The US Media as Orwellian Minitrue
May 13th, 2008 by SocProf and tagged Media, Politics, United StatesSo says Gabor Steigart in Der Spiegel,
“It’s betrayal. During this election campaign, a large part of the American media has neglected to carefully follow the principles of the profession. In fact, some were about as loyal to those principles as Eliot Spitzer to his wife.
A journalist’s twin points of references should be the real and the important. But for months the focus of the election coverage was on trivia. Every insignificant detail got blown out of proportion, with every chipmunk becoming a Godzilla. According to a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, over 60 percent of election coverage by the US media has been focused on campaign strategies, tactics or personalities — but not on actual political content.
Reporters focused the most attention on such pressing questions as whether Barack Obama was wearing an American flag lapel pin, whether John McCain had a mistress eight years ago or whether former first lady Hillary Clinton was incorrectly recalling her 1996 trip to Bosnia.
Clinton claimed to recall hearing sniper fire as her plane landed in Bosnia. In fact, as archive TV footage later showed, Clinton was actually greeted by a young girl who recited a poem on the tarmac. That may have been embarrassing for Hillary Clinton, but it is insignificant for voters.“
Yes, thank you, Mister German reporter for stating what should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. And for Steingart, it is not just the embarrassing spectacle of such a focus on stupid things.
The real betrayal is the peddling of lies to the audience so much so that the US Media can be compared to George Orwell’s 1984 Ministry of Truth (or Minitrue in Newspeak). As we all remember, the Ministry of Truth is, of course, in charge of lying to the public and feed it all sorts of falsities and lies. The only thing that matters is that we all keep on loving Big Brother and hating Goldstein.
So, according to this German fellow, what should the media focus on?
“The upcoming US presidential election should address issues of war, peace, and growing inequality created by the forces of globalization. Many questions could be posed that are hard to beat in terms of drama. What would happen if the Democrats really were to withdraw the US Army from Iraq? How does Barack Obama plan to address the threat that the killing fields of Cambodia could be repeated in Basra and Baghdad? Does he have a plan or even an idea for dealing with the day after?
How do the Republicans plan to end the scandal of the uninsured? Some 47 million people in America now have no health insurance. Around 9 million have been added to that total during the seven years George W. Bush has been in power. This is the greatest market failure since the invention of modern capitalism.”
I did not cut anything out: obviously, since Hillary has been addressing these issues, she’s not included in the list of people who have some explaining to do. Right? 
But Steingart finds another culprit in addition to the media: the consultants and strategists.
“Journalists and strategists deliver their commentaries, side by side and in harmony, on CNN and Fox News. Make way for Karl Rove, the architect of George W. Bush’s two electoral victories, who is now under contract with Fox News, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal. Raise the curtain for Dick Morris, once the closest adviser to Bill Clinton, who is a fixture on practically every TV channel. Cast the spotlight on Donna Brazile, who appears on CNN as a commentator on every election night — the audience only learns in passing that she is actually a member of the exclusive Democratic National Committee and one of her party’s superdelegates.”
And that is the major issue. It is, for all intents and purposes, impossible to tell what the respective roles are. There are no clear boundaries between the strategists, the pundits and the journalists. They are one and the same class, recycling information amongst themselves, and in isolation.
Remember when the progressive blogs were going to be the 5th power that would counterbalance the collusion between corporate powers and the media, and where the big bloggers were all over “the Village” as the symbiosis between the DC political corps and Big Media? And the Internet was going to be the great equalizer? And when we all enjoyed it when the Ombudswoman from the Washington Post would oh-so deplore to have her contradictions exposed by the riff-raff?
That’s completely lost. To pursue the Orwellian metaphor a bit further, the A-list blogs are stuck in a cycle of permanent “minutes of hate” over Hillary Clinton, some of them have already sold out to Big Media, either by directly participating in it or by positioning their blogs to become part of the Village.
I guess the essential of media critique will fall on the shoulders of B- and C-list blogs but with more limited audiences and fewer resources, it will be harder. In the now-established social stratification of system of the blogosphere, there does not seem to be much room for extensive social mobility.
