten mit einem klassischen Dilemma unseres Landes konfrontiert. In den letzten 100 Jahren waren die USA an 75 Kriegen beteiligt. Seit 1914 sind es immer Lügen der Präsidenten mit denen das amerikanische Volk in den Krieg gelockt wird. In den 30er und 40er Jahren wollte Franklin D. Roosevelt in den Krieg ziehen und so log er unablässig, bis er es geschafft hatte. Woodrow Wilson, 1916 noch der "Kandidat für den Frieden", plante bereits für 1917 den Kriegseintritt. 1964 war Lyndon B. Johnson der "Friedenskandidat". Er werde uns nie nach Vietnam schicken, beteuerte er. Es schmerzt, nachlesen zu müssen, dass er bereits seit 1964 alles für den Kriegseintritt vorbereitet hatte.
Und in dieser dunklen Stunde hatte uns der Journalismus verraten. Der 1. Weltkrieg war ein sinnloses Abschlachten. Ein ebenso sinnloses Abschlachten war Vietnam, wo viele von Ihnen wie ich nahe Angehörige verloren haben. Hätte der Journalismus damals seine Pflicht und Schuldigkeit getan, hätten diese Menschen nicht sterben müssen. Das ist die Lehre die wir weitergeben müssen.

Zum Schluß möchte ich noch über Enron sprechen. Enron ist genau so wichtig, wie die Wahl von 2000 und wie der 9. September 2001, denn es geht hier an die Wurzeln unserer korrupten Wirtschaftspolitik. Der Fall Enron zeigt, wie die Wirtschaft die Arbeitnehmer ausbeutet, die Politiker besticht und die Verbraucher betrügt, ohne dass sich irgend jemand darüber empört. Noch vor eineinhalb Jahren galt Enron als ein Musterbeispiel der New Economy. Der Skandal kam völlig unerwartet. Wird der Bankrott von Enron unsere Dreyfus-Affaire.? Werden die engen Beziehungen zwischen Politik und Wirtschaft aufgedeckt? Nein, denn man tut so, als handle es sich um eine simple Firmenpleite. Ein gewisser Arthur Anderson hat Unterlagen geschreddert und dubiose Buchalter haben Zahlen manipuliert, aber niemand spricht von der wichtigsten, nämlich der politischen Seite dieser Affaire. Enron hat sie alle gekauft, Rechte wie Linke: Joe Lieberman, Tom Daschle, George W. Bush und Dick Cheney, sie alle besitzen dicke Enron Aktienpaketen. Sie alle stecken unter einer Decke. Niemand wünscht sich eine Dreyfus-Affaire, denn dann wären sie alle selbst dran, und mit ihnen das gesamte korrupte politische System.

Viele Zuhörer fragen mich, warum ich nicht resigniere. Ich resigniere nicht, weil ich sehe, wie sehr sich die Wirtschaft bemüht, zu verhindern, dass all diese Dinge an die Öffentlichkeit kommen und dort diskutiert werden. Sie wissen, wie ich, dass die Menschen wütend werden, wenn sie das alles erfahren und es dann schnell ändern möchten. Deshalb unternimmt die Medienindustrie alles in ihrer Macht stehende, um diese öffentliche Debatte verhindern. Deshalb ist es an uns, endlich alles ans Licht zu bringen.
Ich schließe mit einem Zitat von Noam Chomsky. Den vielen Menschen, die fürchten, es sei nicht möglich, es sei zu schwierig, es lohne sich nicht, die Welt zu ändern, weil die Mächtigen zu stark sind, antwortet er: "Sie haben die Wahl."
Wenn wir glauben, dass es keine Hoffnung auf eine Änderung zum Guten gibt, dann wird es keine Änderung zum Guten geben: Sie können wählen. Ich danke Ihnen.

ROBERT McCHESNEY

Write What We Say, Not What We Do
Asheville, NC 7 May 2002

Robert McChesney is Professor of Communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a leading critic of corporate media. He is the author of Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy. His latest book is Rich Media, Poor Democracy.

Now, in this talk, I’m mostly going to be the bearer of bad news.
I think you can’t change anything until you understand how it works and why it works. This is my bad news talk. I’m going to try and tell you, concretely, how our journalism works the way it does, why it does, and to give you some concrete examples of recent, crucial stories and go through them to show you how it works. I think implicit in this, and certainly explicit in my presentation will be the explanation for why this is disastrous for democracy, and why we’ve got to change our media, and change our journalism if we’re going to have a viable democracy. It’s not really an abstract matter. It’s not really as if we’re talking about a tangential issue. This goes right to the heart of the future of this country. It’s absolutely central to what direction this country, and frankly this planet, is going to go in the next 25, 50, 75 years. The politics of media, which I’ve talked about in all my other talks—how we can change it, what we can do to improve the system—I’m going to lay off in this talk. This is the critique that leads to that talk.

This is the talk I should have given first, but I’m giving it last.
But the point you should keep in the back of your mind throughout this talk, which should be clear I hope, is that media systems are created. They are the result of public policies. All forms of media are regulated. There is no such thing as free media. There is always someone paying the piper, always someone calling the tune. The questions in a democracy are whose values are going to be served, how accountable are these media going to be, and who are they going to be accountable to.

Those are the central issues that we can affect. And we have got to organize around these issues to change our media.
Let’s explain what the problem is today. Let’s just talk a little bit about the nature of the problems we have. Journalism is mandatory in society and governance. You see it’s role most clearly in the relationship between society and governance when you look at an authoritarian society. When there is a coup or something, the first thing they do is take over the TV stations, the newspapers, the radio stations, and the internet service providers. They understand that control over the means of communication is central to the exercise of political governance.
In a democracy, it’s mandatory that you have some sort of decent form of journalism to have self-governance and make it possible. This journalism is going to be spawned by the media system. The structure of the system, how it is set up, will go a long way toward determining the quality of the journalism that comes out of that system. Structural issues are mandatory in explaining the nature of your content. What do we need from journalism in a democracy? What are the things we need?

Well, what I’m going to say is really standard issue political theory. This is nothing especially radical. Although now to talk about basic democratic theory, you almost want to look over your shoulder: “This seems like pretty radical stuff—they’re talking about self government!” What we need from journalism in a democracy are three things. First, we need a watchdog over people who are in power and people who want to be in power, in both the public and private sector. We need them to be held accountable, so we know what they are doing. If journalism doesn’t do it, we simply don’t know. We can’t govern ourselves. We can’t govern them. We can’t rule them. Secondly, we need a wide range of informed opinion on the most important issues of the day. That helps us put together our own opinions. We can evaluate other positions, sift through them, debate them, think them through, and then come to an informed decision. Third, we have to have a media system which can generate reliable facts, so we can know what the truth is, get to the truth of the matter, and weed out lies from truth. Now we can’t expect every single medium to do that. But what we should expect is that an average person, a citizen, would have access to all that material through a combination of media which they could be exposed to. That’s not too much to ask from a democratic society. That should be our goal.

Given that as a goal, what would you say the state of journalism is today? Well, I’d say, I’d give a grade of a D minus. I think our media, our journalism in particular, is completely failing us. I think in terms of watchdog, and I’ll talk about this, the private sector is virtually off limits from any serious watchdog activity over corporate malfeasance. Public sector malfeasance is only covered within a narrow range. It covers fights between the two dominant parties, otherwise it slides by without a shred of coverage. Reliable facts and truthfulness are completely discarded for the most part, and I’ll talk about that too, coming up, when we discuss the Florida election in 2000. And then third, the range of opinion, the range of informed opinion: I think Jeff Cohen, the reporter for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, hit the nail on the head: “We have a range of opinion in our media system that extends all the way from GE to GM.” We have serious problems. Now the reasons for this aren’t exclusively corporate control. I’m going to talk a lot later about how corporate concentration and the profit motive have really squeezed journalism in the last ten or fifteen years. You will find lots of books by former journalists or even current journalists talking about the crisis of journalism as a public service due to corporate and commercial pressure in the last ten or fifteen years. That’s not new. My argument goes a lot deeper than that. My argument goes far beyond that. That’s part of the problem, but it’s not just the problem. That makes it sound like 20 years ago everything was hunky-dory. When it wasn’t. We had problems twenty years ago, very serious problems with our journalism, although it’s worse today.

And here it’s good to think about something called “objectivity.” Often times, I’ll talk to people about journalism, and they’ll say, “Yeah, you’re right, the media suck, what we need is more objectivity. If they were objective, everything would be fine, just like the good old days.” (And they usually use that accent too.) There is a notion that objectivity was something that the Founding Fathers cooked up. Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, and Samuel Adams got together in a tavern and said, “What sort of journalism would protect2 democracy? How about objectivity? Non-partisan, neutral journalism that has no opinion. That’s the solution.” In fact, objectivity didn’t even come about until the beginning of the 20th century. For the first 120 years of our history, we had a stridently partisan journalism. The journalism of the Founding Fathers, the journalism of the first three generations of this republic was phenomenally partisan. The front page was partisan—you didn’t have to wait until the editorial page to know where a newspaper was coming from. The owner and the editor were one and the same. You knew who owned the paper, and you knew the politics—they were that person’s politics, period. That’s how journalism worked for the first 120 years, nothing objective about it, nothing neutral whatsoever. This was a very different style of journalism than we have today.

Objectivity has certain merits, which we’ll talk about, but it also has flaws.
Let’s discuss the origins of objectivity. Why did it pop out of the sky in the early 20th century? Why didn’t we continue with the partisan system that worked so well? Some of you who study American history will have a sense of the partisan system. Look at some of the newspapers, if you get a chance, during the Civil War. See how the Northern newspapers covered Abraham Lincoln. The worst thing the biggest right-wing kook ever said about Bill Clinton doesn’t come close to the treatment Abraham Lincoln got from the Northern press during the Civil War. You want to talk about partisan journalism. It was a stridently partisan institution throughout the 19th century. Why did it change? Or why didn’t it change?
Well, this is what happened. Over the course of the 19th century, our newspaper industry became increasing a capitalist system. It started off as largely partisan—it’s goal was to help parties win elections. Then entrepreneurs figured out you could make a lot of bucks publishing these things and selling them and selling ads. And that logic gradually took over.

But the partisanship remained, even though it was by now primarily a commercial enterprise. But it was also a much more competitive market. So if you were in a city like St. Louis in 1870 or 1875, there were fifteen daily newspapers in St. Louis. All were partisan, all had distinct points of view, but there were fifteen of them. You could really pick and choose. The market was so competitive, that if you didn’t like one of those fifteen, you could start the sixteenth paper with a different point of view. It worked pretty well. There were flaws with it, I don’t want to romanticize it, but the partisan system works well as long as you’ve got a lot of different viewpoints and people can add their new ones. In fact, that’s what the First Amendment’s “free press” is all about protecting, the ability to start new partisan viewpoints. What happened? Well, the logic of newspaper economics changed radically toward the late 19th century. What happened was that the rise of advertising made it so that most newspaper markets winnowed down to becoming one or two newspaper markets. By the early 20th century, that was the rule in most small towns. I doubt Ashville had more than two or three papers 80 or 100 years ago. It may have only had one for all I know. Most American cities were like than.

Now partisan journalism when you’ve only got one or two newspapers looks a lot different than when you’ve got fifteen.
When you’ve only got one or two newspapers and it’s impossible to start a new newspapers, as it is with newspaper markets due to the logic of those markets, stridently partisan journalism smells like month old fish. It’s not unlike the sort of stridently partisan journalism you had in the Soviet Union where you had the Party line and that was it, you either bought it or you went out. You had no choice because you couldn’t start another paper to compete with it. You’re stuck with it. And this partisan journalism in the Progressive Era, in the first decade of the 20th century, was stridently pro-capitalist and anti-labor.
Yet the dominant social movement of that time was the labor movement. It was the movement of workers to improve their standard of living. The press couldn’t have been more viciously, hostilely, or directly anti-labor than they were in the first ten or fifteen years of this century.

This became the foundation for the rise of objective or professional journalism. This was a crisis for the system. It was a political crisis in the sense that if you read our newspapers, magazines and political speeches from that period, this was a political obsession for people. But if it was just a problem for democracy it wouldn’t have changed the system. It also became a problem for commercial newspaper publishing. The large newspaper publishers were facing a dilemma. If people didn’t trust their newspapers, they wouldn’t buy them and they would lose their advertisers. It became bad for business. This was the groundswell to understand the solution to that crisis of capitalist journalism, of monopolistic newspaper markets in the early 20th century. That solution was professional journalism. That’s the birth of objectivity. That’s the cauldron that gave birth to the modern notion of non-partisan journalism. The revolutionary idea of professional journalism was that for the first time you take the owner and the editor—which were linked, which were one and the same for the first 120 years of the republic—and you split them, like splitting the atom. Owners would be over here with the advertisers, making the money. The “Chinese Wall” is here, and on the other side are the editors and the reporters: separation of “church” and “state.” They would not meet. So if you read a newspaper in a monopoly town, you read the front page, you won’t know the politics of the owner. It will be neutral, professional journalism. Where will these professional journalists come from? Well, they will be trained at journalism schools. There were no journalism schools in the United States in 1900. By 1920, every major journalism school had been founded. They were founded because the major newspaper publisher in every state marched to the state capitol to say “we need one of these professional journalism schools so we can have professional journalists while we rack up all the money, and then we’ll have a separation between church and state.” That’s the birth of professional journalism.

Now the notion of objectivity—that you can have absolutely neutral journalism—has been ridiculed. It’s been dismissed. It’s ludicrous. The idea is just like adding up a row of numbers. So if I gave you 2 + 3 + 2, you’d all come up with 7, hopefully. The idea of objective journalism is that you’d all go out and see the world like 2 + 3 + 2, and come in and write identical stories. That’s nonsensical. No one would make that claim for journalism now. The claim for professional journalism is that it can be fair, accurate, and nonpartisan. And that’s not necessarily bad. I don’t think there is anything wrong with being fair, accurate, and nonpartisan. I don’t think it’s the only type of journalism we need. But I don’t think we should necessarily dismiss it as bad or awful. The problem with professional journalism, as it’s been practiced in the United States, is that it’s smuggled in certain crucial biases into what’s 2 democracy? How about objectivity? Non-partisan, neutral journalism that has no opinion. That’s the solution.” In fact, objectivity didn’t even come about until the beginning of the 20th century. For the first 120 years of our history, we had a stridently partisan journalism. The journalism of the Founding Fathers, the journalism of the first three generations of this republic was phenomenally partisan. The front page was partisan—you didn’t have to wait until the editorial page to know where a newspaper was coming from. The owner and the editor were one and the same. You knew who owned the paper, and you knew the politics—they were that person’s politics, period. That’s how journalism worked for the first 120 years, nothing objective about it, nothing neutral whatsoever. This was a very different style of journalism than we have today.

Objectivity has certain merits, which we’ll talk about, but it also has flaws.
Let’s discuss the origins of objectivity. Why did it pop out of the sky in the early 20th century? Why didn’t we continue with the partisan system that worked so well? Some of you who study American history will have a sense of the partisan system. Look at some of the newspapers, if you get a chance, during the Civil War. See how the Northern newspapers covered Abraham Lincoln. The worst thing the biggest right-wing kook ever said about Bill Clinton doesn’t come close to the treatment Abraham Lincoln got from the Northern press during the Civil War. You want to talk about partisan journalism. It was a stridently partisan institution throughout the 19th century. Why did it change? Or why didn’t it change?
Well, this is what happened. Over the course of the 19th century, our newspaper industry became increasing a capitalist system. It started off as largely partisan—it’s goal was to help parties win elections. Then entrepreneurs figured out you could make a lot of bucks publishing these things and selling them and selling ads. And that logic gradually took over.

But the partisanship remained, even though it was by now primarily a commercial enterprise. But it was also a much more competitive market. So if you were in a city like St. Louis in 1870 or 1875, there were fifteen daily newspapers in St. Louis.
All were partisan, all had distinct points of view, but there were fifteen of them. You could really pick and choose. The market was so competitive, that if you didn’t like one of those fifteen, you could start the sixteenth paper with a different point of view. It worked pretty well. There were flaws with it, I don’t want to romanticize it, but the partisan system works well as long as you’ve got a lot of different viewpoints and people can add their new ones. In fact, that’s what the First Amendment’s “free press” is all about protecting, the ability to start new partisan viewpoints. What happened? Well, the logic of newspaper economics changed radically toward the late 19th century. What happened was that the rise of advertising made it so that most newspaper markets winnowed down to becoming one or two newspaper markets. By the early 20th century, that was the rule in most small towns. I doubt Ashville had more than two or three papers 80 or 100 years ago. It may have only had one for all I know. Most American cities were like than.

Now partisan journalism when you’ve only got one or two newspapers looks a lot different than when you’ve got fifteen.
When you’ve only got one or two newspapers and it’s impossible to start a new newspapers, as it is with newspaper markets due to the logic of those markets, stridently partisan journalism smells like month old fish. It’s not unlike the sort of stridently partisan journalism you had in the Soviet Union where you had the Party line and that was it, you either bought it or you went out. You had no choice because you couldn’t start another paper to compete with it. You’re stuck with it. And this partisan journalism in the Progressive Era, in the first decade of the 20th century, was stridently pro-capitalist and anti-labor.
Yet the dominant social movement of that time was the labor movement. It was the movement of workers to improve their standard of living. The press couldn’t have been more viciously, hostilely, or directly anti-labor than they were in the first ten or fifteen years of this century.

This became the foundation for the rise of objective or professional journalism. This was a crisis for the system. It was a political crisis in the sense that if you read our newspapers, magazines and political speeches from that period, this was a political obsession for people. But if it was just a problem for democracy it wouldn’t have changed the system. It also became a problem for commercial newspaper publishing. The large newspaper publishers were facing a dilemma. If people didn’t trust their newspapers, they wouldn’t buy them and they would lose their advertisers. It became bad for business. This was the groundswell to understand the solution to that crisis of capitalist journalism, of monopolistic newspaper markets in the early 20th century. That solution was professional journalism. That’s the birth of objectivity. That’s the cauldron that gave birth to the modern notion of non-partisan journalism. The revolutionary idea of professional journalism was that for the first time you take the owner and the editor—which were linked, which were one and the same for the first 120 years of the republic—and you split them, like splitting the atom. Owners would be over here with the advertisers, making the money. The “Chinese Wall” is here, and on the other side are the editors and the reporters: separation of “church” and “state.” They would not meet. So if you read a newspaper in a monopoly town, you read the front page, you won’t know the politics of the owner. It will be neutral, professional journalism. Where will these professional journalists come from? Well, they will be trained at journalism schools. There were no journalism schools in the United States in 1900. By 1920, every major journalism school had been founded. They were founded because the major newspaper publisher in every state marched to the state capitol to say “we need one of these professional journalism schools so we can have professional journalists while we rack up all the money, and then we’ll have a separation between church and state.” That’s the birth of professional journalism.

Now the notion of objectivity—that you can have absolutely neutral journalism—has been ridiculed. It’s been dismissed. It’s ludicrous. The idea is just like adding up a row of numbers. So if I gave you 2 + 3 + 2, you’d all come up with 7, hopefully. The idea of objective journalism is that you’d all go out and see the world like 2 + 3 + 2, and come in and write identical stories. That’s nonsensical. No one would make that claim for journalism now. The claim for professional journalism is that it can be fair, accurate, and nonpartisan. And that’s not necessarily bad. I don’t think there is anything wrong with being fair, accurate, and nonpartisan. I don’t think it’s the only type of journalism we need. But I don’t think we should necessarily dismiss it as bad or awful. The problem with professional journalism, as it’s been practiced in the United States, is that it’s smuggled in certain crucial biases into what’s considered fair, accurate, and nonpartisan journalism that have actually made it unfair, inaccurate, and partisan. That’s the problem with professional journalism as it’s developed in the United States. The professional code that emerged in the Progressive Era and that is crucial to understanding journalism to this day—and you’ll see it really explains most of the coverage we’re going to see—builds in the biases, the political interests, of the owners and the advertisers. But it makes journalists oblivious to the compromises with authority they make because they’re just going about the professional code.

And this is absolutely crucial to understanding what’s going on.
Ben Bagdikain, who wrote a book called The Media Monopoly really has the best discussion of the biases that are built into the professional code of journalism. Bagdikian is the former editor of the Washington Post and then the Dean of the University of California School of Journalism, and one of the single most thoughtful writers on issues in journalism. He says there were three crucial biases built into the professional code of journalism in that era that became the rule through to this day. First, and for the first time, stories are based on credentialed facts, or what are called official sources. Political coverage is based on what people in power say. Period. That’s the basis of journalism. This is absolutely important for professional journalism for a couple of reasons. First of all, it takes the controversy away from story selection. So you can no longer say, “why’d you run that story?” You say that the governor said it and therefore we had to cover it. We report, you decide. So it takes the controversy from story selection. You just report what people in power say. Second, it’s a lot cheaper to cover. You just plant a reporter at the White House, one at City Hall, one at the Capitol, and a reporter at any place people in power congregate and report what they say that day. That’s your news hole. It’s a lot cheaper than having reporters go and dig up stories, find out what’s actually happening in the community.

So it’s a very conducive system for professional, commercial journalism. But it has real problems built into it. You can probably already see them if you just think about it for a second. It gives sources a lot of power. They become the assignment editors of journalism. If they are talking about something, you report it. If they’re mum on something, you really can’t report it. It’s hard to report. It makes journalists very reluctant critics of their crucial sources. The range of debate, therefore, in our journalism, tends to volley inside the range of debate among elite opinion or official sources. That tends to be a strong bias built into our journalism. Now look what happens to a journalist—and we’ll see tangible examples of this later on when I talk about the war against terrorism we’re in right now—who goes outside official opinion and tries to introduce a new idea that no one in power is talking about. What are they accused of? They’re accused of being unprofessional, of bringing their own partisan opinion in. There is a real disciplinary thing to stay within the range of elite opinion, or else you’re going to be accused of being unprofessional and partisan. So what journalists have to do—the smart ones, if they want to somehow raise an issue that no one is talking about—they’ve got to coax someone in power to mention it so they can use that as a source and claim that they’re just reporting what that person says. That’s a trick of journalism for those of you who are planning on going into the profession. It happens all the time. Good journalists do that. That’s how they get their stories in there, the good ones, when people in power don’t want to talk about something. This is a crucial factor in understanding the news coverage of the recent election in Florida, for example, and we’ll get to that in a second. If you understand sourcing, you understand 90% of why the coverage was so terrible, and why it was so weak.

Let me give you an example of how much it’s changed.
In the 1870s, for example, the White House, or the President, accounted for 1 or 2% of the news hole in American newspapers. 1 or 2% of the news dealt with the White House. By 1925, we had gotten pretty much to the point where we are today, 25% of the news hole is the White House. Now is the President doing 25 times as much stuff now? Especially this one? No, of course not. What’s happening, though, is that you’ve got all the reporters there. So they are just waiting there reporting what’s being fed to them by the White House public information office. That’s why you have so much more coverage. Back in 1870, you wouldn’t cover the White House just for the heck of it. You’d have to have a reason. If you thought the President said something stupid, you wouldn’t cover it. You’d say: “That guy’s an idiot, I’m not going to cover him.

It’s a partisan press, and I think that guy’s a moron. You want us to cover him, read another paper.” That was a different world of journalism then.
The second bias that Bagdikian talks about that’s built into the professional code is the fear of context. When you put stories in context, it almost requires that you take some ideological, moral, or political position. It’s very difficult to talk about an issue, long-term, historically, by putting it in context, without having a position on it. So if you look at scholars, like myself, if I write a book, or if any scholar writes a book, it’s impossible to be neutral or objective. You have values, you have an argument, and when you put it in context, it comes out. You’re establishing it. You’re developing it. It’s very difficult to avoid. But for journalism, that’s bad, because it gives you the controversy of being biased. It gets you in hot water, so you avoid context as much as possible. You argue that news needs a news peg to be covered. There has to be an event, a news hook, or a news peg, to justify coverage. As a result, long-term stories of crucial significance to our society tend to slip through the cracks in our journalism. Suburban sprawl we’re mowing down countryside incredibly fast in a sort of brain-dead process. I don’t know where it ends. Maybe until we have no farmland or country left, in 68 years. There is no rational planning. But it is not really a news story. It’s been going on for fifty years. In some cities, it’s been disastrous already. But it only becomes a news story if there’s a bill being debated or a demonstration. With the long-term stories like that, to cover it invites the charge that you’re being biased—“Why are you raising that issue? No one in power is talking about it.

Have you got an axe to grind? You’re not being professional.” Or another classic issue that Bagdikian loves to talk about is racism. Now Bagdikian when he worked for the Washington Post, would travel around from newsroom to newsroom. He’d go in and talk to the editors. He’d go into the editorial offices in Detroit or Cleveland or Chicago, and he’d say (this was in the late 50’s): “Let me see the articles you’ve written on racism in your community.” And the editors would look around and say, “We don’t have racism in our community. What are you talking about?” Bagdikian said, “Well, that’s sort of interesting.” They had no stories, because it was a long term problem. It didn’t affect their core readership. They didn’t care about it. There wasn’t a news peg or a news hook. Well, five years later, it’s the most covered story in all those cities. You’ve got riots, you’ve got demonstrations, you’ve got political organizing.
Race is the number one issue. It just fell through the cracks for 30 years—not covered at all. So the people in those cities were completely unprepared to deal with this crucial crisis. This is a real weak spot of our journalism. Good journalism would have had us up to speed on a social issue of that magnitude. This sort of journalism—this sort of “just the facts, man”, stay away from context, “don’t blame us, we report the facts, you decide”—really helps promote a de-politicization. It takes the passion, the ideas, the morality, the values, what’s interesting about politics and strips it out. It leaves you with just these sanitized meaningless facts. It’s a real problem. It’s part of the process that promotes the demoralization and the de-politicization of our society.
It also promotes another institution of crucial importance in our society: public relations. The PR industry is born at the exact moment of professional journalism, and it’s not a coincidence. So what does the PR industry do? It provides expert sources for its clients so that you can get favorable press coverage using professional code conventions. It provides news hooks. It provides news pegs. The PR industry is there to serve it’s largely corporate clientele with favorable press coverage.

You read the paper and think it’s just quality journalism. The studies of the news hole in our society say that 40-70% of all the news stories you see are directly from public relations press releases. 40-70%. The owners of our media love PR, [that is] the captains of the media industry. Why? It saves them a fortune. If they didn’t have PR funneling all this good material to them, they’d have to have reporters actually go out and cover something. PR saves them a ton of time. It saves them a ton of money. But it produces dreadful journalism for us. Absolutely horrible.

The third bias is the most abstract. In many ways, though, it’s the most important. Even with the first two biases—towards official sources and lack of context—you still have to decide what goes on the front page, what goes on page 7, and what doesn’t get covered. There’s no way around the fact that there have to be values. You simply have to have some explanation as to why that’s an important story and that isn’t, beyond those things I just talked about. Bagdikian argues that there is a bias which he calls “dig here, not there.” Implicit in the professional code are biases in certain directions. Journalists take them as natural. His core argument says that what is privileged in the professional code as legitimate journalism is government malfeasance, and what’s off limits is corporate malfeasance. What’s privileged is government malfeasance, or certain types of government malfeasance. The CIA wouldn’t count. Certain types of government malfeasance, but not corporate malfeasance. Now how do you test that? How do you say that journalists given equal stories, one about corporate malfeasance and one about government malfeasance won’t cover corporate but will cover government. How do you test that? That’s hard to prove. It sounds sort of interesting, but what evidence do you have? History has been extraordinarily generous to us in this matter. There is a great journalist named Charles Lewis, a former 60 Minutes producer who’s won a lot of awards. One of the most acclaimed broadcast journalists and producers in the last 40 years. He got frustrated with the limits placed upon him by CBS at 60 Minutes. About a decade ago, he left and he started a group called the Center for Public Integrity. Some of you might have heard of it. They have a great website. What Lewis did, because he has such a great reputation, he was able to raise a fortune from foundations to hire fifteen crack investigative journalists. What they do is four or five big reports every year. As investigative journalists they write these 50 page reports, and then they distribute them to the entire mass media, the news media. They say, “Guys, here’s a story, now follow up on it. It’s all yours.” That’s what they do.

He broke, for example, the Lincoln Bedroom story. Their group broke the story that Clinton was leasing out the Lincoln Bedroom to raise money. They are nonpartisan, they go after Democrats, and they go after Republicans. But they also do one other thing that no other journalists do. They go after corporations. Charles Lewis is a great journalist. He thinks private power should be held accountable, not just public power.
There are corporations which rule our economy, and we have a right to know how they operate, and how they interact with government policy makers. So about half of the reports they do are about corporate malfeasance, and about half are about public. Lewis says, and this is really interesting, that when they do one of their reports on government malfeasance, they’ll have a press conference and the room will be packed. There will be cameras from all the networks. The phones will be ringing off the hook. Emails will be humming, the computer smoking.

Everything rocking. Then they do one about corporate malfeasance—and one of them, by the way, was an expose about the corporate media lobby and how it basically owns all the politicians—and he says you can hear a pin drop in their office. No one comes to the press conference. It doesn’t get picked up. No one covers it. Same journalists, same quality of research—this is really a controlled experiment—no coverage.
If Chuck Lewis wasn’t a principled man, he’d stop doing those ones. Because his funders say, “Gee, Chuck, why do you keep doing these things about corporate malfeasance? No one’s running them. Why don’t you go back to the Lincoln Bedroom?” But he says, “No. I’m a journalist and if I’m going to do journalism, I’m doing the whole package.” It’s just because he’s a person of unusual integrity that we get this and get that test. But it points to this bias. It’s an example of the bias that says that corporate power is off limits. It’s much like Communist Party power was off limits in the Soviet media, in Pravda and Izvestia.

You get roughly the same treatment of corporate power in our media.
Much of our news media looked a lot better once it became professional, because what preceded it was partisan, it was sensationalistic, it was trashy. So it did have a lot going for it. And there are some strengths to professional journalism: the emphasis on factual accuracy, some independence, and some very good reporting. The best reporting in professional journalism is where elites disagree. Where you have elite, or official, sources disagreeing, it gives journalists a lot of wiggle room to work. The best journalists can get in there and do great work. The weakest area of professional journalism, however, tends to be where elites agree. This is where professional journalism and the professional code of journalism that we have in this country looks really bad. When our elites are in agreement on a crucial issue, don’t want to talk about, or say the exact same thing, it gives journalists almost no wiggle room to get around it. And then our journalism is not too far from what you would find in an authoritarian society in terms of content.

What sort of things are off limits? What sort of things do elites agree upon which are not debated in our news media as a result? Well, I’ll give you a couple of examples. One, there is a belief in this country amongst official sources, Republicans and Democrats, that the United States, and the United States alone has a 007 right to invade any country it wants at any time for any reason. We’re the only country in the world who gets this right. Now sometimes we can deputize another country, but no one else is allowed to do it but us. This is an issue that is never debated in our news media. The classic case was the invasion of Panama back in, what was it, 1989? That was seven invasions ago for those keeping score at home. The day of the invasion, I was watching CSPAN. Secretary of State James Baker, or then Secretary of State James Baker, was giving a press conference. This is where CSPAN is great, because they show you the entire press conference. He’s getting the usual questions about Noriega, and did you catch him, and how many casualties are there. The sort of stuff that you might as well mail the questions in. The same boiler plate questions they always get, right: Who did the President consult with? Did he talk with the Prime Minister of England yet? All that sort of stuff. It was the usual ho-hum garbage, and I didn’t learn anything from it. Then at the end, when he’s just starting to close down, you could see this woman at the back. She looked like a college girl, raising her hand frantically. And he says, “Okay, you.” And you could tell that at just the moment he did that, he regretted it. Then she stands up, and she’s sort of nervous. She says, “Secretary of State Baker,” and clearly she’s from a college paper or a union paper, one of these left wing rags, though somehow she got in the room, “I’m holding here a copy of the Organization of American States treaty (which the United States signed), and it says that any country that signs this will not invade another signatory. (Panama also signed it. And Baker sort of nodded) And I’m holding here a copy of the U. S.

Constitution, which says that if you break a treaty, that’s grounds for impeachment and treason.” Now James Baker was absolutely stunned. Because that’s a question that had not been asked by a reporter to an American Secretary of State for thirty years. That’s simply a question you don’t ask. As every good reporter knows, you don’t even think to ask that question, you’ve internalized that rule. Baker sat there, and he looked at her with a Dan Quayle look for about ten seconds. He didn’t really know how to respond. Now, I’m not going to make up what he said. This is unbelievable. He looked at her, and then he said—and this guy is really slick—“We’ll have our lawyers look into it and get back to you.” That was the end of it. And that’s the last time that question has ever been asked. And it will never be asked again. Because we alone have the 007 right to invade any country we want, anytime we want for any reason, and it’s not even discussed. We’re God’s chosen empire, just like Rome was. Now it’s us.

Another thing you’ll never see debated in our news media is that capitalism equals democracy. Because to the elite of this country, capitalism does equal democracy. They don’t care about democracy, they care about capitalism, but they call it democracy because they know we care about democracy.
Capitalism equals democracy, even though there is so much evidence that they don’t equal each other, and in fact they are often times in serous tension and conflict, especially among the free market, neoliberal policies that have wreaked havoc on so many places in the world. But to our elite that is irrelevant.
What they call democracy means basically where US commercial interests rule the country, or commercial interests rule in the political system. Ideally they’ll have elections. But, if the elections don’t come out right, screw it. Democracy means our guys run the country. Now you say, “Bob, that’s not being fair.” Well, consider this. We have some good evidence recently. Anyone been watching what’s happened in Venezuela in the last month? You guys know the story. This was an extraordinary case study of this phenomenon. You have a popularly elected government in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, a popular government. Now, I don’t know much about Chavez, he might be a schmuck. He might be a great guy. But he’s popularly elected. It’s a constitutional government, and he hasn’t violated the constitution. He’s a populist, and he’s hostile to US oil interests. He’s explicit about that. He got elected to mess with them. That’s why he’s won this big election. That’s the case. The US elite despise the guy. The Venezuelan elite despite the guy, and they want to get rid of him. They don’t want to wait for another election, and they probably don’t think they could win another election. So they say, “What are we going to do? Let’s overthrow this guy. Let’s get rid of him.” So they overthrow him. And the next morning in an editorial in the New York Times and the Washington Post, which I think must have been written before the coup because they came out literally within hours of the coup taking place, the New York Times and the Washington Post both applauded this coup. And you say, “Wow, that’s sort of interesting.” A popular government is overthrown by a coup and in its place is installed the president of the Chamber of Commerce of Venezuela who immediately suspends the constitution, abolishes all the locally elected governments in the country and abolishes the elected parliament. This is the first thing he does in power, and the New York Times editorial says this was a healthy step toward a restoration of democracy. This coup in Venezuela was a healthy step in the restoration of democracy.

In the bottom sentence you get the truth. It says that this new government will encourage entrepreneurial initiative. That was the kicker. The key thing is that they’ll protect capitalism. They’ll protect the interests of the rich to run the country like they’ve been running it, and they won’t get messed up with all this populist mumbo-jumbo. So those are the things which won’t be debated in our news media. And those are crucial things for us. We are the world’s biggest military power, and yet the most crucial issues are off limits. You won’t hear them debated in our news media.

It leaves us with one hand tied behind our back as a society trying to come to terms with these issues. There are some other things you won’t see in our news media either. There’s a Sicilian code in our news media. Thou shall not cover local billionaires critically. That is the eleventh commandment of the news media. And that’s true all across the country. No local media is going to tangle with local billionaires or corporations.
They always kiss up to them, everywhere, and for obvious reasons. They’re usually important advertisers. They’re pals with the local publisher. Their kids go to the same school.

They live in the same gated community. This is the world they work in. It’s not good business to upset the largest business in your community if you’re publishing a newspaper or running a TV station. So, thou shalt not do critical work on local billionaires or local corporations. Now occasionally we get examples of what happens when you violate the Sicilian code. There’s a guy named Mike Gallagher in Cincinnati who writes for the Cincinnati Inquirer.
A few years ago he did an expose on the Chiquita Banana Company, which talked about how the Chiquita Banana Company to enhance its business prospects would assassinate people, or pay for the assassination of political opponents in third world countries. True story. It’s true that he did that, and it’s true what he wrote. The problem that Mike Gallagher had when the Cincinnati Inquirer ran this story was that the Chiquita Banana Company is owned by Carl Lindner, the richest guy in Cincinnati. Big problem, worth 4 billion dollars. Carl Lindner is just like James Baker. He’s never had anything but smoke blown up his butt by the local media. He turns around, and now all of sudden, he’s running a hit squad. What they do at the Chiquita Banana Company is that they find out that this reporter has gotten some of his information from access to voice mail he shouldn’t have had. He didn’t have official permission. So the Cincinnati Inquirer, in what was an enormously ridiculous step, disavowed his entire story on the basis of the fact that he got a couple of quotes using voice mail improperly. Even though the story was true! And believe me, they’re not doing any more stories at the Cincinnati Inquirer on the Chiquita Banana Company. They might, after Lindner sells it, but not until then.

After he sells it, they probably won’t be interested in it.
The corporate attack, which I’m about to get to, isn’t responsible for all the problems of our journalism. Lots of them are embedded in this professional code which really pushed journalism in a certain way. Even stories which get lots of resources, like the Florida case in 2000, have really dreadful coverage. Let’s go through the 2000 election. Because I think this is a really a bell-weather moment for understanding the deep flaws in professional journalism. What happened in Florida? Well, Al Gore won the state. We know for sure that the majority of people who got up to vote that day in Florida—those who got up and said, “I’m going to go vote,” and the majority of people who legally filed their absentee ballots on time for that day—we know for sure that a majority of them intended to vote for Al Gore. In fact the evidence for this is overwhelming. I would urge you all to read a book called Jews for Buchanan, by John Nichols, that New Press published. It’s a very serious book. He goes through the recount almost ballot by ballot to discuss this issue. Al Gore won the election in Florida.
He won it nationally. Yet, if you looked at our press coverage, George Bush won it. He won it in Florida, and he won it, therefore, nationally. He’s the just and legitimate President.

How could that be? How could our journalism in fact almost cheer on the Bush case, they were so eager to have it closed?
What happened to this idea of the feisty Fourth Estate that’s going to tell us the truth, for those of us who want to know who got the most votes and represent our interests? I’d feel the same way if it was Gore or Bush, Bush or Gore, I just want to know who won the darn thing. Who got the most votes? Period.
Don’t give me a lot of gobblety-gook. Who won the thing, journalists? Get off your butts and go find out. For those of us who think that’s what the press should do, we had no dogs in that race. Journalists weren’t doing that. We were out of luck.

Why was the coverage so deplorable? How was it so deplorable? Well, the fundamental starting point is official sources. Journalists, in what passes for journalism, would go basically everyday and get the Republican Party line and they’d get the Democratic Party line, and they’d report that. They wouldn’t investigate the claims. Almost never. There was very little investigation. Just report this party line, report that party line, present them. We report, you decide. So what were they reporting? Well, remember this: It was basically a tie in the first vote. What was it 300 votes, 500 votes? But in a state of 6 million votes, that’s a statistical tie. You had no idea who was going to win, based on what they knew. But in the middle of the night, Fox News declared George W. Bush the winner. It was at 3 AM, I think. They declared George W. Bush the winner. You know who made that decision for Fox News?
John Ellis, the first cousin of George W. Bush. You know that.

Come on! Now this was a totally unsubstantiated call. You can’t statistically make a call based on a 500 vote lead out of 6 million votes. It’s just absurd. We saw recounts in Washington State, a much smaller turn out of votes, and 10,000 votes turn around in the Cantwell race on a recount. She was trailing, and then she won the race. This is 6 million votes, in Florida of all states. Florida. And this guy called it for George W. Bush. But that was absolutely crucial. Because the media framing thereafter for the Republicans, and therefore for the media, was that George W. Bush won it and Al Gore was trying to figure out a way to steal it or get it back somehow. Reporters, from November 7 until the Supreme Court’s interesting vote, would go everyday to the Republicans and go everyday to the Democrats. The Republicans everyday would say, “We won the darn thing and the Democrats are trying to steal it.” The Democrats, everyday, would say, “We don’t really know. I guess we’ll have to count the votes. We don’t want to hurt the stock market or anything. We don’t really want anyone to be too upset. We just want to get at the truth here.” Anything would go. James Baker, as I said, would say, “The Democrats just want to keep recounting the votes. They’ve counted them three times already.” Well, in fact, a lot of the votes were never counted in that so-called recount, we now know. They did a bogus recount, and it was completely fraudulent. But no one investigated that. That’s real journalism. Don’t just report what both sides are saying, investigate whether they’re telling the truth! That’s what we needed, and we didn’t get that.

Journalists were penalized by the Democrat’s unwillingness to play hardball, to fight for what we now know they won. So, one great story did come out in November of 2000, by a journalist named Greg Palast, an American working in England for the BBC, the Mirror, the Guardian and the Observer. He writes for all of them. Some of you are probably familiar with this story. Palast discovered that for the first time in American history, Katherine Harris had out-sourced [the task of] making a list of all the felons who would not be allowed to vote in the Florida election. She out-sourced it to a company that, purely coincidentally, was owned and operated by all Republicans. They came up with a list of 57,700 names of felons in Florida who should not be allowed to vote. One small problem: the list was largely bogus. They discovered that there were tons of names there of people who weren’t felons. They also found out that the instructions were so loose that if there were names that were even close to a felon’s name, they called them felons. It was not done with anywhere near the care required. Thousands of voters, almost all poor and significantly African-American or Latino, went to the polls on election day and weren’t allowed to vote, wrongly. We know this. It’s heavily documented. There is a great piece by Palast in the 7 March 2002 Harper’s Magazine, if you want to read more about it. Yet, why wasn’t that an issue in November? It wasn’t an issue because the Democrats didn’t want to fight on it. Al Gore didn’t go on TV and slam his fists on the table and say, “Darn it, this is wrong that these people weren’t allowed to vote. It cost us the election. It’s not fair and we have to do something about.

It’s not acceptable.” Al Gore, and we can debate why he did this, decided not to do that. And because of that, journalists didn’t have source cover to go after that story. If a journalist tried to push that story—and I know journalists who tried to—they’d say, “Hey, you’re being partisan, you’re not being objective, you’re not being professional. Even Al Gore’s not raising this issue, it must not be a real story. If it were a real story, Al Gore would be pushing it.” So it didn’t get covered The great story was that Palast said that a CBS producer called him up in late November and said, “This is a great story, Palast, we want to cover this.” So Palast said, “Go for it.” The CBS producer, who wins my Pravda award for the year, replied, “We called up Governor Jeb Bush’s office and asked him about this, and he said there was nothing to it. So we decided not to pursue the story.” I’m not making this stuff up. I can’t make this stuff up.

Since the Supreme Court decision, of course, our media has had this obsession with healing, with closure, and with not stepping on the toes of our maximum leader. When they announced the official recount, a year later, remember the press coverage of that in November of last year? It was striking in the New York Times. Gore Vidal has a wonderful piece I urge you all to read in the Nation. You can get it online at the Nation.com. Enter Gore Vidal in the search engine. Read his coverage of the New York Times reporting on the official recount that was done on the Florida vote. He goes paragraph by paragraph, breaking it down. By the 16th paragraph, they admit Gore won the state. But if you read the first 11 paragraphs, it’s all about how it’s impossible to say, Bush won this way, Gore won that way. But in the end, they say, if you count all the ballots, Gore won—any way you do it. But the lead wasn’t that. Why wasn’t the lead that? Because if they admitted that Gore won the state, then they’ve got a lot to answer for. Where the hell were you guys in November of 2000? Why the heck when it counted didn’t you get the truth out? You should have. You had ever journalist in the country down there reporting what James Baker ate for breakfast. Why couldn’t one of you actually do some journalism and get to the truth of the matter?

So that wasn’t due to corporate control, necessarily, though it might be an influence. I mean the recent pressures.
But a lot of the stories point right to the more commercial pressures in journalism. What’s happened since the mid-1980s is very simple. Remember church and state? Owner/Business, Editors/Reporters, Chinese wall between them? Well, that deal made a lot of sense for 50 years. By the 1980s, and certainly into the 1990s, what increasingly happened was that big companies would buy out news media. CBS would get bought by Lawrence Tisch. Then it gets bought by Viacom.

Newspaper chains get bought by larger chains. As these companies pay more and more—like Sumner Redstone paid 30- 40 billion dollars to buy CBS—he’s over here looking at the Chinese wall between the owner and the CBS news. He’s saying, “Hey, what’s the story with this deal? I just paid a fortune for this company and now my sports teams, my MTV, my film studio, my video rentals at Blockbuster—all these executives are forced to maximize return for me and my investors. What’s this church and state mumbo-jumbo that says these guys can do whatever they want? Who came up with this crazy idea?” That’s been the logic that’s affected the owners of all our media. They’re saying this deal doesn’t make sense for us anymore, and they’ve torn down that wall between church and state. They’ve said, you guys have to start generating profit for us. We’re in this to make money. We’re not a philanthropy. We’re not a charity. There’s been tremendous pressure on journalism to become a profit source, much greater than had been the case in the past. How do you do that? Well, you reduce costs for starters. You lower costs. The best way to do that is to lay off as many editorial people as possible. Lower budgets. One of the crucial things that got cut out in the mid-80s— something we’re suffering from today—is foreign news in our news media. The virtual elimination of foreign news from the mid-80s to this day still exists despite the hot air you’re getting to the contrary. The statistics are striking. I’ve got them in the book. There is a 60-70% drop off in the number of foreign correspondents. The amount of time and space taken up by foreign news dropped by 40, 50, 60%. It’s just not covered anymore. What passes for foreign coverage in our news media in the new world order is this: you take a superstar correspondent, you fly them into the zone, you air drop them, and you get them in front of a visual. Then you have them mouth whatever the State Department official told them to say on the way in the limo. Then they get back in the limo, back in the chopper, back in the plane, back to New York—that’s foreign coverage nowadays. That’s bogus. Real foreign coverage is someone who knows the country, knows the language, knows the people, and really understands what’s going on.

The worst part about investigative journalism is not that it won’t break a story, but that it might break a story. It might actually break a really important story about someone in power, and then it gets you in hot water with someone you’re playing croquet with, or someone you’re selling ads to, or someone your daughter’s going to marry. It’s just not good business. It’s bad business, so you see a lot less of it. Labor news has all but dropped from the equation. You know how many labor reporters there are in American news media today? Two that I know of. Though there probably won’t be two for very long. But we have a ton of business reporters.

Business is the fastest growing section of the newspapers. It’s a spectacular class bias.
When the Flint sit-down strike took place in 1937 that established the modern trade union movement—it established the UAW—it should have been named, in my opinion, a national holiday. It created the American middle class. It was a great moment in American history. It was a front page story in every major newspaper in the country, including the Chicago Tribune which hated labor. They had five labor reporters covering it from Flint. It was just a story. It was news. It was important to people’s lives. We had the next biggest sit-down strike in American history fifty-some years later in Pittstown, Virginia. It got no press coverage at all. It couldn’t have been more stark or more different. It got no coverage though, because labor has pretty much dropped from view.
During the Florida debacle in 2000, there was a casual thing that happened that sort of said it all. The commentator 8 from the CNN offices said “thank-you” to the correspondent in the field. Then they said, “Now we’re going to go to a commercial and when we come back we’re going to see how all this is affecting our stock portfolios.” She didn’t say that with any qualifications, but, “Of course, our viewers have stock portfolios. Our viewers have SUVs and computers and go to Europe. This is who we do the news for, people like that, not people down there. They’re not in our world. They’re not part of it.” The class bias is pronounced and it’s severe. And it’s not because they’re bad people. It’s rational business. If you were simply a shareholder and you were out to maximize return, you’d do exactly that. That would just make perfect business sense. The problem is that it lets rich people in wealthy corporations control our media system to suit their self-interests at the expense of our interests.

The problem is the structure of the system. There is still some very good work that’s done. In fact, there is some outstanding journalism that’s done. You see it all the time. The problem we’re seeing increasingly, and this gets to the crisis we face, is that there is no echo effect. Morton Mince, a great, investigative reporter for the Washington Post, did an article a couple of years ago that was really striking. He went around and he found a lot of great investigative reports in a lot of newspapers around the country. Not big city newspapers, oftentimes, but regional papers. What he found was that they’d run these great, damning exposés, but then there would be no follow up. No one else would go after it. You wouldn’t see other newspapers send three more reporters in to follow up. It would run once, or a couple of times, and die. There would be no political action on it. It wouldn’t lead to reform. The PR people would have to gloss it over, whatever the exposé was on, but it wouldn’t change anything. What Mince argued, and I think he’s absolutely right, is that the crisis in our journalism is also a crisis for our democracy. We often talk about how democracy needs journalism, but journalism needs democracy.
If you’re reporting on some malfeasance, and you’re reporting and then nothing happens because the political system is so absolutely corrupt, you can’t really have journalism either.

That’s the situation that we’re in today. The corruption in our political system is so immense that it’s approaching any level of corruption that we’ve ever had in our history, if not exceeding it. This puts journalism in a very difficult spot. You can do exposés, but they fall through the floor because no one pays attention. It doesn’t change anything. That’s how severe the corruption is. That’s a big difference from 30 years ago. That’s a big difference from 40 years ago. Our media is no longer a correction to the corruption in our politics and our economy. Our media are part of the problem. They are entrenched within it.

Finally, let me turn to the last issue. I know I’ve gone on a little longer than I wanted to. But this is maybe the most important issue that I could possibly talk about, which is the current world war against “evil-doers” that we’re in the midst of. When the 9/11 terrorist attacks took place, journalists were faced with a classic dilemma in this country. This country in the last 100 years has had roughly 75 foreign wars. We don’t know about most of them. A lot of them are these quickie carpet-bombings that we don’t even hear about anymore in our news media—we just go blow-out some country. But sometimes they require troops, sustained involvement, lots of money, and they require a lot of press coverage. WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, these aren’t the sorts of things you can slide by. You need troops to go over and put their butts on the line. You need to get a lot of money from the government, from the taxpayers, to pay for these wars. If we look at the ways these wars have been handled in the press and they’ve been conducted in the US, there is actually something you find that’s fairly striking about all our major wars since 1914. In every single one of them, the President in power (the government and White House in power) has lied to the American people to get us in that war. Every single one of them. That’s the track record. It’s just blatant.

It’s not a debated issue. Even FDR in the late 30s and early 40s wanted to get us into that war. He didn’t think if he told the truth that the American people would go into that war, and so he lied. He did everything in his power to get us in that war. Woodrow Wilson, in 1916, ran as the candidate of peace. “He kept us out of war,” that was his slogan. He won reelection. While he was using that slogan, he was planning to get us into WWI. He got us into it in 1917. In 1964, LBJ ran for President as the peace candidate. He wouldn’t get us into war in Vietnam. “Oh, that Barry Goldwater, he’s a kook, he’ll be dropping A-Bombs on Hanoi. Don’t vote for him. You want peace, you vote for me.” We now know, and it’s almost painful to read the diaries and the transcripts of recordings that have come out of his White House in 1964, that he fully planned to get us into the war. He knew he just couldn’t tell the truth to the American people and win the election. Or he didn’t want to take that chance. But he had to lie to the American people to get them to go to that war. He lied through his teeth. The Pentagon Papers showed that. He wanted to go to that war, for whatever reason, he wanted to do that. These are things we teach in journalism schools. These are the dark moments in American journalism.

These are the sort of things we say, “Our journalism failed us here.” WWI was a senseless slaughter. Vietnam, I bet there are people in this room, like myself, who lost close relatives there. Senseless slaughter. If our journalism had done its job, those lives would not have been lost. It failed us. This is the lesson we tell journalists. So how does it handle WW3, with permanent war against secret “evil-doers”? How does the journalism handle it?
Well, what sort of debate was there? What sort of tough questions were given to people in power as they said they had to have this permanent war against “evil-doers”? Well, it was atrocious. By even the most rudimentary standards of journalism, it was appalling. In fact, on CNN they were talking about how they might have to raise more money to pay for the war. They said on the screen—the headline for the story—was “Freedom’s Price Tag.” I thought that it must be comforting to the people of Iraq to know that this was freedom’s price tag, or maybe Venezuela or Columbia, or wherever the “evil-doers” are next to be nailed. Where was the skepticism towards the war claims? The logical questions when someone wants to go to war—the most important thing a government can do—require journalists to double their vigilance, not reduce it. That’s when you need them most to ask the tough questions. Where was the skepticism for this blank check for a fifty year war against invisible enemies that we just trust them to find? It was hardly there, whatsoever. In fact, the reason for this is clear: the sources. The Democrats didn’t provide any opposition, so no reporter could cover 30 Democrat Senators protesting. They were all marching in lock-step. So the journalism also marched in lock-step. War was the only possible alternative. Cokie 9 Roberts, one of our legendary journalists, on the day the war began was asked if there was any opposition to the war in the country on ABC. Her response was, “None that mattered.” “None that mattered.” I think she nailed it right on the head.

“None that mattered.” I think that settled it for Cokie. The point isn’t that you should be anti-war. The point is that in a democracy, the decision to go to war has to be made with critical, informed dissent. It’s the most important decision we make. It cannot be made in this sort of manner.
Finally, the last point I’ll talk about—and I wish I had more time, but I’m going to have to stop—is Enron. I’m only going to say a couple of things about it. Enron, in my view, is every bit as important as the 2000 election, every bit as important as 9/11, because it goes right to the heart of the corruption of our political economy. It lifts the rock on the myth of some sort of free-market “New Economy.” It exposes the ways in which corporations sleazily rip off workers, buy off politicians, and screw over consumers to make their quick bucks and then get away with it. In the mid-90s, people were exposing what Enron was doing by buying off politicians and screwing over the energy policies in California, other countries, and other states. But it wasn’t a news story. In fact, as recently as a year ago or a year and a half ago, Enron was called the model, “New Economy” corporation. It got kid-gloves treatment in our news media. We were unprepared for this scandal. Now that the scandal has hit and Enron has gone bankrupt, has it become our Dreyfus Affair? Has it become the affair that makes us question the relationship between our most powerful government figures , our politicians, and our large corporate figures? It should have done that. Because that’s exactly what it’s about. That’s exactly what this story is about. Have we had a debate about how to get rid of that sort of corruption so that it never happens again? No, we haven’t had the debate. It’s been converted into a pure business story. Some Arthur Andersen guy shredded the papers. So, bad on them, we aren’t going to give them a promotion. It’s a business story about some dubious accountants who messed with the numbers. The political side—which is the whole story, Enron’s whole story is a political Ponzi scheme—has dropped from view. The political corruption implicit [in this affair] has fallen [from view]. The reason for that? Go back to sources. Enron bought off everyone. It was an equal opportunity briber. Joe Lieberman has a big fat wallet thanks to Enron. So does Tom Daschle.

George W. Bush has a really big fat one. Dick Cheney can’t even get it in his pants. The fact of the matter is that they’re all in bed with this. None of them want a Dreyfus Affair exposé, because they’d all go down with it. The whole system would go down. It would require a major reform, a cleansing equal to the Progressive Era or the New Deal, to address the built-in corruption of our political system. Now people say when they hear me talk: “Man, I’m depressed. You’ve really bummed me out. It’s impossible. Life sucks.” They say, “Why aren’t you depressed? I’m not depressed because I see the extent these companies go to, to keep us from having this discussion. I see the extent they go to, to see that there is no public debate over these issues. Because they know what I know, which is that when people hear about this stuff, they get outraged. When people hear about this stuff, they want to change it. When they understand that they have the right to change media, they’re willing to do it. That’s why the media corporations do everything in their power to see that there is no public debate. They don’t even want a Congressional debate. They want it behind ten locked steel doors with the FCC, them, and the other fat cats. That’s their idea of democracy. If we rip down those steel doors, they know that their system won’t hold up in the light of day. That’s what we have to do, shine the light of day on it, and only good things can possibly happen. I’ll leave you with a quote from one of my favorite writers, Noam Chomsky. It’s one of my favorite quotes by Noam. He deals with a lot of people who say, “I just don’t think it’s possible. It’s too intense. The problem of changing this world is just not worth it. You kill yourself because people in power are so strong.” Noam says: “The choice is yours.” Basically, you’ve got to look in the mirror, look in the eyes in that mirror, and look deep into your soul to see what your made of. The choice that you’ve got to deal with is this: If you act like there is no hope for change for the better, you guarantee there is no hope for change for the better. That’s your choice.
Thank you very much.

David Barsamian Alternative Radio
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