Plante

Analysis
Open-source project: The Echo Chamber
Interview: CBS White House Correspondent Bill Plante

This is the first of my analyses of the texts of the interviews for The Echo Chamber project. As such, it will be a bit more sketchy than those to follow because each analysis will build on previous ones. My job is to look for the threads of the thought that create a web of knowledge across all the interviews. No web exists in fact. I will be creating it based on my application of disciplinary knowledge (rhetoric) to the texts. Because this is an open-source project, anyone may analyze the interviews for themselves and create their own webs. Together we will create meaning.

I identified 5 themes. The commonality among these themes is persuasion--political and journalistic. Further, each theme deals with epistemological concerns, i.e. how the political and journalistic actors know what they know, who may know it, who may speak, how they may speak, who may be heard, and how this collective knowledge may be evaluated and disseminated. Nothing in this first interview challenges the standard metaphor of journalism as lecture. The epistemology here fits the culture's noetic field and standard journalistic practice:

1. Perceptions of the danger Iraq posed to the U.S. and the Middle East.

EXAMPLE: "And what brought it back to the fore in the debate about the war in Congress was the widespread belief, promoted by the government, that we were subject to attack again."

2. The voice of debate: who was covered; who was ignored.

EXAMPLE: "Reviewing some scripts from that period, I noticed that in mid-March we still had the Democrat leader of the Senate, Senator Daschle, complaining about the rush to war without the completion of arms inspections. And he was certainly not the only voice, so Congress wasn't silent. That's first thing. Nor were media -- Congress wasn't silent, nor were critics of the idea of war who were also heard in the media. Perhaps not to the degree that government's message was heard, but they were heard nonetheless."

3. Motives of political and journalistic actors as portrayed by those actors.

EXAMPLE: "Members of Congress, particularly members of the House, are extraordinarily sensitive to public opinion because they run every two years. Therefore even many of those who had personal concerns or reservations about the war were listening to their constituents, and very concerned about how they would feel. And didn't feel that the constituent concern that they heard outweighed what they considered the inadequacy of the argument. That was the situation in Congress."

4. Arguments for war as given and portrayed.

EXAMPLE: "The argument focused on the weapons of mass destruction. The argument was also heavily influenced by the notion that Iraq might somehow have been connected to, if not to 9/11 at least to the shadowy terrorist network which promoted jihad and 9/11."

5. Journalistic practice in regard to covering political actors.

July 20th, 2004
Transcription by Volunteer Citizen Journalist Ben Tupper

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and how long you've been here at CBS.
BILL PLANTE: I'm Bill Plante, the correspondent for CBS News, I cover the White House, have for most of the last 23 years. And I've been at CBS for 40 years.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay -- In the film that I'm looking at -- I'm looking at the buildup to the military intervention in Iraq. So when you look back onto this time period, what kind of thoughts come to your mind?

I refined my vision of the new media ecosystem at the Online Social Networking Conference 2005, and the following flowchart ties together a lot of my thoughts.

I've written probably close to 8,000 words about this chart across over 40 different posts at OSN2005. I hope to synthesize and summarize these posts as soon as I receive permission from some of the other participants to include their insights and questions.

Below are some additional notes about the chart.

[UPDATE: I added more context to this post after receiving links from Rebecca MacKinnon and David Weinberger.]

I refined my vision of the new media ecosystem at the Online Social Networking Conference 2005, and the following flowchart ties together a lot of my thoughts.

I've written probably close to 8,000 words about this chart across over 40 different posts at OSN2005. I hope to synthesize and summarize these posts as soon as I receive permission from some of the other participants to include their insights and questions.

Below are some additional notes about the chart.

Dr. Andrew R. Cline of Rhetorica.net has completed his first analysis an Echo Chamber interview with his perspective the Bill Plante interview. He posted it on his site yesterday, and I'll repost it here as well.

Analysis
Open-source Project: The Echo Chamber
Interview: CBS White House Correspondent Bill Plante

This is the first of my analyses of the texts of the interviews for The Echo Chamber. As such, it will be a bit more sketchy than those to follow because each analysis will build on previous ones. My job is to look for the threads of the thought that create a web of knowledge across all the interviews. No web exists in fact. I will be creating it based on my application of disciplinary knowledge (rhetoric) to the texts. Because this is an open-source project, anyone may analyze the interviews for themselves and create their own webs. Together we will create meaning.

The problems with the pre-election 2004 CBS Bush-National Guard story will probably become the most convincing circumstantial evidence for the liberal media bias hypothesis.

Producer Mary Mapes' sloppy journalistic practices are already proof enough of liberal bias within conservative circles. This is based upon the assumption that her actions were explicitly or implicitly motivated by a liberal political bias against George W. Bush.

Grievances with the mainstream media are often framed in terms of the supply rather than the demand. Most analyses focus either on the field of journalism, corporate ownership, commercialization or government regulation.

But what about our culture that demands to see mindless infotainment?

I would like The Echo Chamber documentary to provide a catalyst for the process of cultural evolution based upon the insights of the dynamic nature of our culture and various theories of human development.

The following sections explore the question of how ‘the public institution’ interacts with other institutional powers of influence...

The Media Research Center is the conservative watchdog group that is the most influential intellectual authority behind the claims that the media "slant reports in favor of the liberal position on issues."

While there may in fact be instances where the media’s coverage is tainted by a political bias, the standard of scientifically validating this causal path goes beyond simply collecting "a mountain of evidence."

The MRC claims to have proven the existence of liberal media bias through "sound scientific research," but yet their scientific methodology relies solely upon inductive method of investigation while never using a more comprehensive Hypothetico-Deductive Method of scientific inquiry.

I intend for my project to be soundly grounded in theory from the disciplines of sociology, psychology and mass communications.

The underlying theory that I am trying to apply is that fixed attitudes and beliefs can limit one’s perception of reality. Our attitudes and beliefs are influenced by our value system and sense of morality. Our value systems serve as the primary filter to how we see the world and what we perceive to be the "truth" as we understand it.

The project will be covering issues that are very emotionally charged, and it will inevitably stimulate emotional states of high passion and low logic. But at the same time it is difficult to make a credible argument to an opposing viewpoint by going outside the bounds of accepted academic discourse. The more that the film’s content is grounded in academic theory, then more persuasive and acceptable it will become.

I'm writing up various parts of my business plan, and thought that the "Market Demand" section resonated with the cultural aspects of academic bias that I briefly discussed in the previous post.

Below is a rough draft that hasn't been proofread yet, but I thought I would share what I have and welcome any feedback.

MARKET DEMAND

There is a strong demand for hard-hitting investigative reporting on complex issues, especially regarding the performance of the mainstream media leading up to the war in Iraq.

There is also an evolving paradigm shift for how our society views the role of mainstream journalism in our democracy. There is an increasing level of doubt as to whether the mainstream television news media can adequately fulfill their obligations of informing the electorate about the vital issues of the day.