Analysis of Rosen interview
Analysis
Open-source project: The Echo Chamber
Interview: New York University Journalism Professor Jay Rosen
Running themes [tags]: 1. Perceptions of the danger Iraq posed to the U.S. and the Middle East. [danger]; 2. The voice of debate: who was covered; who was ignored. [voice]; 3. Motives of political and journalistic actors as portrayed by those actors. [motive]; 4. Arguments for war as given and portrayed. [argument]; 5. Journalistic practice in regard to covering political and journalistic actors. [practice]; 6. Relationship between the public and television news. [public/TV]
Rosen will provide the project with a cogent look at journalistic behavior from an academic perspective. As the interview shows, Rosen rejects certain professional beliefs--myths really--that he refers to as "press think" on his weblog of the same name.
Rosen is skilled at boiling down difficult ideas into effective bits of reasonable discourse. I'm trying my best to avoid the term "sound bite" here because Rosen does not speak in such a manner. That makes his contribution valuable yet difficult. How will the final product do justice to some of his more interesting and important insights?
For the most part, Rosen's interview touches on three of the themes I'm following so far: #4 and #5 to a large extent and #2 to a lesser extent. I want to consider first an extended period from late in the interview that is particularly interesting in terms of the relationship between the public and television news. [This relationship constitutes a sixth theme.] This portion of the interview also offers theoretical challenge to one of the foundational premises of the Echo Chamber Project. The project contends that the networks and cable news did a poor job of covering the build up to war with Iraq. A foundational premise (unstated) is that information learned from television news has an impact on what people understand about the situation. What if that premise is false? Or, rather, what if we don't understand the nature of the impact implicit in the premise?
I am not suggesting that it is false. What I see in the following exchange isn't a problem for the project but an interesting opportunity to consider what role television news actually plays in civic debates as important as the question of war. Is televison's impact informational? Or is it emotional? Or something else or something in between? Did television coverage convince us to go to war, or, more likely I think, did it help us feel our way to war by creating an emotional inevitability? I would identify this as the same inevitability Bill Plante felt.
Here is an extended quote including [tags]:
ECP: Can you talk a little bit about television news -- from standpoint of the role of imagery? And how many people get their news from television news versus newspapers, in the sense of how influential the television news is.
ROSEN: Well, television news has been seen in surveys and studies for a long time as 'the place most Americans get their news.' I'm not sure I really know what that means. Since the amount of information in a typical newscast is actually pretty small. When it's said that people get their news from television, it almost sounds like as if 'This is where people get their vitamin B1 or get their iron every day.' As if it's a fixed amount of news and 'You have to get it here or you get it there, and most people get it from television.' That doesn't seem to make much sense to me. So television as a news medium is really this sort of strange hybrid of facts delivered and new information that's come out -- [practice] Along with a great deal of material that serves merely to authenticate that information, like the correspondent standing in front of the White House to show that he's actually at the White House. That isn't really information. It's there to prove that this person is there. And of course, we've known for a long time that the weakness and the strength of television news is imagery, but that imagery can be concocted or arranged for the cameras. And TV news is also uniquely about the people who give it to us [practice] [public/TV] -- So when somebody sits down to watch the World News Tonight on ABC, most of the time they're thinking to themselves, "I'm gonna watch Peter Jennings" not "The World News on ABC," because the connection people make with television news is with a person. This is not so if one is absorbing news from a newspaper or magazine. To some degree, it might be so in radio because of the power of the voice. People say, "I like the voice of Bob Edwards" or "I like Cokie Roberts." So we've learned how to inform ourselves this way, [practice] but the only strength that television has as a news medium -- besides being able to present video of something that happened -- is when it's live -- that's when television news can be really powerful. When something is happening now, and you're finding out about it in real time. As a news medium for kind of recapping the day or for explaining complicated things that go on in the world, television news is pitifully adequate and always has been. [practice] [public/TV] And so -- It's also subject uniquely so to manipulation. But -- We've kind of created this system that has different avenues into news, and we tend to compare them -- when actually, they're extremely different worlds altogether. I'm not sure that watching a half an hour of television news is really analogous at all to absorbing an account in a newspaper. They seem to be about the same things. They're really extremely different experiences. And TV, because it's so -- up to now -- technology-heavy, and it's expensive, and requires a great deal of planning and coordination -- tends to be dependent much more on systems and officials and institutions and cooperation because of the nature of the medium.
ECP: If you were talking to someone who only watched, let's say, NBC News or ABC World News Tonight as their only news information source -- What advice would you give them?
ROSEN: Well Walter Cronkite said this like thirty years ago, that if you're just watching a half hour of news you can't possibly be informed about the world, but everybody knows that. And yet people don't just find out about the world through a half-an-hour news program. Even if that's the only professional news operation they come in contact with. They hear news from other people. The most trusted source of news for any American is actually somebody you know who tells you about it. So I think there are lots of ways to be informed about the world, and it's a little bit difficult to look at audience studies and ratings and reason backwards from that to what people know. I think that's an error. People do that a lot -- They look at what's on television, and they look at the audience studies and say, "Well, people seem to be relying on that." And they say, "Well, that's what people must know." But people aren't that simple, and they know more than that. And sometimes their own convictions outweigh the information that they're presented with. So it's a very complex picture. And because it's so hard to know -- "How do people get a sense of the outer world? How much do they know about issues? Or where do they come to their conclusions?" It's really a very difficult thing to know. But there's such a demand to understand it that all kinds of crackpot theories and crackpot claims get accepted all the time. [public/TV] So I don't really know what's going on between an American citizen and her television set in that kind of alchemy that happens. It's a very hard thing to understand -- it's not accessible to us. We see the results -- We know how people vote. Or we might know that they're aware of this or they're unaware of that. Or we can look at polls and see that public sentiment is shifting. But the transaction of building up a picture of the world through news accounts is very much inaccessible to us, and we don't really know what's going on. It's just that everyone has an incentive to say that they do. And that's how we get our audience studies and our ratings, and we say that 'Fox is pulling ahead of CNN.' And we think we understand what that means. But if our underlying concern is the American public and its understanding of the world and what it knows, that comes from lots of sources. And it's a bad idea to just focus on the performance of the news media. [public/TV]
While portions of this deal with #5, it's challenging to imagine how the project can make use of this material in the final product. But Rosen's thoughts should be taken into account, especially regarding citizen's emotional attachments to news anchors and the general emotional quality of news as presented on television. When Rosen discusses the difference between reading an account in print (which could include text on the internet) and watching an account on television, he's alluding in part to the differences articulated by the late Neil Postman in books such as Amusing Ourselves to Death and Building a Bridge to the 18th Century. Print is a medium of propositional content and television is a medium of emotional content. [Note: I know that I have over-simplified Rosen's position here. In fact, I've merely given my interpretation based on my knowing that he was a student of Postman's. I hope Rosen will comment on this analysis and make any necessary corrections or amplifications.]
Moving on, Rosen spends a great deal of time early in the interview addressing arguments for war and how journalists portray civic actors. Interestingly, Rosen does not seem to be invested in the master narrative of the inevitability of war as we saw in the analysis of the Plante interview. Early in the interview, Rosen demonstrates his academic detachment from the passions of inevitability:
[argument] [practice] There was not the kind of vigorous debate you would hope for in a democracy. And there are a lot of reasons for that. Part of it was that Congress didn't really put up much resistance to the war. The President was very popular. There was still a lot of fear and concern about terrorism in the world. And, for the most part, their coverage of this situation reflected that. And there were some questions asked, but not enough. And the Bush administration, by giving certain reasons for what it was doing, threw the benefit of the doubt toward itself because of all this alarm and concern in the country. So in some ways the press reflected the political system, which didn't muster a full debate at that time. It's extremely difficult for journalists to create a debate when other institutions aren't necessarily doing their jobs. [argument] [practice]
Notice that he reduces WMDs to "certain reasons." What Rosen highlights here is not the emotion of inevitability (and the master narrative it helps create), which I have no doubt many journalists felt. He highlights the structure of journalistic practice in relation to public institutions. That the debate didn't materialize in government made it more difficult for it to materialize in the press.
Why does the press reflect the political system? My answer to that may be found here. I assert that the press has a status quo bias: "The news media believe 'the system works.' ... The mainstream news media never question the structure of the political system. The American way is the only way, politically and socially. In fact, the American way is news. The press spends vast amounts of time in unquestioning coverage of the process of political campaigns (but less so on the process of governance). This bias ensures that alternate points of view about how government might run and what government might do are effectively ignored."
Following directly, Rosen echoes Plante at the end of this answer saying: [voice] "So that's pretty much what we saw. Despite the fact that it was known that there were protests, and there were people who were immediately against the war. But it wasn't taken all that seriously until much later when the reasons for the war came under scrutiny." [voice]
I'm still in the early stages of analysis, but I'll posit this for the moment, and we can test it against the other interviews: Claim: The press experienced the emotion of inevitability in regard to the build-up to war because of its structural inability create a debate independent from civic institutions (e.g. Congress) and powerful civic actors (e.g. President Bush).
Another interesting observation regarding themes #4 and #5 is Rosen's assertion that [practice] [voice] "journalists have a weakness for real politick attitudes and a sensibility that regards things such as international law and the UN as nice, but perhaps not the way the world really works. And if anything, it's that conviction of theirs that leads them sometimes to be taken in. Perhaps the greatest problem was that the Bush administration had a kind of contempt, I think, for reason-giving and for explanation. And that ended up working its way into the press coverage as well. And by and large the US press couldn't quite conceive that a case built for the war so profoundly -- a single claim of weapons of mass destruction -- could be all wrong. I mean, nobody imagined that. -- It wasn't really in their list of possibilities." [practice] [voice]
"Real politick" is politics based on practical rather than moral or ideological considerations. It sometimes identifies the down-and-dirty wrangling of politics divorced from theory. It's the common-sense experience of how things really (appear) to work. [Note: All common-sense notions deserve scrutiny.] Rosen identifies a particularly important weakness in modern press coverage. Institutions such as the U.N. or international law are moral constructs more than political constructs (the difference between asserting something "good" and being able to make it happen). Several structural biases of journalism play a role here. The status quo bias certainly. But the narrative bias also plays an important role as does the bad news bias. Journalism as a professional practice in structured to see situations as conflicts (drama) among people more than as conflicts of moral and/or ideological constructs. That the actions of the U.S. might upset the dictates of international law is far less dramatic than, say, an argument about WMDs delivered to the U.N. by Colin Powell. The emotional images of Powell holding up a vile of chemical agent trumps any (necessarily) long-winded explanation of why a war might not meet the dictates of international law. Claim: The television press is structurally incapable of relaying information about conflicts that do not arise in contentions between and among people.
In several places in the interview, Rosen makes it plain that the press is dependent upon "authorized knowers" for much of the news it relays--a large contributing factor to the status quo bias (discussion of this epistemology here). And that is especially so in regard to situations in which it is impossible for the press to independently verify the facts. That the press is dependent upon "authorized knowers" is a simple fact of journalistic practice. When I consider this fact, the status quo bias of journalism, the emotional portrayal of events demanded by the medium of television, and Rosen's contention that it is difficult for the press to create a debate independent of civic institutions, I am led to this question: Was any other type of coverage of the build-up to war even possible in our current cultural context?
At the moment, it appears to me that the Rosen interview will be particularly useful as a critique (and even a corrective) to expressions of journalistic experience in regard to covering the build-up to war. And he has much to say about the public's experience with news as presented on television.
Beyond WMD
Submitted by kentbye on Thu, 2005-05-26 11:25.
Sven writes that the President:
- concluded that Iraq's a threat, then the media and public are irrelevant. The press' job is simply to report the progress, and the public's job is simply to watch the process unfold.
I disagree. As Ronald Reagan says, "Trust, but verify."
It reminds me of the moral dilemma that Rosen's writes about in his Abyss of Observation Alone essay -- Should journalists be stenographers without any moral sensibilities or should they actively participate in the civic process by asking challenging questions?
Rosen also points out that going to war wasn't designed to be the decision of one person,
- Basically since World War II, we haven't had a declaration of war. The constitution hasn't worked the way it's supposed to -- where it's the United States Congress that finally approves such a mission.
I also think that it's too narrow to only focus on the WMD issue.
To me a larger and clearer issue that the media should have investigated before the war was the Bush administration's alleged authority to invade and topple Iraq's government.
The US claimed that it was enforcing UN resolutions under the umbrella of authorization from previous resolutions. This is analogous to a state court prosecuting a federal case -- it's beyond their jurisdiction. Just the same, only the United Nations Security Council has the right to enforce UNSC resolutions -- the US doesn't have this right.
So even though the US insinuated to the domestic US population that the Iraq war was for self-defense, in the halls of the UN the US was claiming that UNSC resolutions from 1990 and 1991 had already authorized war.
In order to keep the UN relevant, the US had to violate the UN charter in order to enforce UNSC resolutions.
Needless to say, this was a strained legal theory that had plenty of dissent from other countries. But the US media didn't cover these types of debates that were happening in the halls of the UN because the Democrats were silent on the issue, the war was inevitable, and as Dr. Cline says:
- The television press is structurally incapable of relaying information about conflicts that do not arise in contentions between and among people.
War Powers
Submitted by Sisyphus on Fri, 2005-05-27 16:03.
Kent: "Rosen also points out that going to war wasn't designed to be the decision of one person ..."
I think you have to be careful on how you represent this, especially in the case of Iraq. I would recommend the following:
Use of Force
Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798 - 2004
Public Law 107-243
Concerning Iraq and UN resolutions, I would recommend the following:
The United Nations, International Law and the War in Iraq
I would also ask you to consider that in the first Gulf War, the UNSC didn't authorize war or the use of force, but "all necessary means" and the war wasn't fought as a UN operation but as an American led coalition cooperating with Kuwait. The cease-fire between Iraq, Kuwait and the Member States cooperating with Kuwait (formalized in UNSCR 687) had also been a point of contention for the use-of-force previously, specifically in enforcing the no-fly zones by the US, UK and France from 1991-2003 (France quit in 1996) and Operation Desert Strike (1996) and Operation Desert Fox (1998).
I would argue that the US media did cover these types of debates.
More on War Powers & UN Resolutions
Submitted by kentbye on Fri, 2005-05-27 16:49.
Sisyphus,
I'll admit that I still don't have a clear idea for how International Law fits into US domestic law and relative to the War Powers act.
The US has domestic law, but it also fits into a larger International Law framework depending on the individual treaties that we've signed.
Phyllis Bennis told us that International Law becomes a part of US domestic law when it's ratified by the Congress. This would imply a domestic obligation to follow the UN charter. Bennis was a journalist who covered the UN.
Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media strongly disagreed -- He was insistent that the War Powers act was enough. Kincaid also covered the UN as the journalist.
Neither Kincaid or Bennis are Constitutional experts. I interviewed Hugh Hewitt for like 8 minutes and I didn't have time to ask him about the Constitutional aspects of the Iraq situation. I still have some unanswered questions that will become more clear as I get more of the transcripts posted.
By the way, none of this level of detail will probably ever make it into the final cut of the film, but there are important distinctions that need to be clarified and important conversations to be had.
I don't consider the article you pointed to from World Press Review to be an authoritative accounting for what the US position at the United Nations actually was.
John Negroponte sent a letter to the UN on March 20th laying out what I was talking about above with the so-called revival theory of 678 & 687.
This is the most authoritative Public Document I've found that lays out the US legal case.
Ruth Wedgwood refused to give us a definitive US legal theory. She basically said that there probably wasn't a detailed legal theory ever written at the State Department. This struck me as odd. It seemed like she was afraid to go on the record saying that the official US theory was the "revival theory."
Wedgwood did say that it was NOT a pre-emptive war as many progressives mistakenly call it. She refused to say that the Iraq war was for self-defense. Cliff May also hesitated when asked if the war was for self-defense.
The British Attorney General also refused to write an extensive legal briefing. He testified about it, but he never wrote it down (at least the UK says he didn't). It's been reported that Lord Goldsmith changed his mind about whether or not the US' revival theory held water, and there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that he was politically pressured to support the "revival theory" when he was privately advising Blair to start getting a legal defense for the being tried for war crimes.
Anyway, it'll be easier to discuss when all of the interviews that I did have been transcribed and posted. Sean Murphy is an international lawyer and he has quite a critique of the US legal position in our interview with him.
- Sisyphus: I would argue that the US media did cover these types of debates.
The US media still thinks of this war as a pre-emptive war -- as evidenced by a number of the journalists that I interviewed. The US media completely ignored the legal case that was presented as the UN, because it was irrelevant. War was inevitable, and the UN was only a political story as to how many allies the US could get for the war.
When 1441 was passed on November 8th, 2002, PBS reported that Negroponte had assured that 1441 had "no automaticity" and "no hidden triggers" but ABC, CBS and NBC did not.
After the 8th of November -- even for PBS -- it was as if Negroponte had never spoken these words. I couldn't find a journalist who could accurately explain to me what the meaning of Negroponte's assurances actually meant.
And in the end, what Negroponte meant was that there is hidden triggers in 1441 because, 'We claim to already have authority to invade Iraq and topple their government because 687's ceasefire agreement is 'suspended' and somehow continues the war authorization in 678.'
You can read Murphy's reaction to this here.
War Powers, International and Domestic Law
Submitted by Sisyphus on Fri, 2005-05-27 22:01.
I agree on the Negroponte letter as the "most" authoritative public document of the Bush administration position. The WPR article was not offered as authoritative.
The only other public statement I could add to Negroponte's is Taft's as further documentation.
That's a good interview with Murphy. It was very interesting to contrast his position on armistice/peace agreement in Iraq and the international acceptance of "very low-level uses of force against Iraq" throughout the 90s (proportionality). It would be interesting to hear his thoughts on Bosnia/Serbia in 1999.
UN Details and FOIA
Submitted by kentbye on Mon, 2005-05-30 09:04.
Wow Sisyphus,
I'm impressed that you took the time to read through the Murphy interview and was able to pick up his main points about armistice/peace agreement in Iraq & his points about proportionality.
Whether or not I can edit together a short film to convey the same points is another question. I may have to cut it together and post it online and as a DVD extra since it's probably too dense for the final cut.
I took some of my interviewees off guard by defying traditional media logic. Ruth Wedgwood and Phyllis Bennis told me that my viewers were never going to be able to understand some of this stuff -- they were both hesitant to answer some of my questions to the level of detail that I would've liked. You've proved both of them wrong.
I could've gone another hour with Murphy tracking down more info, but I knew that I had more than enough for my film.
I based a lot of my interview on Murphy's comprehensive paper called Assessing the Legality of Invading Iraq.
Wedgwood said that the US government probably didn't ever put together a defense of their legal position to the level of a paper like Murphy's. I'd be interested in testing this by submitting some Freedom of Information Act requests to the State Department. I'd be curious to see what else the US was basing their revival theory upon.
Limts of Cultural Context?
Submitted by kentbye on Wed, 2005-05-25 14:59.
- acline -- Was any other type of coverage of the build-up to war even possible in our current cultural context?
- The problem for our press is that, whenever possible, it wants to avoid making a political judgment.
If it isn't, then we need to change our culture.
But I would argue that it is possible for the press to create a debate independent of civic institutions because this type of coverage did exist within the print and radio mediums.
Jonathan Landay & Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder did some
hard-hitting investigative journalism before the war.
Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher also had a lot of skeptical pieces published before the war.
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now uses a different paradigm of advocacy journalism that's based upon a more progressive cultural context. Their show had tons of skeptical coverage day in and day out. Their coverage is certainly slanted to the left, but I also believe that a lot of their coverage stands the test of time.
There was also a lot of intreprid reporting from Robert Dreyfuss, Jim Lobe, John MacArthur and Julian Borger (UK) who were all outside the economic influences and bubble of power of the mainstream media .
We tried to interview as many of these types of skeptical journalists as possible.
So I think that it was certainly possible to dig deep into the case presented for the war and serve more as an opposition party would.
Rosen makes a great point when he says:
This is partly due to the fear from claims of political bias from both sides. I also think that the "He Said / She Said" objectivity standard does more to protect the liability of the corporations than it does to serve the public interest of our democracy.
I also think that there needs to be more sophisticated analytical tools for journalists to be able to gather enough convincing evidence in order to make these types of political judgments.
The PIPA study
Submitted by Sven on Wed, 2005-05-25 13:43.
Thanks for the analysis. Very thought provoking. I'm wondering how Jay's comments square with PIPA's study (available as a PDF at pipa.org) on the media and misperceptions related to Iraq, which posits that Fox viewers were misinformed about key facts more than public broadcasting viewers and listeners(it also indicates that those who get their news primarily from PBS/NPR were better informed than those who relied mostly on newspapers). The study also claims that viewership is a stronger indicator than other factors like demographics or political disposition:
"Variations in misperceptions according to news source cannot simply be explained as a result of differences in the characteristics of each audience. It is true that some audiences vary according to such demographics as party identification and education—Fox viewers are more Republican, PBS-NPR is higher in education and less Republican, print readers are more educated, and CBS is less educated and more Democratic. It is also true that Republicans and those with lower education are more likely to have misperceptions. However, controlling for these demographic differences by examining the variations in misperception within demographic groups reveals persisting variations in the level of misperceptions according to news source..."
I have caution with PIPA's study
Submitted by kentbye on Wed, 2005-05-25 14:25.
Welcome Sven.
I had a number of interviewees mention the PIPA study, and while I think that their data are interesting, I'm not so sure how conclusive it really is.
I tend to agree with Rosen when he says:
- And yet people don't just find out about the world through a half-an-hour news program. Even if that's the only professional news operation they come in contact with. They hear news from other people. The most trusted source of news for any American is actually somebody you know who tells you about it.
Just taking the Fox-viewing demographic, then I wonder how much news online they were reading from RealClearPolitics.com, Townhall.com or DrudgeReport.com? -- Or how much there were influenced by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or Huge Hewitt?
Or if they weren't directly, then what about the people they come in contact with?
If you move away from your own personal media consumption and look at what's feeding into one or two degrees away from your network of friends, family and associates, then I think you'll discover a pretty interconnected web of media connections all stemming back up to our Political Institutions.
I do think it's really difficult to pinpoint the origin of knowledge based upon a number of questions PIPA's poll.
Passive listening doesn't correlate 1:1 to knowledge transmitted and knowledge gained.
I think PIPA is trying to reduce the uncertainty between what was happening with this inherently qualitative process, but it's really difficult to do with just quantitative methods.
What I find interesting about Rosen's comment is that the most trusted source of information is "somebody you know who tells you about it."
I think the political blogosphere has set up a trusted network of news divided sharply by partisan ideology.
I think that being trapped inside of a closed paradigm of a "Daily Me" diet of news consumption will have more of an effect an these types of perception gaps that PIPA was trying to isolate.
I think your excerpt is on to something -- maybe the chosen primary news source is more of an indicator of a certain value system than it is of how that news organization influence perception.
Challenging Premises & Bankrupt Two-Party System
Submitted by kentbye on Wed, 2005-05-25 13:34.
- acline -- This portion of the interview also offers theoretical challenge to one of the foundational premises of the Echo Chamber Project. The project contends that the networks and cable news did a poor job of covering the build up to war with Iraq.
When I give the short ECP elevator pitch to anti-war progressives, I usually claim that the press became an uncritical Echo Chamber to the Countdown towards the War in Iraq.
When I give a short elevator pitch to conservatives, journalists, or someone whom I don't know their perspective on the war, then I usually say that the press became an uncritical Echo Chamber to the Executive Branch after the Congressional authorization for military intervention passed in October.
Sometimes I go on to say that the press ignored evidence presented by the IAEA that contradicted the Bush Administration's claims on Nuclear Weapons, as well as more cautionary and skeptical perspectives coming from other countries -- especially members of the United Nations Security Council.
I still think that there is a lot of evidence to support these contentions.
- A foundational premise (unstated) is that information learned from television news has an impact on what people understand about the situation. What if that premise is false? Or, rather, what if we don't understand the nature of the impact implicit in the premise?
I do agree that the premise of how television media affects both consciousness, worldviews, private opinion and public opinion is really hard to determine.
I don't have a lot of evidence to make these types of connections. I'm haven't found anyone who really has, and I agree with Rosen when he says:
- But the transaction of building up a picture of the world through news accounts is very much inaccessible to us, and we don't really know what's going on. It's just that everyone has an incentive to say that they do.
However, one connection that I do see that is easier to connect dots between is how the media logic of television news drives the communications strategy of the Executive Branch.
Claim: If the level of complexity for a topic is too rich and dense for it to be covered by the television reporters, then the Executive Branch takes this freedom to make up just about any wild claim that it wants to .
This is a real politik situation where politicians are depending on the television reporters to not be interested in "boring details." And as long as these boring details don't appear on the front page of the New York Times or Washington Post, then I think that the Bush Administration sees this as a green light to pretty much say whatever they want to.
This phenomenon isn't just isolated to the Bush Administration and Republicans -- the Clinton Administration and Democrats play these types of PR games as well.
I think that the moral bankruptcy of the American two-party political system is driving so many of the issues with the press' credibility.
As Andy said:
- The mainstream news media never question the structure of the political system. The American way is the only way, politically and socially. In fact, the American way is news.
The American press never does questions the monopoly of ideology shared by the two-party system -- both parties are so power hungry that don't seem willing to ever want to loosen their grip on the political process. If they did loosen up the electoral laws with Instant Run-Off voting, then it could bring in more competition from Green Progressives and Libertarian Conservatives in places where the opposition isn't currently pushing.
Having multiple parties would serve the Long-Tail of niche worldviews and communities, and it introduce more competition to the free market of ideas. There are so many huge issues that are suffering from theoretical stagnation because both the Democrats and Republicans have agreed that those topics doesn't win electoral votes during the election season.
Having multiple political parties would also give institutional voice to those progressive and libertarian perspectives that aren't currently being heard on the mainstream media.
Andy asks a great question:
- Did television coverage convince us to go to war, or, more likely I think, did it help us feel our way to war by creating an emotional inevitability?
It was the Bush Administration and the Executive Branch who were driving the news cycle. They did more to create this state of inevitability than the media.
The thing that I find amazing is that many of the journalists KNEW what was happening. They saw everything that I was seeing, but were feckless in reporting it. Partly because of the objectivity standards where the Democrats were silent.
But it's also because the media cared more about WHEN the war was going to start more than asking the big questions of WHY or where the real evidence was.
A number of interviewees also told me that the press was more concerned with planning for how the embedding process than it was with covering the UN deliberations.
Incorporating Rosen's Anti-Soundbite Nature
Submitted by kentbye on Wed, 2005-05-25 12:42.
- acline -- I'm trying my best to avoid the term "sound bite" here because Rosen does not speak in such a manner. That makes his contribution valuable yet difficult. How will the final product do justice to some of his more interesting and important insights?
Well, the final film probably won't do full justice to all of Rosen's insights. I can't fit all 60 minutes of insights into a 90 minute film -- especially trying to condense the best of 41 other hours of insights.
This is part of the reason why I'm deciding to open source these interviews -- I think that Rosen brings up a lot of complex and nuanced points that deserve to be discussed more at length. Hopefully the Drupal infrastructure of this site can help facilitate these types of discussions.
But Rosen's insights are too dense for the fast-paced and short-attention span world of TV news. He defies the traditional media logic.
I'm very interested in ways of using the Internet to facilitate these types of Long-Tail discussions that have been cut short by the limited space and time of on air newscasts.
Will any of Rosen's "sound bites" make the final cut? I'm pretty certain that a number of them will -- although at this point it's really hard to tell as the film is still very early in the post-production process.
Press Always Echoes Political Institutions
Submitted by kentbye on Wed, 2005-05-25 12:27.
Andy,
Wow -- I think you're hitting some nails right on the head here.
Lots to digest.
I'm going to post some short comments responding to what jumps out at me.
- acline -- Claim: The press experienced the emotion of inevitability in regard to the build-up to war because of its structural inability create a debate independent from civic institutions (e.g. Congress) and powerful civic actors (e.g. President Bush).
BINGO! I saw this theme repeated over and over and over again throughout many interviews with journalists. In fact, Lawrence Grossman explicitly said that the press is and always has been an echo chamber to official thought.
The question becomes -- What if the press knows that a political party is lying or telling a half-truth, AND the opposition party becomes complicit in that partial or outright lie?
Well, it seems that without that institutional opposition, then the press lays over. They don't think that they can serve as an opposition party, and they do believe that the system works. They're not there to rock the boat unless it's being rocked from inside the Halls of Congress.
Of course, this doesn't mean that this is always the case whenever there is a political consensus in Congress , but it definitely seemed to happen during the build-up to the war in Iraq -- especially after Congress voted on October 10th & 11th. From that point on, the broadcast television media served as an uncritical Echo Chamber to nearly any claim that was coming from the Executive Branch.
Time's Arrow
Submitted by Sisyphus on Wed, 2005-05-25 15:18.
The "inevitability" of war with Iraq has a 15 year narrative in both official thought (including party think tanks) and the press. Your documentary is a relatively short 8 month (Sep 2002 - March 2003) snapshot.
I think this is an interesting component because it contrasts with the "short memory/attention span" meme. It also provides a context where war opponents were going against a conventional wisdom (mental map) that was well-rooted in the population, officialdom and media.
This long-standing narrative contributed to the inevitability. GHW Bush, Clinton and GW Bush argued for war against Iraq (Clinton in Feb 1998 and then Desert Fox later that year). Many of the opposition "official" voices for this war were "boxed in" because they previously had been hawks (Republicans under Bush and Democrats under Clinton).
Also, I think that Blix was hesitant to voice strong opposition based on his earlier IAEA experience with Iraq hiding it's pre-war nuclear program, his "I'm just an observer not a decision-maker" approach, and never stating that he had Iraq's full cooperation.
The military buildup during the time also led to a "countdown" narrative enforcing that another 12 year inspection period was not considered an acceptable conclusion.
Re: Time's Arrow
Submitted by kentbye on Wed, 2005-05-25 15:57.
Sisyphus,
I'm really glad you're participating because I think that you have a lot of good insights.
It is really difficult to narrow down this huge foreign policy topic down to this eight-month time period.
And even though I tried to fit the scope of my interviews and historical context into this tiny box, I was unsuccessful. Wedgwood, May & Donnelly as well as many, many other interviewees talked about the Iraq policy prior to late August 2002.
How much of it will fit into the final film is hard to say. I hope to make and post some short video vignettes of pertinent topics online as time permits.
I'm shooting for a 90-minute film, and I decided to make the film more about the press performance during this time period more than the political aspects -- apsects that do go back many decades to even Reagan & the pro-Iraq/anti-Iranian US tilt.
I actually don't think that the US should've gone to war in Iraq regardless of what Clinton did with Desert Fox or what past President's have said about Iraq.
I believe that the bottom line is that the communications technologies can do way more to promote democracy and freedom around the world than military intervention.
I don't think we've seen the endgame for how many-to-many communication tools like blogs can be used for personal expression in repressive societies -- and the cultural and political impact that this can have.
I interviewed Hoder at Personal Democracy Forum, and he said that the blogs in Iran are starting to change the culture by giving people the freedom to talk about taboo subjects. The bottleneck seems to be prolific Internet access and access to Proxy IPs to shield identity.
Ben Walker at SXSW talked about how most of the censorship in China comes from self-censorship.
Once the Internet is integrated into the economy of China and other repressive dictatorships at a no-turning back point, then the cultural taboos of self-censorship can be overcome by a critical mass of bloggers who make a collective decision to express themselves. Democracy will emerge from that. We don't need war and violence -- our toolkit is expanding.
But our toolkit hasn't finished expanding yet, and so it wasn't a viable alternative to military intervention in Iraq. But does this really mean that our only option was to go to war in Iraq? A lot of pro-liberation folks believe this, but I think it's shortsited and suffers from a lack of imagination.
Wouldn't you agree that tapping into the personal desires of the free market is better than what the military can do in terms of bringing democracy to the every country in the world?
To me the communications route seems to scale a lot better, and it'd probably be a lot cheaper than dumping $1+ billion a week into a mobilization.
Democracy emerges from the people. It doesn't come from gun point.
If the US really wants to promote democracy and freedom, then it should spend time investing in the communication infrastructures of these repressive societies in order to let people talk to each other.
Re: Time's Arrow
Submitted by Sisyphus on Wed, 2005-05-25 16:23.
Thank you for welcoming me, Kent.
The timeline context is not a criticism, and I don't think you should spend any time showing quotes from previous administrations/politicians. But I do think it would help contextually to get a feel for how ingrained preconceptions had become over time.
It also helps to define "the fringe" challenging narratives.
I'm an advocate of information (part of DIME).
I think that Western information and economy has spread democracy and culture.
One misconception that I would challenge is "Democracy emerges from the people. It doesn't come from gun point." It's a good sound bite, but not representative.
First, the point of a gun has most often been used to prevent Democracy and enforce Authoritarian, Totalitarian, ..., political systems.
The point of the gun can also be used to remove, and hold at bay, unDemocratic forces. Our Independance, our Democracy, was gained at the point of a gun.
The debate is over when, not that it "doesn't", and what's the correct balance.
For example, I consider the Clinton military interventions much more "pre-emptive" than the one in Iraq.
Incorporating Historical Context
Submitted by kentbye on Wed, 2005-05-25 16:53.
- Sisyphus: I don't think you should spend any time showing quotes from previous administrations/politicians. But I do think it would help contextually to get a feel for how ingrained preconceptions had become over time.
It also helps to define "the fringe" challenging narratives.
I do that this political history is important and gives more context to the challenging narratives.
We interviewed Joyce Battle on her take on the declassified historical record. It was really dense summary of a lot of stuff that I hadn't heard before.
We also got some interesting perspectives on the US reaction to Iraq's Human Rights in the early 90's from representatives of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Again, I think that this type of stuff will come out when the interviews are posted -- even if it doesn't make it into the film.
This site can help provide additional context, but I don't expect to do full justice in summarizing all of the US foreign policy history with Iraq. I'll leave that up to other writers of books.
Again, as far as guns go, I think that the emerging capabilities provided with these developing communications technologies will enable all sorts of non-violent alternatives to conflict resolution that have yet to be explored.
I hope to see the Diplomacy & Information aspect of DIME make the Military aspect more obsolete -- it may seem nieve, but as the economy becomes more and more interconnected, then our planet may be moving more towards a culture of symbiosis rather than hierarchical domination based upon the economy or military of a single nation.
This trend of cooperation will come from the free market and expansion of identity from ethnocentric values to worldcentric values rather than from governments.
RE: Incorporating Historical Context
Submitted by Sisyphus on Wed, 2005-05-25 17:23.
I don't think it's naive, or if it is, then I'm as naive as you (maybe moreso).
The context is important for two of your tags, [danger] and [argument]. I'm advocating for a consideration of what Rosen calls in his latest essay punctuation, which I consider part of Cline's narrative bias: "The point they're making involves the punctuation of events: when do you start the story, and what are the effects of beginning it where you do?" I'm wondering if you can alert the viewer to this efficiently.
Also, I would ask that you consider the study by Devon Largio as part of [argument]. The public debate dismissed many reasons for war.
Context & Tag onwership
Submitted by kentbye on Wed, 2005-05-25 17:44.
I hope to explore new ways of punctuating the context of this huge topic.
Rosen talked about how people start with the emotional passion of opinions and then go and research the facts -- as opposed to the traditional paradigm of facts -> analysis -> opinion.
I hope that tags can be used to explore the intersubjective context in a way that is really scalable.
FYI: The [danger] and [argument] tags are Dr. Cline's -- not mine.
Two things will hopefully make this more clear down the road:
- 1.) Drupal modules that allow del.icio.us-like tagging of soundbites that are searchable by authors.
2.) Pictures or Avatars next to blog posts and comments
I'm having trouble with the PHP security settings, and that's prevening pictures from being displayed at the moment.
Facts, or judgement?
Great discussion. I'd like to take a different tack and challenge one of the basic premises of this and other examinations of the subject (as well as my previous post) - that the decision to go to war rested on a weighing of evidence about WMD.
Framed in that context, the issue boils down to intelligence: what information about Iraq's WMD was available to the administration, the intelligence community, the media and the public. It's created an endless loop of finger-pointing about who knew what when.
It's also glossed over what I consider to be the more important issue: Who ultimately should make the judgement call on whether to go to war? I think this goes to the sense of "inevitablility" identified by Andy. If it's assumed the decision is primarily a matter of examining the intelligence, to which only the president has access (because he
"can't disclose sources and methods"), and it appears he's concluded that Iraq's a threat, then the media and public are irrelevant. The press' job is simply to report the progress, and the public's job is simply to watch the process unfold.
But looked at another way, the "facts" about WMD were essentially irrelevant to the decision, because intelligence can be interpreted to say whatever one wants to hear. The real decision was political (in the polis sense of the word): is a war in the nation's best interest?
There's a prediliction to believe that war being a democratic choice is a naive idea. I remember Slate's Fred Kaplan once preferencing a statement about war and democracy with "At the risk of sounding like a goo-goo..." But one can also view leaving the decision to the president as the "goo goo" idea, and the public deciding as "realpolitick."
I recently came across the following excerpt about the Fulbright hearings from Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly that sums up this perspective well:
“The issue of longest consequence, Executive war, was not formulated until after the hearings, in Fulbright’s preface to a published version. Acquiescence in Executive war, he wrote, comes from the belief that the government possesses secret information that gives it special insight in determining policy. Not only was this questionable, but major policy decisions turn ‘not upon available facts but upon judgment,’ with which policy-makers are no better endowed than the intelligent citizen. Congress and citizens can judge ‘whether the massive deployment and destruction of their men and wealth seem to serve the overall interests as a nation...’
“The belief that government knows best was voiced just at this time by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who said on resumption of the bombing, ‘We ought to all support the President. He is the man who has all the information and knowledge of what we are up against.’ This is a comforting assumption that relieves people from taking a stand. It is usually invalid, especially in foreign affairs. ‘Foreign policy decisions,’ concluded Gunnar Myrdal after two decades of study, ‘are in general much more influenced by irrational motives’ than are domestic ones."