1811 Duration: 16.08 seconds
Jim Lobe:
I mean, I’m not saying there is active censorship. Most of it exists on a self-censorship level, I believe. And people become used to censoring themselves and feeling the political winds and figuring out what they can get away with and what they cannot get away with.
1812 Duration: 10.34 seconds
Jim Lobe:
I mean, I’ll give you an example -- I don’t know how interesting it may be to you. But if you take -- Sorry --
1813 Duration: 33.03 seconds
Jim Lobe:
The fact that Knight Ridder -- which is on the 7th floor of this building -- was way, way ahead of the Times and the Post in terms of reporting on what was going on in the Pentagon, the way Cheney really was exercising a decisive influence within the administration -- the role of someone like Douglas Feith, who’d been really ignored by the Post and the Times for a long, long time.
1814 Duration: 19.89 seconds
Jim Lobe:
The fact that Knight Ridder was able to do this with a small investigative staff points out the difference between the court newspapers and regional newspapers -- or a chain that’s a little more independent of Washington kind of power circles.
1815 Duration: 38.37 seconds
Jim Lobe:
Because the same thing happened during the Iran-Contra period. Knight Ridder, whose team -- investigative team was then headed by a Mexican-born reporter, Alfonso Chardy, really had put the basic elements of Iran-Contra together long before the Times and the Post felt they could write about it on a consistent basis.Now, I’m sure that the Times and the Post had a lot of the information that Alfonso Chardy and his group had at the time. But it could not be put together because of the political framework in which the Times and the Post operate.
1816 Duration: 33.93 seconds
Echo Chamber Project:
And do you think part of that framework is maintaining access with the highest officials in government? Do you see an influence there -- that the people who are outside of that access realm have to scramble a little bit more? [I think a lot of it has to do with influence, but I think --] I’m sorry, when you say a lot of it -- what has to do with what? [Oh, sorry, yeah... They -- ]
1817 Duration: 4.64 seconds
Jim Lobe:
They work in a different political milieu.
1819 Duration: 23.56 seconds
Jim Lobe:
The prominence of the Post and the Times, and the way they set the news agenda for the rest of the mainstream media, puts them very much in the spotlight for the powers that be. Whereas Knight Ridder can scurry around the edges more and it doesn’t draw as much attention, and that gives them greater freedom.
1821 Duration: 8.78 seconds
Jim Lobe:
You take the Post and the Times and they’re almost kind of institutions, institutions in the way arguably that Congress is an institution.
1822 Duration: 20.29 seconds
Jim Lobe:
And I’m sure you’ve come across the writings of someone like Dan Hallin at the University of California in San Diego who did kind of the best analysis of the Vietnam war and the relationship of the media to a change in the views to that war and so on. And for him, I’m oversimplifying, but the idea was -- That --a
1823 Duration: 23.56 seconds
Jim Lobe:
The reporters look to other institutions for, in a sense, what is permissible to report and what is not -- particularly elite reporters. If it’s a matter of, say, foreign policy, the institution they look to -- for in a sense "permission" as to whether they can publish dissent -- is Congress and the opposition party in the Congress.
1824 Duration: 7.64 seconds
Jim Lobe:
And I think the question they raise -- though again not on a conscious level, I think it’s part of the censorship process -- is --
1825 Duration: 29.46 seconds
Jim Lobe:
"Is there a credible weight in the opposition party, a credible number of opposition party people who are raising these questions?" And if they find "Yes, there is," then they’ll begin dot connecting, and they can do that pretty efficiently. But if they find that there isn’t -- that the minority dissenting views in Congress are hardly heard -- the media will not go out on its own.
1826 Duration: 11.81 seconds
Jim Lobe:
The elite media, the real agenda-setters like the Post and the Times, won’t go out on its own and kind of plant the flag and say "Look what’s going on here -- this is awful."
1828 Duration: 14.08 seconds
Jim Lobe:
What’s funny is I think that Congress, people in Congress, often look to the press for a similar signal as to whether they can go forward and plant flags and say, "This is really bad."
1830 Duration: 14.25 seconds
Jim Lobe:
And at the level of the Times and the Post you really are talking about kind of an institutional self-conception that’s like that -- looking for other institutions to validate what is okay and what is not okay.
1831 Duration: 15.35 seconds
Echo Chamber Project:
And in the case of the war in Iraq after the resolution was passed in early October there was only a few dissenting viewpoints -- So do you see after that time period, since there wasn’t a lot of opposition, therefore that a lot of the press just followed suit?
1834 Duration: 14.28 seconds
Jim Lobe:
I’m citing Knight Ridder because it did the best and consistently the best job of really investigating what were the roots of this policy, and what was going on that was highly unusual in the policy making process
1835 Duration: 10.08 seconds
Echo Chamber Project:
[Uh -- Sorry, I lost the beginning of the sentence.] Yeah. Just kind of recap, after October -- [Yeah. I remember. Yeah --]
1836 Duration: 21.15 seconds
Jim Lobe:
The media had a lot of options as to how it was going to cover the run-up to what was almost certainly going to be a war. And they could have done as Knight Ridder did, which was really putting a lot of investigative resources and good people into finding out what was going on behind the scenes --
1837 Duration: 14.88 seconds
Jim Lobe:
Why were we going to war? What was the root of all of this? What was going on in the Pentagon in terms of doing the strangest things with intelligence? What was outside of kind of accepted rules of institutional behavior that made this so extraordinary?
1838 Duration: 14.08 seconds
Jim Lobe:
Or they could decide, as most of the media did, that they would really get involved in kind of the mechanics of war preparation, and embedding their journalists into parts of the Army that would then be involved in the invasion.
1839 Duration: 31.33 seconds
Jim Lobe:
And obviously, the latter was the easier course, particularly when the only person who was trying to raise hell in Washington, D.C. was Robert Byrd, and to some extent Al Gore and Senator Kennedy. I mean, these such small voices, although prominent people, but nonetheless the fact that people weren’t following them made them easy to marginalize in the mind of mainstream media.
1840 Duration: 0.77 seconds
Echo Chamber Project:
Is --
1841 Duration: 9.08 seconds
Jim Lobe:
I should also back up for a second. I’ll say something very controversial -- not controversial, but off-the-wall in a sense. I mean, I --
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