(medialens) - To be clear, there +is+ much
of merit in Flat Earth News - the book is well worth reading. Davies
describes, for example, how all was not well in the Observer newsroom
in the autumn of 2002. The newspaper correspondent, Ed Vulliamy, had
been talking with Mel Goodman, a former senior CIA analyst. Despite
leaving the agency, Goodman retained his high security clearance and
remained in communication with senior former colleagues. Goodman told
Vulliamy that, in contradiction to everything the British and American
governments were claiming, the CIA were reporting that Saddam Hussein
had no weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, Goodman was willing to go
on the record as a named source. It was an incredibly important scoop
but the Observer refused to publish it. Over the next four
months, Vulliamy submitted seven versions of the story for publication
- his editors rejected every one of them. (pp.329-331) In January 2003,
the Observer then editor, Roger Alton, told his staff: e抳e got to
stand shoulder to shoulder with the Americans.?(p.350)In
support of this stance, the Observer David Rose echoed government
propaganda on Iraq alleged connections with al-Qaeda - a performance
that ended with a humbling apology from Rose in 2004. He described how
his trust in official sources had been misplaced and na飗e… I look
back with shame and disbelief? (p.334)Other people paid the
price. Eleven days after Vulliamy story was rejected for the seventh
time in March 2003, the first bombs fell on Baghdad. In
September 2006, the Evening Standard reported that Alton had been on
omething of a lads?holiday?in the Alps. Alton companions included
Jonathan Powell, ony Blair’s most trusted aide? and staunch Blairite
MP and propagandist Denis MacShane. (Gideon Spanier, æ…–n the air,?
Evening Standard, September 6, 2006)Most recently, we learned
that Alton æƒs understood to be in talks to replace Simon Kelner as
editor of the Independent? (Stephen Brook, ?a href=”http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/04/theindependent.independentnewsmedia” target=”_self”>Alton in talks about
Independent role,?The Guardian, March 4, 2008) It
should come as no surprise: æ”elner and Alton are known to be friends;
in December Kelner gave a speech at Alton’s birthday party, attended by
many Fleet Street editors, a few weeks before he left the Observer.One wonders how even the compliant souls of the liberal press can bear it. We know, indeed, that some of them cannot.But
occasional nuggets should be set apart from Davies analysis of the
media system as a whole. What, then, +is+ his æ‰o-holds-barred?
critique of the press? In the Guardian, he described how he
commissioned research which surveyed more than 2,000 UK news stories
from the four quality dailies (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent)
and the Daily Mail. They found that only 12% of the stories were wholly
composed of material researched by reporters. 80% of the stories were
wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material
provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. They
also found that facts had been thoroughly checked in only 12% of the
stories. Davies commented:he implication of those two
findings is truly alarming. Where once journalists were active
gatherers of news, now they have generally become mere passive
processors of unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by
PR to serve some political or commercial interest. Not journalists, but
churnalists. An industry whose primary task is to filter out falsehood
has become so vulnerable to manipulation that it is now involved in the
mass production of falsehood, distortion and propaganda.?(Davies, æ…œur
media have become mass producers of distortion,?The Guardian, February
4, 2008)The researchers found that the average Fleet Street
journalist is now filling three times as much space as he or she was in
1985: æ‹enerally, they don’t find their own stories, or check their
content, because they simply don’t have the time.In his book,
Davies emphasises that journalists re no longer out gathering news
but… are reduced instead to passive processors of whatever material
comes their way, churning out stories, whether real event or PR
artifice, important or trivial, true or false? (p.59)This is
what Davies calls æ·hurnalism?- this is his central focus. Writing in
the Guardian, Peter Wilby indicated the basic sound bite used to
summarise the Flat Earth News thesis:he main reason why you
read so little decent journalism, he argues, is simple: hacks don’t
have time to do it.?(Wilby, op., cit)Tim Luckhurst wrote in the Independent:æ‚t
the root of the problem lies commercial pressure, but not the
ideological pressure blamed by Marxist academics anxious to portray the
press as an establishment conspiracy. Davies blames the more insidious
influence of media conglomerates that prefer profit to political
influence and pare editorial staff to the bone to achieve it.?
(Luckhurst, æ…”ard truths for the trade in æŠlat Earth News??The
Independent, February 10, 2008)By contrast, Edward Herman - an
æŠutsider?and surely one of Luckhurst æ—arxist academics?- here
reflects on the origins of the propaganda model, which is primarily his
work:e had long been impressed with the regularity with which
the media operate within restricted assumptions, depend heavily and
uncritically on elite information sources, and participate in
propaganda campaigns helpful to elite interests. In trying to explain
why they do this we looked for structural factors as the only possible
root of systematic behaviour and performance patterns.?(Herman, he
propaganda model revisited,?Monthly Review, July 1996)It is in this analysis of tructural factors?that Herman and Chomsky depart from Davies analysis. Herman explains:he
crucial structural factors derive from the fact that the dominant media
are firmly imbedded in the market system. They are profit-seeking
businesses, owned by very wealthy people (or other companies); they are
funded largely by advertisers who are also profit-seeking entities, and
who want their ads to appear in a supportive selling environment. The
media are also dependent on government and major business firms as
information sources, and both efficiency and political considerations,
and frequently overlapping interests, cause a certain degree of
solidarity to prevail among the government, major media, and other
corporate businesses.æ‹overnment and large non-media business
firms are also best positioned (and sufficiently wealthy) to be able to
pressure the media with threats of withdrawal of advertising or TV
licenses, libel suits, and other direct and indirect modes of attack.
The media are also constrained by the dominant ideology, which heavily
featured anticommunism before and during the Cold War era, and was
mobilized often to prevent the media from criticizing attacks on small
states labelled communist. hese factors are linked together,
reflecting the multi-levelled capability of powerful business and
government entities and collectives (e.g., the Business Roundtable;
U.S. Chamber of Commerce; industry lobbies and front groups) to exert
power over the flow of information.?(Herman, Ibid) There is
much more in Herman and Chomsky book, as there is in Davies, but we
are here in a different world of insight and rationality. And yet,
unlike Flat Earth News, Herman and Chomsky Manufacturing Consent does
not exist for the mainstream media. Lexis-Nexis records a single review
of the book over the last 20 years - a two-paragraph review totalling
147 words that appeared in the Guardian in December 1989, a year after
publication. The Rules Of Production - 1-5In
Chapter 4, The Rules of Production, Davies provides a list of ten
æ‘ules?that superficially appear to resemble the list of five filters
offered by Herman and Chomsky. Davies rules are divided under two
sections: 1-5 æ…utting the costs?and 6-10 æ‘ncreasing the Revenue?The
emphasis is on the selection of low cost, afe?facts and ideas that
avoid æºlectric fences? and yet literally no mention is made of the
advertisers who provide 75% of a 憅uality?newspaper revenue. As we
have seen, earlier in the book Davies discusses the influence of
advertising in the context of an implausible conspiracy theory. Davies
also comments on interference from owners and advertisers:æ“ournalists
with whom I have discussed this agree that if you could quantify it,
you could attribute only 5% or 10% of the problem to the total impact
of these two forms of interference.?(p.22)Advertiser
responsibility for Flat Earth News, he claims, is æ‰ot only negligible
but a distraction from what is really going wrong? (p.15)Davies
explains the basis for his low figure, apparently plucked from the air:
here certainly are examples of corporations pulling their advertising
in order to try to have an impact on the political or general editorial
line of a media outlet - but there is a real shortage of examples of
their succeeding? (p.14)Again, this is a red herring. It is
clear that newspapers are not primarily in the business of selling a
product to readers - they are in the business of selling wealthy
audiences to advertisers. It is not just hat stories should increase
readership or audience?- they should sell the right readership to the
right advertisers. This is not an apolitical stance. This marketplace
naturally favours facts, ideas, values and aspirations that are popular
with elite audiences, elite advertisers and elite journalists. What
Davies describes as afe?stories are stories which interest wealthy
audiences without alienating advertisers. The problem is not
just that advertisers might directly pressure a newspaper - for
example, by pulling its advertising - but that newspapers have no
choice but to provide a supportive environment in order to attract
these sponsors. In 2004, we wrote to Nick Taylor, editor of the
Guardian Spark magazine. We asked: as not Spark itself originally
conceived as a vehicle for major advertising? Surely the needs and
preferences of advertisers were central considerations in deciding the
format and focus of the magazine? Taylor replied:Your point is valid. But certainly not unique to my product. æˆver
worked on a magazine launch? The first and only real questions are: who
will advertise with in product / Will it be read by people whom
advertisers want to reach? æœeaders/viewers/listeners are the
most important thing to any publisher or broadcaster. But, from an
economic point of view, primarily because high numbers ofreaders means
high ad revenue. And media survive only through ads.?(Taylor, email to
Media Lens, April 6, 2004)These pressures have shaped, not just
the layout and structure of individual titles, but the whole structure
of the British press. Media analysts James Curran and Jean Seaton
describe how the industrialisation of the press brought progressive
transfer of power from the working class to wealthy businessmen, while
dependence on advertising encouraged the absorption or elimination of
the early radical press and stunted its subsequent development before
the First World War? (Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility
- The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, Routledge, 1991, p.47)The effect on national radical papers that æ»ailed to meet the requirements of advertisers?was dramatic:hey
either closed down; accommodated to advertising pressure by moving
up-market; stayed in a small audience ghetto with manageable losses; or
accepted an alternative source of institutional patronage.?(Ibid, p.43)Davies
also downplays the significance of owner interference, which he
describes, curiously, as he other widespread conspiracy theory?
(p.15):æ‚lmost all of the old patriarchs who personally owned
and abused newspapers have sold out to corporations, whose primary
purpose is not propaganda. Their primary purpose simply and
uncontroversially is to make money.?(p.16) This last comment
is breathtaking. Anyone who knows anything about the political history
of the last century in Britain and the United States knows that the
primary purpose of much propaganda is precisely o make money? Davies
does discuss the cynical relationship between the public relations
industry and the media, but this is only one small component of
state-corporate manipulation of society. Historian Elizabeth
Fones-Wolf notes that the growth in workers’ power during the 1940s and
1950s was a major factor in shaping elite US policy, leading to a
fierce business backlash intended to contain US public opinion. The
campaign was immense in scale, involving all the leading business
organisations, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Committee for
Economic Development, the National Association of Manufacturers and
many industry-specific bodies. Fones-Wolf commented:Manufacturers
orchestrated multimillion dollar public relations campaigns that relied
on newspapers, magazines, radio, and later television, to re-educate
the public in the principles and benefits of the American economic
system… employers sought to undermine unionism and address shop-floor
conflict by building a separate company identity or company
consciousness among their employees. This involved convincing workers
to identify their social, economic, and political well-being with that
of their specific employer and more broadly with the free enterprise
system. (Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise - The Business Assault on
Labour and Liberalism, 1945-60, University of Illinois Press, 1994, p.6)The
press has never been an ideologically neutral, solely profit-oriented
system in this everlasting battle for the minds of men?- it has
always been a key propaganda weapon for corporate power. And we should
not imagine that this struggle is at an end. Elite interests remain
determined to shape public opinion, to limit the perceived range of
conceivable options in their interests, and the media system is still a
prime means for achieving these goals. In other words, the
result of hundreds of years of political struggle for corporate control
against popular interference has resulted in a situation where it is
simply understood that certain facts, ideas, values and aspirations are
acceptable while others are not. Wealthy individual owners and parent
corporations have selected senior managers and editors who understand
this, and who select journalists - company men like Davies - who
perceive the architecture of the media as ideologically neutral rather
than the product of political struggle.Davies analysis is
so flawed, such a symptom of the problem he has failed to perceive,
because he is able to ask in all seriousness:hy would a
profession lose touch with its primary function? Why would
truth-telling disintegrate into the mass production of ignorance??
(p.45)Truth-telling has +never+ been the primary function of
Davies profession. Even the idea of rofessional journalism?is a
fraud. As media analyst Robert McChesney notes it is no coincidence
that the notion of professionalism appeared just as corporations
achieved an unprecedented stranglehold at the beginning of the 20th
century:Savvy publishers understood that they needed to have
their journalism appear neutral and unbiased, notions entirely foreign
to the journalism of the era of the Founding Fathers, or their
businesses would be far less profitable. (McChesney, in Kristina
Borjesson, ed., Into The Buzzsaw - Leading Journalists Expose The Myth
Of A Free Press, Prometheus Books, 2002, p.367)Wealthy owners
could thereby claim that editors and reporters were freed from external
influence by trained, professional judgement. This allowed the
corporate media monopoly to be presented as a æ‰eutral?service to
democracy. The claim, McChesney notes, was entirely bogus.By contrast, Davies endlessly reiterates his faith in the essential neutrality of his profession:æ‘f
the primary purpose of journalism is to tell the truth, then it follows
that the primary function of journalists must be to check and to reject
whatever is not true.?(p.51)We can perhaps imagine a critical
military officer observing: æ‘f the primary purpose of an army is
national defence, then…?This is the view of a professional divorced
from the political reality out of which he and his army has emerged.
Imagine, after all, if the military officer were speaking of the German
Wehrmacht in 1939, or of the Soviet Red Army. Imagine if Davies were a
Soviet journalist.Davies reassures us that there is more than
just æ·hurnalism? æƒt is possible that as much as 20% of Fleet
Street work is still being produced entirely by independent
journalists? (p.95)But how is a corporate employee in any sense æƒndependent?Davies
writes: he evidence I found in researching my new book, Flat Earth
News, suggests our tendency to recycle ignorance is far worse than it
was? (Guardian, op., cit)This na飗e idea that the corporate
media merely æ‘ecycle ignorance?goes to the heart of Davies
analysis. We sent Noam Chomsky a link to Davies Guardian article.
Chomsky responded:æ“udging by the article, which is all I’ve
seen, his inquiry into the media is complementary to ours. He’s writing
about how local stories about children’s squabbles are insufficiently
sourced. We are investigating systematic bias in selecting and framing
news and opinion, and tracing it to its institutional source. For
the story about the children, insiders’ reports are appropriate. For
inquiry into any of the topics that Ed [Herman] and I discussed in MC
[Manufacturing Consent], or elsewhere jointly or separately, it’s at
most worth some footnotes. On the WMD, there’s no disagreement about
what happened, and essentially nothing to unearth. The media
uncritically accepted government propaganda, with some scattered
exceptions. Furthermore, as we’ve shown, that’s routine. It’s not a
matter of a endency to recycle ignorance,?transparently. If that
were so, we’d expect reliance on the state to be randomly interspersed
among cases of reliance on its enemies and independent sources. I don’t
think anyone with a gray cell functioning would claim that. And if they
did, it would be very quickly refuted.æo I don’t really see
any conflict. Just different topics. And it is not in the least
surprising that this is the kind of critique that the media and
intellectuals would be happy to discuss, praise, or denounce, because
it leaves untouched their systematic behavior and the institutional
reasons for it. I’d have expected the same in the old Soviet Union.Noam?(Email to Media Lens, February 17, 2008)Give Them What They Want? 6-10Davies
focus on the relative innocence of corporate profit-making leads him to
even greater extremes in his second five æœules of production? We are
asked to believe that newspapers are motivated to maximise profits by
succeeding in a competition to give readers what they want. Again,
there is no mention here of the direct and indirect influence of
advertising. Davies summary of how his rules æ»it neatly into the new
structure of corporate news organisations?again presents the media as
an ideologically neutral bystander just trying to make a buck: æ“ournalists
who are denied the time to work effectively can survive by taking the
easy, sexy stories which everybody else is running; reducing them to
simplified events; framing them with safe ideas and safe facts;
neutralising them with balance; and churning them out fast.?(p.147)Nevertheless, there is hope:here
are still reporters who have the time to do their work effectively, and
it is still possible to break the rules of production.?(p.149)But
it is almost impossible to break the rules of production because the
entire system is the result of an ongoing struggle to organise society
in a way that favours powerful interests. It is not enough for
reporters to have the time. These are reporters like Davies who have
succeeded precisely +because+ they do not fundamentally challenge the
system. And this is why Davies book has been so eagerly
embraced by the corporate media it claims to expose. He is willing to
expose failings in the media system - including the rotten apples at
the Observer - but he is not willing to expose the fundamental
corruption of a corporate media system operating within corporate
capitalist society. As an answer to the question of hat is
to be done??Davies has nothing serious to offer: an æƒmaginary world?
in which a parallel news organisation would monitor global press
honesty; Annual Flat Earth News awards; and an initiative to æ»orce
media owners to provide decent levels of staffing; resurrect the
network of front-line reporters which once covered the country and
indeed the globe…? (p.393) Davies notes that, according to
a recently retired officer, MI6 runs an intelligence section which has
particularly close links to the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph
and the Financial Times. (p.231) The former UN arms inspector, Scott
Ritter, reports MI6 propaganda specialists declaring that they could
spread their material through æºditors and writers who work with us
from time to time? (p.231)If the media, and Davies, were
serious about putting an end to Flat Earth News, they would surely
begin with suggestions for identifying and stamping out this kind of
crude corruption. ConclusionDavies underlying
message is an old one and it all but guarantees a sense of
hopelessness. It is, to borrow the words of PR guru Walter Lippmmann,
that the important work of media analysis and reform is the domain of
the responsible men, who must live free of the trampling and the
roar of a bewildered herd. This is the general public, the ignorant
and meddlesome outsiders whose function is to be spectators, not
articipants?Flat
Earth News invites us to focus on staffing levels, on a lack of
journalistic time and resources. It invites us to tinker at the edges
of a system which in fact is rotten to the core. Or rather it invites
æƒnsiders?to address these issues. But authentic reform of
hierarchical, exploitative social systems - of which the corporate mass
media is a classic example - has only ever been achieved by democratic
pressure from outside.Perhaps in years to come, Flat Earth News
will be seen as part of the corporate media response to the growing
clamour from internet-based eddlesome outsiders? With increasing
effectiveness, these are demanding that anyone with compassion for
suffering, anyone required to witness the appalling impact of corporate
media bias, +is+, in fact, an æƒnsider? SUGGESTED ACTION The
goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect
for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to
maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone. Write to: Nick DaviesEmail: mail@nickdavies.netWrite to: Tim LuckhurstEmail: T.Luckhurst@kent.ac.uk Writ to Mary RiddellEmail: mary.riddell@observer.co.ukPlease send a copy of your emails to us Email: editor@medialens.org Please do NOT reply to the email address from which this media alert originated. Please instead email us: Email: editor@medialens.org This media alert will shortly be archived here: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/080305_flat_earth_news.php The
Media Lens book æ…“uardians of Power: The Myth Of The Liberal Media?by
David Edwards and David Cromwell (Pluto Books, London) was published in
2006. See here: http://www.medialens.org/bookshop/guardians_of_power.php Please consider donating to Media Lens: http://www.medialens.org/donate Please visit the Media Lens website:
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