the ideology problem (1) - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 03-07-2009, 07:34 AM

this piece seems to me to state the obvious set of problems.

Quote:

The American Media Misdiagnosis

By Robert Parry
March 2, 2009

It’s widely agreed that there are a number of factors dragging down American newspapers, including the economic recession and the impact of the Internet, but a reason rarely mentioned is that the national news media failed in its most important job – to serve as a watchdog for the people.

As Americans look out over the wreckage of the past three decades – and especially the last eight years – there have been too many times when the constitutionally protected U.S. news media didn’t raise the alarm or even joined in spreading misinformation that advanced the disastrous mismanagement of the U.S. economy and government.

Not that anyone should derive pleasure from watching once formidable institutions like the New York Times and the Washington Post fade into pale shadows of their former selves.

But it also must be acknowledged that decisions by senior management of those and other top news organizations contributed to their own decline, especially the failure to stand up to the Right’s increasingly effective propaganda that emerged in the late 1970s in the wake of Richard Nixon’s Watergate debacle and the American defeat in Vietnam.

The Right was determined to prevent “another Watergate” and “another Vietnam.” So, key Republican strategists, such as former Treasury Secretary William Simon, went to work building their own media infrastructure, which included special groups to attack mainstream reporters who got in the way.

Rather than standing up to this pressure and defending the kind of aggressive journalism that exposed Nixon’s criminality and the lies behind the Vietnam War, many major news organizations consciously retreated from that watchdog tradition. [See Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

At the New York Times, neoconservative executive editor Abe Rosenthal talked about moving his newspaper “back to the center,” by which he meant to the right. Washington Post chairwoman Katharine Graham also was uncomfortable with the adversarial position of her newspaper and sidled up to President Ronald Reagan when he came to power in 1981.

When I was hired at Washington Post-owned Newsweek in 1987 – supposedly to pursue the Iran-Contra scandal that I had helped expose while at the Associated Press – I was surprised to find senior Newsweek executives fretting about the possibility that Iran-Contra could become another Watergate.

The very company (the Washington Post), which was credited with blowing the whistle on Nixon’s Watergate crimes, seemed not to want “another Watergate,” in part because it might damage the generally friendly dinner-party relationships that had developed with the Reagan insiders, which in turn might upset Mrs. Graham.

I ran into this corporate reality when I pressed ahead with an investigation showing that the Iran-Contra scandal was not a rogue operation run by White House aide Oliver North and a few men of zeal – but rather was authorized and directed by President Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush with the active support of the CIA.

I encountered hostility from Newsweek’s top brass in New York and little support from my immediate superiors in Washington. The message was that the Iran-Contra scandal should be wrapped up quickly, that it should not go any higher, and that additional digging would not be “good for the country.”

It was known inside Newsweek that executive editor Maynard Parker was cozy with key neoconservatives and the CIA, while Washington bureau chief Evan Thomas was a great admirer of the neocon writers at The New Republic. It soon became clear that battling to tell Iran-Contra truths was not a route to career advancement.

Changing Journalism

More broadly, the character of journalism was changing, too.

Instead of the Watergate/Pentagon Papers image of scrappy reporters and hardened editors standing up to the powers-that-be, star journalists and well-paid executives were partaking in the riches and comforts of a then-booming industry with extra money to be made on TV pundit shows – if you stayed safely within the bounds of Washington’s “conventional wisdom.”

In short, many people in the news business stopped being outsiders keeping an eye on the insiders for the American public, but rather they became insiders themselves.

And the fastest way to lose your lucrative insider status was to offend the Right, which was building a vast media infrastructure that could easily pick off the few reporters and editors who resisted this new paradigm.

By the time I left Newsweek in 1990, I was convinced that the mainstream U.S. news media had moved beyond a point where it could be reformed. It was becoming incapable of examining complex cases of wrongdoing either by the government or the private sector.

Yet, when I approached liberal foundations with my first-hand insights – and my recommendation that they must begin investing aggressively in a counter-media infrastructure – the reaction I received was usually one of bemusement. “We don’t do media” went one typical reaction.

So, the downward media spiral continued, accelerated by the emergence of right-wing talk radio (which hammered even mildly center-left politicians like Bill Clinton) and cable news (which obsessed 24/7 on sensational crime stories, such as the O.J. Simpson case).

One of the reasons I founded Consortiumnews.com in 1995 was that the market for well-documented stories about the serious wrongdoing of the Reagan-Bush-41 years had disappeared. That information was considered too historical as well as too risky.

By then, top media commentators also had bought into the insiders’ faith in globalization and deregulation as well as the value of a “tough-guy” foreign policy and a dismissive attitude toward tree-hugging environmentalists.

You could safely protect your future as a big-name media star if you parroted Bob Woodward's view that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was a “maestro,” if you followed the foreign policy lead of neocons like Charles Krauthammer and Fred Hiatt, or if you echoed Gregg Easterbrook’s critique of environmental extremists.

In Campaign 2000, the Washington press corps sank to its junior-high worst when it ganged up on nerd Al Gore and fairly swooned at the feet of big-man-on-campus George W. Bush.

Not only was there no warning about the danger of putting an unqualified dauphin like Bush in charge of the federal government, the major U.S. news media – led by the New York Times and the Washington Post – paved the way by treating Gore as a delusional braggart. [For details, see Neck Deep.]

The Bush-43 Era

Then, with Bush in place, the U.S. news media spent the crucial summer of 2001 obsessed with one of many white-girl-goes-missing stories – about Washington intern Chandra Levy who had had an affair with a Democratic congressman, Gary Condit.

Almost no attention was paid to the growing alarm inside the U.S. intelligence community about the prospects of a terrorist attack from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization. And once the attack took place on 9/11, the news media lined up unquestioningly behind Bush, who then mounted a public relations campaign to justify invading Iraq.

Besides failing to ask tough questions of Bush, the major U.S. news media joined in cheerleading for the go-go financial era, offering little or no substantive criticism of the dangers from a deregulated global economy. Indeed, any commentator who dared challenge the conventional wisdom about “free markets” and “free trade” almost surely would get drummed out of the media insider club.

The Washington Post became a prime example of all these trends – and did so in contradiction to the political views of much of its community, one of the most liberal in the country. Though facing competition only from two right-wing newspapers (the Washington Times and the Examiner), the Post charted a neocon editorial direction that often insulted its more liberal readers.

A typical day in the life of the Post’s editorial section offers up the writings of neocons like Krauthammer, William Kristol, Robert Kagan and editorial page editor Hiatt. (Hiatt oversaw an ugly campaign to discredit Iraq War critic Joseph Wilson, whose wife, covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, was exposed by senior officials in the Bush administration.)

Besides the neocons, you might find more traditional conservatives like George Will and Kathleen Parker, plus laissez-faire economic writer Robert Samuelson and pro-Iraq War “insiders” like David Ignatius, Jim Hoagland and Richard Cohen.

Liberals, such as E.J. Dionne and Eugene Robinson, are almost always in a distinct minority.

So, when the Washington Post complains about its 77 percent drop in fourth-quarter earnings, its loss of advertising during the economic downturn, its three rounds of staff buyouts, or its circulation struggles in the face of Internet competition, many Washingtonians may be inclined to say simply, “it’s your own damn fault.”

Liberal Failings

But blame for America’s media mess also must fall on wealthy liberals and progressives who have largely stayed on the sidelines as the right-wing juggernaut rolled over honest reporters during the past three decades and thus made the fabrication of a false national narrative much easier.

The Left’s failure to engage on media also represents possibly the biggest threat to the young Obama presidency and to its ambitious reform agenda, which includes broader availability to health care, stronger environmental protections, more resources for education, help to unions, and investments in the national infrastructure.

George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California-Berkeley, described this problem in a HuffingtonPost article on Feb. 24 entitled The Obama Code. Though the article focuses on how Obama frames his rhetorical arguments, Lakoff adds near the end:

“The conservative message machine is huge and still going. There are dozens of conservative think tanks, many with very large communications budgets. … About 80 percent of the talking heads on TV are conservatives.

“Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are as strong as ever. There are now progressive voices on MSNBC, Comedy Central, and Air America, but they are still overwhelmed by [the] Right's enormous megaphone.

“Republicans in Congress can count on overwhelming message support in their home districts and homes states. That is one reason why they were able to stonewall on the President's stimulus package. They had no serious media competition at home pounding out the Obama vision day after day.

“Such national, day-by-day media competition is necessary. Democrats need to build it. … The President and his administration cannot build such a communication system, nor can the Democrats in Congress. The DNC does not have the resources.

“It will be up to supporters of the Obama values, not just supporters on the issues, to put such a system in place. Despite all the organizing strength of Obama supporters, no such organizing effort is now going on.

“If none is put together, the movement conservatives will face few challenges of fundamental values in their home constituencies and will be able to go on stonewalling with impunity. That will make the President's vision that much harder to carry out.”

So, while it is undeniably true that the mainstream news media has failed the American people – and that the nation is paying a terrible price for that failure – it’s also true that liberals and progressives have contributed to the problem by seeing media as someone else’s responsibility.

Combined with the Right’s disinformation and the cowardice of the mainstream, the Left’s media blindness – the “we-don’t-do-media” syndrome – has enabled the unfolding American political/economic disaster, which has now carried the country and the world to the brink of a global depression.

It is way past time for people of goodwill to respond.

Consortiumnews.com

i put this here not because it's a particular deep analysis, but because it strings together a series of factors that could be taken apart and examined separately--i'm considering a series of threads that do that, depending on what i find that fits into the factoid-orientation of a messageboard.

here's the claim:

despite the functional implosion of neoliberalism, the framing devices--that is the ways of packaging information, which extends to defining relevant variables and contexts and the naming of the phenomena created by these definitions and of the dynamics that link them--all remain locked into this imploded ideology. why is that?

i think parry provides a sketch of an answer.

against my better judgment, i find myself these days sometimes watching television. at first, i maintained a strict diet of reality shows, figuring that since all television is about itself, reality shows at least were up front about it, and they provide a kind of interesting theater of the power of editing (and if you listen to the tools who go onto these shows, alienation from themselves--editing makes them over into characters, which they then play, wittingly or not)...but gradually, i tried to overcome my aversion of the idiocy of cable "news" and look at it.

what seems clear to me is that neoliberalism remains as it has been for some time the lingua franca of the main american ideological relay system, television.

what seems also clear is that the decline of newspapers (on this i think parry is simplistic, but no matter for the moment) has resulted in the decline of an internal opposition, which could and should have relativized the various medium-specific and (worse) political shortcomings of televisual infotainment.

what also seems clear is that the shift to the right undertaken on "competitive" grounds by the o-so-free televisual apparatus, which resulted in explicitly ideological ways of thinking and speaking being integrated into the packaging of information, such that information results in infotainment, now presents the televisual apparatus as a whole with a significant problem. now to shift ideological frameworks?
the appearance that television seemed, consciously or not (it doesn't really matter until one enters into a critique, and if you're following this, we're not there yet: we're simply outlining a problem) to rely upon was that it's slide to the right discursively was matched by broader shifts in the media climate (see parry above) so that it became possible to collapse an appearance of neutrality into a shift into a particular ideological space.

the problem this creates now is that as the world moves around television, it is trapped with the consequences of it's own choices.

one result of this is a seemingly endless barrage of performances of dissonance that condense onto entirely incoherent presentations of both the political and economic crisis/transition (depending on how it works out) and of the obama administration's attempts (like them or not, and i'm often kinda skeptical) to address them. this dissonance is performed through a consistent collapse of what you might call the time-frame of expectations. it is also preformed by an inability to come to terms with the obsolescence of "free market" ideology. this for two main reasons, i think:
1. cognitive dissonance
2. concern that shifting the lingua franca now would de facto indicate that the earlier lingua franca was POLITICAL through and through.

the result of that would be a problem of legitimacy of the televisual apparatus itself as an infotainment and ideological relay system.

you can see the results of this paralysis--because that's what it is--playing out everywhere--but to focus this a little, i would argue that it is a direct reflection of this problem for television infotainment that explains the nature, language and lack of coherence of both assessments of the ongoing crisis and of attempts to address it.

what do you think?
do you this parry is correct in his overview?
do you see the arguments that i derive from it as reasonable?
if so, what do you think should happen? what should we do? how to proceed?

flstf · 03-09-2009, 01:59 PM

I think the death of newspapers has little to do with the character of journalism and more to do with the nature of modern media and the choices people make to receive news. My local newspaper The Cincinnati Enquirer recently announced that delivery would no longer be available in my rural area. For 25 years when I lived in Seattle I had delivered and read the 2 local newspapers every day. When I moved to the country I could only get Sunday delivery and was forced to get news from other outlets and was surprised how easy the transition was. Now I will not even be able to get the paper on Sunday.

I understand some of the shift to the right for competitive reasons and the popularity of Limbaugh and Fox to the angry conservatives but am surprised that there is not more of an outlet for angry moderates. Almost everyone I talk with is angry with our polititians and their minions on Wall Street who caused this economic mess and yet are still enriching themselves at our expense. People's confidence in our system is dropping rapidly and will probably continue to do so until some of those responsible for this mess are brought to some kind of justice. I have visions of guillotines being erected in Washington and on Wall Street.

Rarely have people felt so powerless as the economy crashes and our polititians and their wealthy patrons remain unaffected as we pay the price.

I guess most of us are just apathetic. It was interesting listening to an ACORN spokeswoman advocating that foreclosed people stay in their homes. All we need is for the police to refuse to throw people out in the street and we will have anarchy. Maybe there will be increased rioting as unemployment reaches 20%. I notice there is quite a bit of money in the stimulus package for states to avoid police layoffs.

roachboy · 03-10-2009, 07:30 AM

first off, i agree that the decline of newspapers is not adequately explained in the article--but it was not set up to provide an explanation for it, but merely to note it as a factor. i picked up on it because i wanted to focus a bit on the centrality of television as an ideological relay system--newspapers have the advantage of providint at least some context for events reported, while television notoriously and continuously substitutes an illusion of "being there" as over against "being informed"...

within that, there's a more fundamental matter that i'm not sure i set up well enough.
ideology refers to the ways in which experience is staged--the mix of images and discourse that mediate relations to one's experience, the role of which becomes increasingly prominent as information refers to the "experience distant"---the narratives and/or explanations that these signifiers are linked to---the notions of causation and time that underpins them---all of which converge on the way "we" understand ourselves (as spectators) interacting with (typically watching) events which unfold in the world (the big movie)...

what i've been thinking is that the relation of a spectator to television is that of agency in the world.
so if people are apathetic about the implosion of the neoliberal order--if they see it as a natural phenomenon and not as the result of a long series of political choices made by particular actors operating with particular interests in mind, the advancing of which has had and will continue to have direct, ugly material consequences for the spectators themselves---and if the above is accurate, then this "apathy" is an ideological effect.

this is as much a mapping of the relation to the medium as it is a relation shaped by the explicit contents within it. see what i mean?

so there's a structure of passivity, of spectatorship, that's modelled on watching television, in the context of which one watches one's own life.
the existing order is naturalized because it appears as the underlying logic that informs any given sequence of footage.
causation--and by extension political action or choices--are reduced to abstract features that impinge upon the picture of the world in ways that erase any sense of agency or volition.
change is typically rendered arbitrary or violent because television footage provides no context and there's no interest on the part of the talking head class in providing context because the purpose of news is to keep viewers engaged from one sequence of commercials to the next, so anything too dense or long runs the risk of viewers switching off to something else thereby missing vital adertising. (you can see the difference in something like pbs' news operations, which are not so motivated and which therefore operate with more freedom to provide context. the idea that things happen in the world as a function of particular choices made by particular agents emerges from context--it is not immanent to imagery)

so the basic ideological situation, it seems to me, is one of spectatorship. people watch their lives happen like they're watching tv. they have no power because they cannot imagine taking any. social relation collapse onto natural features---so there's no agency to be taken.

within this, you have the problem of political shifts unfolding in response to the rapid implosion of neoliberalism.
that's the focus of the opening post, really--what amounts of superstructural adjustments, hedged round with problems, in a context of a substructure of spectatorship/passivity.

so this loops onto the op maybe.
i think it does.
we'll see i suppose.

flstf · 03-10-2009, 09:45 AM

I agree with your TV analogy. It does seem that getting one's news from TV is like watching a series of soundbites with little substance or explaination. Switching between the major network and cable news channels in an effort to understand what is going on with the economy is very frustrating. Only after multiple searches on Google was I able to even begin to comprehend the root of the problem. Print media (newspapers and magazines) tend to go deeper into the issues but even then I prefer to compare multiple viewpoints (including theirs) which can best be found on-line.

People's reaction to the economic crash from information garnered from TV news seems to be that the major reason is irresponsible people who took out mortgages they couldn't afford when the real culprits are the institutions who bundled them into highly leveraged paper and our government which did not regulate this activity.

I don't think the ideological concept of what is currently happening is covered well at all. Most of us have a vague understanding that the myth of the free market is pretty much dead at the top since they are getting bailed out but the little guy will be left to fail. I think discussions about the implosion of the neoliberal order are way too complicated for TV soundbites.

03-10-2009, 07:30 AM	#3 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	first off, i agree that the decline of newspapers is not adequately explained in the article--but it was not set up to provide an explanation for it, but merely to note it as a factor. i picked up on it because i wanted to focus a bit on the centrality of television as an ideological relay system--newspapers have the advantage of providint at least some context for events reported, while television notoriously and continuously substitutes an illusion of "being there" as over against "being informed"... within that, there's a more fundamental matter that i'm not sure i set up well enough. ideology refers to the ways in which experience is staged--the mix of images and discourse that mediate relations to one's experience, the role of which becomes increasingly prominent as information refers to the "experience distant"---the narratives and/or explanations that these signifiers are linked to---the notions of causation and time that underpins them---all of which converge on the way "we" understand ourselves (as spectators) interacting with (typically watching) events which unfold in the world (the big movie)... what i've been thinking is that the relation of a spectator to television is that of agency in the world. so if people are apathetic about the implosion of the neoliberal order--if they see it as a natural phenomenon and not as the result of a long series of political choices made by particular actors operating with particular interests in mind, the advancing of which has had and will continue to have direct, ugly material consequences for the spectators themselves---and if the above is accurate, then this "apathy" is an ideological effect. this is as much a mapping of the relation to the medium as it is a relation shaped by the explicit contents within it. see what i mean? so there's a structure of passivity, of spectatorship, that's modelled on watching television, in the context of which one watches one's own life. the existing order is naturalized because it appears as the underlying logic that informs any given sequence of footage. causation--and by extension political action or choices--are reduced to abstract features that impinge upon the picture of the world in ways that erase any sense of agency or volition. change is typically rendered arbitrary or violent because television footage provides no context and there's no interest on the part of the talking head class in providing context because the purpose of news is to keep viewers engaged from one sequence of commercials to the next, so anything too dense or long runs the risk of viewers switching off to something else thereby missing vital adertising. (you can see the difference in something like pbs' news operations, which are not so motivated and which therefore operate with more freedom to provide context. the idea that things happen in the world as a function of particular choices made by particular agents emerges from context--it is not immanent to imagery) so the basic ideological situation, it seems to me, is one of spectatorship. people watch their lives happen like they're watching tv. they have no power because they cannot imagine taking any. social relation collapse onto natural features---so there's no agency to be taken. within this, you have the problem of political shifts unfolding in response to the rapid implosion of neoliberalism. that's the focus of the opening post, really--what amounts of superstructural adjustments, hedged round with problems, in a context of a substructure of spectatorship/passivity. so this loops onto the op maybe. i think it does. we'll see i suppose. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

03-09-2009, 01:59 PM	#2 (permalink)
flstf Easy Rider Location: Moscow on the Ohio	I think the death of newspapers has little to do with the character of journalism and more to do with the nature of modern media and the choices people make to receive news. My local newspaper The Cincinnati Enquirer recently announced that delivery would no longer be available in my rural area. For 25 years when I lived in Seattle I had delivered and read the 2 local newspapers every day. When I moved to the country I could only get Sunday delivery and was forced to get news from other outlets and was surprised how easy the transition was. Now I will not even be able to get the paper on Sunday. I understand some of the shift to the right for competitive reasons and the popularity of Limbaugh and Fox to the angry conservatives but am surprised that there is not more of an outlet for angry moderates. Almost everyone I talk with is angry with our polititians and their minions on Wall Street who caused this economic mess and yet are still enriching themselves at our expense. People's confidence in our system is dropping rapidly and will probably continue to do so until some of those responsible for this mess are brought to some kind of justice. I have visions of guillotines being erected in Washington and on Wall Street. Rarely have people felt so powerless as the economy crashes and our polititians and their wealthy patrons remain unaffected as we pay the price. I guess most of us are just apathetic. It was interesting listening to an ACORN spokeswoman advocating that foreclosed people stay in their homes. All we need is for the police to refuse to throw people out in the street and we will have anarchy. Maybe there will be increased rioting as unemployment reaches 20%. I notice there is quite a bit of money in the stimulus package for states to avoid police layoffs.

03-10-2009, 09:45 AM	#4 (permalink)
flstf Easy Rider Location: Moscow on the Ohio	I agree with your TV analogy. It does seem that getting one's news from TV is like watching a series of soundbites with little substance or explaination. Switching between the major network and cable news channels in an effort to understand what is going on with the economy is very frustrating. Only after multiple searches on Google was I able to even begin to comprehend the root of the problem. Print media (newspapers and magazines) tend to go deeper into the issues but even then I prefer to compare multiple viewpoints (including theirs) which can best be found on-line. People's reaction to the economic crash from information garnered from TV news seems to be that the major reason is irresponsible people who took out mortgages they couldn't afford when the real culprits are the institutions who bundled them into highly leveraged paper and our government which did not regulate this activity. I don't think the ideological concept of what is currently happening is covered well at all. Most of us have a vague understanding that the myth of the free market is pretty much dead at the top since they are getting bailed out but the little guy will be left to fail. I think discussions about the implosion of the neoliberal order are way too complicated for TV soundbites.