Or guarding Guardians of Power?
Media Lens is a British website, influenced heavily by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, whose work it recommends as:
“…a basis for understanding the manner in which truth is filtered from, rather than consciously obstructed by, the modern media system.”
This means journalists rarely lie intentionally, but they also don’t realise how untruthful they are, because they rarely define what they say, never mind what the story they’re reporting ought to be.
Instead, as the British government’s chief propagandist once put it, they work “on the principle that you can report anything that a source says, regardless of its veracity, provided that you report accurately what the source has told you.”
Add to this the conviction that their democratic duty is to inform the public what officials say about what they’re doing, and the result is a tendency to:
i) defer to the most powerful sources, and adopt their narratives to frame stories;
ii) report facts without contextualising them accurately, never mind insightfully, because of i), combined with ignorance;
iii) foghorn one agenda over others, because of i) and ii), giving propaganda more coverage than scepticism, and burying the facts that refute it.
So what, then, is to be done? To quote an earlier essay on the subject:
Media Lens, which describes itself as “correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media”, publishes regular newsletters [called media alerts] encouraging subscribers to email journalists and challenge their version of events with evidence that contradicts it.
These exchanges with the media, and the alerts they generate:
“…berate journalists for pushing facts through an interpretive framework that obscures their significance; for sacrificing analysis on the altar of novelty; for accumulating information without joining up the dots. Editors tend to favour news stories that recycle the idées fixes of conventional wisdom in their presentation of background material. These are regarded as unbiased, while those structured on alternative interpretations arouse suspicion.”
Alternative interpretations are usually founded on facts reported by these same journalists. But they, and their editors, fail to provide them, most of the time. Why?
“Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model identified five filters distorting media coverage: the interests of parent companies, pressure from advertisers, dependence on official sources, flak from the government and other powerful lobbies and an ideological belief in free-market capitalism. Media Lens seeks to raise awareness of these issues by demonstrating that there are limits to what many journalists are prepared to discuss. More honest reporting is impossible, [the editors of Media Lens] argue, unless the filters blurring their vision are removed. “We cannot change the mass media,” they write, “until we change the culture, which cannot change until we change the mass media.” Their objective is to lobby for a revolutionary restructuring of society by highlighting flaws in journalism, which they ascribe to an all-encompassing theory passed off as axiomatic fact. In effect, then, they are manufacturing dissent.”
This is where we part company, although I share the aim they outline in their book: to “democratise the setting and content of news agendas, which traditionally reflect establishment interests”. Denouncing journalists for not being radicals seems pointless, especially if (as the latest alert concludes) the subtext is that:
The mainstream media will never provide a viable alternative to honest, compassionate individuals writing as free human beings outside the corporate machine.
Perhaps not. But who will provide the facts on which viable alternatives depend? There’s also no guarantee that individuals outside the corporate machine will be more honest, no matter how compassionate they might imagine themselves.
I raised these issues with Media Lens this morning.
–
From: Daniel Simpson
Date: 2009/2/5
Subject: Comment on latest alert
Dear David Cromwell and David Edwards,
You wrote in your Media Alert of 4 February (THE BBC, IMPARTIALITY, AND THE HIDDEN LOGIC OF MASSACRE – PART 1) that it’s important to ask:
“Do the mainstream media provide a viable alternative to non-corporate sources of news and commentary? The answer is they do not and never have.”
This is an inaccurate and misleading assertion.
