Watching the watchdogs

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.

Prior to making it, you cited an article by Alison Weir (Fact-Checking the Ceasefire Breaches; Killing Palestinians Doesn’t Count, Counterpunch, 29 January), which lists seven Israeli ceasefire violations that occurred before “CNN, AP, NPR, the New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News, ABC, CBS, the Christian Science Monitor, the LA Times, the McClatchy Newspapers, etc, all pinned the resumption of violence on Palestinians.”

How did Alison Weir hear about these violations? Have you asked her?

The first, “Israeli forces killed a Palestinian farmer in Khuza’a east of Khan Yunis on Jan 18”, was reported by Joel Greenberg in the Chicago Tribune. He wrote:

“[A] witness told the Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem that his brother was killed at the village of Khuzaa when troops fired at people surveying damage left by the departing Israeli forces. Some 30 homes near the border were destroyed, along with olive and fruit trees and greenhouses, the witness said.”

The second violation on Weir’s list, “Israeli forces killed a Palestinian farmer east of Jabalia on Jan. 19”, was reported by agencies. According to Xinhua, China’s state newswire:

“Israeli soldiers opened fire on Tuesday at an area northeast of Jabalia town in northern Gaza Strip, killing a Palestinian farmer, witnesses and medics said.”

The gunboat attacks in violations three and five, when “Israeli naval gunboats shelled the Gaza coastline, causing damage to civilian structures” and “Israeli gunboat fire injured 4-7 Palestinian fishermen on Jan 22”, were widely covered. Rewriting an Associated Press story, Fox News reported:

“Gunboats have been firing off Gaza’s shore for several days despite a cease-fire that has ended a three-week Israeli offensive against Gaza rocket operations aimed at Israel.”

The Irish Times said:

“ISRAEL’S ROUTINE shelling of the Gaza coast was heavier and louder than usual yesterday. It began at precisely 7.35am and ended at 9.25am. Four Palestinians were wounded – two little girls (4 and 5), a boy of 15 who was shot in the head, and a man.”

The same report addressed Weir’s fourth violation, “Israeli troops shot and injured a child east of Gaza City on Jan 22”. It said:

“Another boy [8] was also shot in the head by a sniper when he was playing near his house close to the land border with Israel.”

The Jerusalem Post, using Associated Press copy, rounded up the incidents as follows, perhaps covering Weir’s sixth violation, “Israeli shelling set a Palestinian house on fire on Jan 22”, though it’s impossible to be sure, since she provides no further details, nor the source for her information. The Jerusalem Post said:

“A navy boat off the shores of Gaza City shot and wounded a man and a girl on Thursday morning, according to a Palestinian medical official. The IDF confirmed the incident, and said it was firing to deter a Palestinian fishing vessel that had strayed off- limits. Between 12 and 2 p.m. Thursday, the navy partially lifted the naval blockade so as to allow Palestinian fishermen to fish. Moaiya Hassanain, a Palestinian doctor, said a shell fired by the boat hit a house in a beach-side refugee camp, and that two who were wounded were walking in the street. Another shell landed 100 meters) away in an empty area near a UN aid distribution center.”

All of these mainstream media stories are available online, and were, presumably, the basis for much non-corporate commentary. But, unless you have evidence to the contrary, this non-corporate commentary does not appear to have provided the primary facts. These were reported, in the first instance, by corporate media.

Only the seventh violation, “Israeli tanks fired on the border town of Al Faraheen, causing damage to homes and farms on Jan 24”, seems to be sourced to a non-corporate report, in this case by Rami Al Meghari, for the International Middle East Media Center, who said, according to witnesses, that:

“Israeli tanks shelled civilian homes and farms in the village of al-Faraheen which borders Israel and is located near the southern Gaza strip city of Khan Younis.”

In the introduction to Manufacturing Consent, a text to which you say you “have to acknowledge [your] debt”, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote:

“That a careful reader looking for a fact can sometimes find it with diligence and a sceptical eye tells us nothing about whether that fact received the attention and context it deserved, whether it was intelligible to the reader or effectively distorted or suppressed.”

Unlike your comments (quoted above), this critique is accurate. Indeed, without the primary facts reported by mainstream media, it would have been impossible to write.

The answer to your question therefore needs rethinking. How many non-corporate sources provide primary facts that they didn’t glean from corporate news reports (however those facts might have been buried or misleadingly framed)? The answer is very few. Until that changes, your analysis needs reframing to keep it accurate.

If you don’t aim to mislead your readers, you’ll advise them of your error, whether or not you append my comments to the second part of your alert, as I’d like you to.

It’s surely a more damning indictment of mainstream media framing that these facts are so widely reported, before vanishing down the collective corporate memory hole.

Best regards,

Daniel Simpson

–

The second part of their alert did not include my comments.

This is perhaps a reflection of previous debates, during which I was banned from their message board. The posting that precipitated this said:

“[A]s your archive of alerts demonstrates (Buncombe and Monbiot are examples that spring to mind) you tend not to take much account of what your interlocutors say to you, except to dismiss it as having no bearing on the case you’re asking them to accept as proven.”

George Monbiot summarised his disagreement with Media Lens similarly:

Rather than offering a clear, objective analysis of why the media works the way it does, who pulls the strings, how journalists are manipulated, knowingly or otherwise, you appear to have decided instead to use your platform merely to attack those who do not accept your narrow and particular doctrine. Whenever a journalist takes a line at variance to your own, your automatic assumption is that he has stopped thinking for himself, and has been, wittingly or otherwise, coerced by dark forces. As a result, you are in danger of reproducing the very problems you criticise. You appear to me to be confronting one form of bias and intolerance with another.

As I have stressed elsewhere, “the Media Lens editors have every right to angle their own playing field as they see fit. But they (and you) might reflect on a quotation from their alert ‘Dismissing Dissidents’”:

“Somehow they have to get rid of the stuff. You can’t deal with the [dissident] arguments, that’s plain; for one thing you have to know something, and most of these people don’t know anything. Secondly, you wouldn’t be able to answer the arguments because they’re correct. Therefore what you have to do is somehow dismiss it.”

– Noam Chomsky

It would be preferable if they thought about how to work with it. After all, the Chomsky article cited in their latest alert bases its argument on a quotation from the New York Times. As suggested before:

What’s needed is an easily searchable archive of critical perspectives; a repository for referenced nuggets that reporters can simply lift.

Media alerts would be more useful if they provided this, whoever might ultimately do the lifting, or some day even mine the nuggets themselves.