It's the Media, Stupid.
Frank Rich, NY Times: The more real journalism declines, the easier it is for such government "infoganda" (as The Daily Show's Rob Corddry calls it) to fill the vacuum. President George W. Bush tries to facilitate this process by shutting out the real news media as much as possible. By the start of this year,
he had held only 11 solo press conferences, as opposed
to his father's count of 71 by the same point in his
presidency. (Even the criminally secretive Richard
Nixon had held 23.) Bush has declared that he rarely
reads newspapers and that he prefers to "go over the
heads of the filter" - as he calls the news media -
and "speak directly to the people." To this end, he
gave a series of interviews to regional broadcasters
last autumn - a holding action, no doubt, until Karen
Ryan and Alberto Garcia could be hired to fill that
role. When the president made an exception last month
and took questions from an actual frontline
journalist, NBC television's Tim Russert, his
performance was so maladroit that the experiment is
unlikely to be repeated soon.
Break the Bush Cabal's Stranglehold on the "US
Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004:
Defeat Bush (again!)
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Frank Rich: Faux journalism is the White House's new ally
Frank Rich NYT
Friday, March 26, 2004
NEW YORK Real journalism may be reeling, but faux
journalism rocks. As an entertainment category in the
cultural marketplace, it may soon rival reality TV and
porn. American television is increasingly awash in
fake anchors delivering fake news, some of them far
more trenchant than real anchors delivering real news.
Even CNBC, a financial news network, is chasing after
the success of the faux-anchor Jon Stewart; its new
nightly fake newscast, presided over by a formerly
funny "Saturday Night Live" fake anchor, Dennis
Miller, is being promoted with far more zeal than was
ever lavished on CNBC's real "News With Brian
Williams."
Turn on real news shows like "Dateline NBC" and "Larry
King Live," meanwhile, and you are all too likely to
find Jayson Blair, the lying former reporter of The
New York Times, continuing to play a reporter on
television as he fabricates earnest blather about his
concern for journalistic standards.
Elsewhere on the dial you'll learn that a fake news
show (Stewart's "The Daily Show") has been in a
booking war with a real news show ("Hardball") over
who would first be able to interview the real (I
think) Desmond Tutu. At such absurd moments, real
journalism and its evil twin merge into a mind-bending
mutant that would defy a polygraph's ability to sort
out the lies from the truth.
This phenomenon has been good news for the Bush
administration, which has responded to the growing
national appetite for fictionalized news by producing
a steady supply of its own. Of late it has gone so far
as to field its own pair of Jayson Blairs, hired at
taxpayers' expense: Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia, the
"reporters" who appeared in television "news" videos
distributed by the Department of Health and Human
Services to local news shows. The point of these spots
- which were broadcast whole or in part as actual news
by more than 50 stations in 40 states - was to hype
the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit as an
unalloyed godsend to elderly voters. They are part of
a public relations campaign, which, with its $124
million budget, would dwarf most actual news
organizations.
When one real reporter, Robert Pear of The New York
Times, blew the whistle on these television "news"
stories this month, a government spokesman defended
them with pure Orwell-speak: "Anyone who has questions
about this practice needs to do some research on
modern public information tools." The government also
informed us that Ryan was no impostor but an actual
"freelance journalist." The Columbia Journalism
Review, investigating further, found that Ryan's past
assignments included serving as a television shill for
pharmaceutical companies in infomercials plugging
FluMist and Excedrin.
Given that drug companies may also be the principal
beneficiaries of the United States' new Medicare law,
she is nothing if not consistent in her journalistic
patrons. But she is a freelance reporter only in the
sense that Mike Ditka would qualify as one when
appearing in Levitra ads. As for the mystery of
Alberto Garcia's journalistic bonafides, it remains at
this writing unresolved. His reporting career has not
left a trace on any data bank. Perhaps he is the
creation of Stephen Glass, the serial fantasist who
once ruled the pages of The New Republic.
The more real journalism declines, the easier it is
for such government "infoganda" (as The Daily Show's
Rob Corddry calls it) to fill the vacuum. President
George W. Bush tries to facilitate this process by
shutting out the real news media as much as possible.
By the start of this year, he had held only 11 solo
press conferences, as opposed to his father's count of
71 by the same point in his presidency. (Even the
criminally secretive Richard Nixon had held 23.) Bush
has declared that he rarely reads newspapers and that
he prefers to "go over the heads of the filter" - as
he calls the news media - and "speak directly to the
people." To this end, he gave a series of interviews
to regional broadcasters last autumn - a holding
action, no doubt, until Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia
could be hired to fill that role. When the president
made an exception last month and took questions from
an actual frontline journalist, NBC television's Tim
Russert, his performance was so maladroit that the
experiment is unlikely to be repeated soon.
There is no point in bothering with actual news people
anyway, when you can make up your own story and make
it stick. No fake news story has become more embedded
in our culture than the administration's account of
its actions on Sept. 11. As The Wall Street Journal
reported on its front page this week - just as the
former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke was going
public with his parallel account - many of this
story's most familiar details are utter fiction.
Bush's repeated claim that one of his "first acts" of
that morning was to put the military on alert is
false. So are the president's claims that he watched
the first airplane hit the World Trade Center on
television that morning. (No such video yet existed.)
Nor was Air Force One under threat as Bush flew around
the country, delaying his return to Washington.
Yet the fake narrative of Sept. 11 has been
scrupulously maintained by the White House for more
than two years. Although the administration has tried
at every juncture to stonewall the Sept. 11
investigative commission, its personnel, including the
president, had all the time in the world for the
producer of a TV movie, Showtime's "DC 9/11: Time of
Crisis" The result was a scenario that further rewrote
the history of that day, stirring steroids into false
tales of presidential derring-do. To shore up the Karl
Rove version of Sept. 11 once Richard Clarke went
public with his alternative tale on last Sunday's "60
Minutes," the White House placed Condoleezza Rice on
all five morning news shows the next day. The
administration is confident that it can reinstate its
bogus scenario - particularly given that Rice, unlike
Clarke, is refusing to take the risk of reciting it
under oath to the Sept. 11 commission.
After Sept. 11, similar fake-news techniques helped
speed us into "Operation Iraqi Freedom." The runup to
the war was falsified by a barrage of those "modern
public information tools," including 16 words of Tom
Clancy-style fiction in the State of the Union
address. John Burns of The New York Times, speaking by
phone from Iraq to a postmortem on war coverage
sponsored by the University of California at
Berkeley's journalism school this month, said of the
real press back then: "We failed the American public
by being insufficiently critical about elements of the
administration's plan to go to war."
What few journalistic efforts were made to penetrate
the trumped-up rationales for war were easily defeated
by the administration's false news reports of
impending biological attacks and mushroom clouds. To
see how the faux journalism sausage was made, go to
www.reform.house.gov/min, where a searchable database
posted by Representative Henry Waxman identifies "237
specific misleading statements about the threat posed
by Iraq" made by Bush and members of his
administration.
As for the embedded journalists who filled in the rest
of the story, a candid assessment was delivered by
Lieutenant Colonel Rick Long, the former head of media
relations for the Marine Corps, speaking at the
Berkeley symposium: "Frankly, our job is to win the
war. Part of that is information warfare." He added:
"So we are going to attempt to dominate the
information environment...Overall, we were very happy
with the outcome."
The New York Times
Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune