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APPENDIX 36: JOURNALISM, NEWS, AND NEWSPAPERS:

ACTUAL RULES THAT GOVERN CONTEMPORARY JOURNALISM: [THE]

the actual rules--quite different from the ostensible rules that are taught in journalism school--that govern contemporary journalism:

BAD JOURNALISM:

Yellow journalism is media ochre.

BELTWAY JOURNALISM:

. . . [D]ivide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

[...]

These "rules of the game" permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too often simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers, sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading.
--Bill Moyers, in his closing speech at the National Conference on Media Reform in St. Louis, 15 May 2005

CNN EFFECT: [THE]

The creation of the global electronic village in which the same images were transmitted simultaneously to millions of households. Thus news of the latest conflict came to the attention of the world as it was happening, and in living colour.

Some government officials found this influence constructive. President Clinton's National Security Advisor commented in a speech: "We know that when the all-seeing eye of CNN finds real suffering abroad, Americans want their government to act -- as they should and we should." A former Secretary of State made a more cautious assessment: "We have yet to understand how profoundly the impact of CNN has changed things. The public hears of an event now in real time, before the State Department has had time to think about it. Consequently, we find ourselves reacting before we've had time to think. This is now the way we determine foreign policy -- it's driven more by the daily events reported on TV than it used to be."
--Dennis C. Jett, Why Peacekeeping Fails, pg 29

CLASSIC JOURNALISTIC DICTUM:

Get if first, but first get it right.

CUISINART EFFECT: [THE]

In the press, it involves the mashing together of images and story lines from fiction and reality. Washington Post reporter John Schwartz coined the term when he identified the process as a key piece of skullduggery used in promoting social panics. E.g.:
A report by Dateline NBC on deaths in Zaire, for instance, interspersed clips from Outbreak, a movie whose plot involves a lethal virus that threatens to kill the entire U.S. population. Alternating between Dustin Hoffman's character exclaiming, "We can't stop it!" and real-life science writer Laurie Garret, author of The Coming Plague, proclaiming that "HIV is not an aberration . . . it's part of the trend," Dateline's report gave the impression that swarms of epidemics were on their way.
--Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear, pg xxiii

DAILY MIRROR: [THE]

The reputation of which is not quite as high as that of American tabloids like The National Enquirer.
--Baylen J. Linnekin, Bush on Cocaine? Don't Believe It Yet, 07 Sep 2004

DANCE OF THE CANNIBALS: [THE]

[...] devouring and dissecting the disillusionment, fixing blame, and pondering where to go next. Shoulda-Woulda-and-Coulda come to dine.
--John Cory, The Election - My Two Cents, 06 November 2004
[Also filed as DANCE OF THE CANNIBALS: [THE] in the main volume]

DRACULA OF JOURNALISM: [THE]

-- the inverted pyramid -- which keeps rising from its coffin and sucking the lifeblood from newspaper writing, even though every rationale for its existence disappeared with the telegraph.

[...]

The so-called inverted pyramid style that has dominated newspaper writing for more than one hundred years does not work very well with readers. It communicates basic information quickly but is not enjoyable to read because it tells a story in reverse, starting with the conclusion.
--John Miller,Yesterday's News, pg 236

ENTERTAINMENT NEWS:

Corporate media in the United States is interested primarily in entertainment news to feed their bottom-line priorities. Very important news stories that should reach the American public often fall on the cutting room floor to be replaced by sex-scandals and celebrity updates.
--Peter Phillips, Director of the Project Censored, Sonoma State University

"FEEDING FRENZY STORY" THEMES:

Those that seem to dominate news about women these days:

FOURTH ESTATE:

Now I have always regarded the operation of a newspaper as a public trust, with editors owing an overriding responsibility to the general good of society. The Equity's job, it seems to me, is to serve people who raised the money to fix up their arena and who deserve to know how it has been spent. This so-called "watchdog role" of the press is not written down in our constitution, but the shopworn term by which you sometimes hear the press call itself -- the Fourth Estate -- implies that is an important part of the self-governing process of a democratic society. The press provides the information that we need to make decisions -- who shall govern us and how, which laws and values we should live by, how we face up to the challenges ahead -- and it keeps tabs afterwards on how well our institutions are carrying them out. This responsibility of the press carries with it a great power that must not be abused. Thus it is wrong for a publisher to ignore news just because an advertiser wishes it or for an editor to ignore sloppy practices in local government just beause your friends sit on council. It is wrong to use the press as a bully pulpit against your enemies, just as it is wrong to patronize those whose favour you seek. It's wrong to jeopardize the search for truth with shoddy or irresponsible reporting or questionable ethics. Every day, many newspapers in Canada quietly perform this vital job for democracy, but too few of us -- within newspapers and among the reading public -- fully appreciate the courage it requires, the good it does, and the fragility that characterizes it.
--John Miller,Yesterday's News, pg 236

FOX NEWS:

The wondrous blessing God bestowed on Gustave Flaubert -- and on America's own great chroniclers of contagious stupidity, Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken -- is that they lived and died without imagining a thing like Fox News. It's easy to laugh at Rupert Murdoch's outrageous mongrel, the impossible offspring of supermarket tabloids, sitcom news spoofs, police-state propaganda mills and the World Wrestling Federation.

Fox News is an oxymoron and Cheech and Chong would have made a more credible team of war correspondents than Geraldo Rivera and Ollie North. Neither Saturday Night Live nor the 1973 film Network, Paddy Chayefsky's corrosive satire of TV news, could even approach the comic impact of Geraldo embedded, or of Fox's pariah parade, its mothball fleet of experts who always turn out to be disgraced or indicted Republican refugees. If Ed Meese, Newt Gingrich and Elliott Abrams couldn't fill your sails with mirth, you could count on the recently deposed Viceroy of Virtue and High Regent of Rectitude, my old schoolmate Blackjack Bill Bennett.

With its red-faced, hyperventilating reactionaries and slapstick abuse of lame "liberal" foils who serve them as crash dummies, Fox News could easily be taken as pure entertainment, even as inspired burlesque of the rightwing menagerie. But the problem -- in fact, the serious problem - is that Fox isn't kidding, and brownshirts aren't funny.

Harper's reports that Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly became so infuriated by the son of a 9-ll victim who opposed the war -- "I'm against it and my father would have been against it, too" -- that he cursed the man and even threatened him off-camera. A Fox TV anchor, one Neil Cavuto, celebrated the fall of Baghdad by informing all of us who opposed the war in March, "You were sickening then, you are sickening now." If reports are accurate, these troubled men are neither bad journalists nor even bad actors portraying journalists -- they're mentally unbalanced individuals whose partisan belligerence is pressing them to the brink of psychosis.

But the scariest thing about Fox and Rupert Murdoch, the thing that renders them all fear and no fun in a time of national crisis, is that they channel for the Bush administration as faithfully as if they were on the White House payroll. Like no other substantial media outlet in American history, Fox serves -- voluntarily -- as the propaganda arm of a controversial, manipulative, image-obsessed government. To watch its war coverage for even a minute was to grind your teeth convulsively at each Orwellian repetition of the Newspeak mantra, "Operation Iraqi Freedom." I swear I hate to stoop to Nazi analogies; but if Joseph Goebbels had run his own cable channel, it would have been indistinguishable from Fox News.
--Hal Crowther, 04 Jun 2003, Weapons Of Mass Stupidity

GOTCHA JOURNALISM:

Designed less to extract information from government officials than to skewer them for their words, their deeds, their intentions, and their histories.

HE SAID/SHE SAID JOURNALISM:

See: Objective Journalism

HOTEL JOURNALISM:

"Hotel journalism" is the only phrase for it. More and more Western reporters in Baghdad are reporting from their hotels rather than the streets of Iraq's towns and cities. Some are accompanied everywhere by hired, heavily armed Western mercenaries. A few live in local offices from which their editors refuse them permission to leave. Most use Iraqi stringers, part-time correspondents who risk their lives to conduct interviews for American or British journalists, and none can contemplate a journey outside the capital without days of preparation unless they "embed" themselves with American or British forces.

Rarely, if ever, has a war been covered by reporters in so distant and restricted a way. The New York Times correspondents live in Baghdad behind a massive stockade with four watchtowers, protected by locally hired, rifle-toting security men, complete with NYT T-shirts. America's NBC television chain are holed up in a hotel with an iron grille over their door, forbidden by their security advisers to visit the swimming pool or the restaurant "let alone the rest of Baghdad" lest they be attacked. Several Western journalists do not leave their rooms while on station in Baghdad.
--Robert Fisk, 17 Jan 2005

HURRICANE JOURNALISM:

See: HURRICANE SURVIVAL GUIDE

INDEPENDENT PRESS:

There is no such thing at this date of the world's history in America as an independent press. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write his honest opinion, and if you did, you know beforehand it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allow my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before 24 hours, my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it, and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and the vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks. They pull the strings, and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
--John Swinden, 1953, then head of the New York Times, when asked to toast an independent press in a gathering at the National Press Club
(At a time when the public was not allowed to attend).

INFORMATION CHAOS:

The paralyzing effect that a revolution in technology has brought to our daily lives since the mid-1960s: too much information, delivered too quickly (by television, photocopier, fax, computers, direct mail), information that comes at us indiscriminately and without context or discernable value, like digital junk food. We feel powerless, confused. Those of us who aren't information junkies yearn today for some interpreter, some travel guide through this jungle of data, but newspapers have not yet taken on this role. They are still obsessed with delivering bits of news or random entertainments, still captivated by what makes events unique, not what connects them.
--Neil Postman, U.S. social critic, paraphrased in Yesterday's News by John Miller, pg 14

JOURNALISM:

Ask an impertinent question and then try to find the answer.

JUNK FOOD NEWS:

"Junk Food News" consists of the cotton candy headlines and soda pop stories that make up the basis of what we call news in this country [the U.S.]. Media feed off our desire to escape the humdrum world around us with an emphasis on celebrity "news." Famous lives provide us with a sugar rush and a false reality that radiates in comparison to the darkness that shrouds what's really going on in the world. Genocide, war, big business machinations, and the manipulation of the Third World countries can't hold a candle to what Gwyneth Paltrow chooses to wear on Oscar night. We are seemingly a nation obsessed with celebrity.

[...] Our current system of corporate-controlled media isn't doing the job it was created to do: inform the American public of matters requiring national attention. A tabloid mentality has invaded somber news outlets leaving America in the dark about significant issues and events, and promoition our national ignorance. The fluffiest of the fluff that is handed to us by our media is what we call "Junk Food News".
--Krista Arata and Kathleen O'Rourke-Christopher, Junk Food News and News Abuse, Censored 2003, pg 193

JUMPS:

British stories have great structural integrity, because their newspapers do not employ jumps. . . . American newspapers use such jumps so often that we think nothing of it. But it is not a benevolent layout decision. Editors know that with every jump, you lose a massive number of readers: few make it past the initial paragraphs. The New York Herald used this reader laziness to great effect on November 9, 1874, when its front page shouted:
A Shocking Sabbath Carnival of Death
Terrible Scenes of Mutilation

And if you were a Herald reader, you had a nasty shock: marauding carnival lions and elephants loosed upon the avenues had trampled and eaten forty-nine New Yorkers; why, Governor Diz himself was out in the street, stalking tigers with his shotgun!

Citizens were too busy loading their guns and barring their doors to notice that, if you read further into the article, you were notified in small type that this story was a fiction to "test the city's preparedness to meet a catastrophe."
--Paul Collins "Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books"

LIPSTICK JOURNALISM:

Selling the sizzle of redesign and trying to pander to our elusive tastes instead of investing in what readers really need, which is the substance of quality journalism. Now that cost-cutting has allowed newspapers to once again ring up healthy profits, they're putting their money not into training or hiring or figuring out how better to cover the news, but into marketing, which is a business school concept that treats news coverage as a comomodity to be manipulated and sold as cheaply as possible. [...] Too many of today's newspapers match the unfattering image of a heavily made-up and slightly overweight floozy, too long without love, prowling the streets in a deperate search for something that passes for affection. The marketplace has changed since her salad days; her old charms find no admirers; the competition is faster and younger. Having lost her integrity and her soul, she thinks the answer is more lip stick.
--John Miller, Yesterday's News, pg 9

NEO-CON NEWS:

America's news is so self-obsessed that if nuclear holocaust struck the Middle East today, America's headlines would proclaim: "Nuclear Holocaust Strikes Middle East: American Killed."

What follows? Endless eyewitness testimony about the dead American's last hours, final words; interviews with his family, friends, employers and past employers, high school teachers and chums and sweethearts, his church's minister, his town's mayor. Yellow ribbons, prayer vigils and street shrines, heads bowed in a nationwide moment of silence. Watch solemnly as the Bush administration arranges a posthumous Purple Heart and Silver Star and burial at Arlington Cemetery in a flag-draped coffin. The slain American was not a soldier, but as every other "soldier" in the military is actually a private contractor, does it really matter?

Then, one news entertainer would ask another, "Well, Debbie, was anyone else killed in that Middle East nuclear holocaust?"

And Debbie would reply, "Well, Bob, millions of Arabs also died."

Cut to a film clip of smoldering carnage.

For two seconds.

Then come commercials and the weekend entertainment lineup. As cinematographer Michael Moore might say, "Hey Dude, where's my news?"

And Debbie and Bob would reply, "Hey Dude, it's all Neocon News now."

Neocon News differs from professional, truth-based news reporting, last seen moments after the first plane struck the World Trade Center. Real news was not 9/11's first casualty. But real news did die, somewhere between Afghanistan and Iraq.

Neocon News produces dramatic stories that strongly influence popular opinions and emotions. Neocon news "dramas" last for days, even years. Only after the powerful emotions such "news stories" stir become firmly entrenched in our minds, and the thoughts they create become an unchangeable part of our being, do we discover the truth.
--Sarah Whalen, ArabNews.com, 05 Jun 2004

NEWS ABUSE:

News abuse highlights those stories that had the emotional aspects to them that the corporate media fed on like jackals to a fresh kill. [...]

Media's knack for going straight to the emotional center of a story and turning it into a tabloid headline is often at the victim's expense. Even the lives of readers are manipulated by the repeated hashing out of unfortunate situations in life. Innocent bystanders' worlds are disrupted by the bombardment of relentless reporting of someone else's tragedy. Needless fear and rage can occur in the witnessing public.
--Krista Arata and Kathleen O'Rourke-Christopher, Junk Food News and News Abuse, Censored 2003, pg 193

NEWS:

There is a wicked pretense that one has been informed. But no such thing has truly occurred! A mere slogan, an empty litany. No arguments are heard, no evidence is weighed. It isn't news at all, only a source of amusement for idlers.
--Gibson-Sterling, The Difference Engine

NEWSPAPER:

A newspaper is a circulating library with high blood pressure.
--Jennifer Patterson

NEWSPAPERS:

Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.
--George Bernard Shaw

OBJECTIVE JOURNALISM:

The gold standard of American journalism has long been "objective" reporting. Journalists at news outlets are expected to present the public with an unbiased account of the facts rather than their own views on the issue at hand. This is a laudable goal, but the expectation that reporters will present both sides of the story too often translates into the mistaken belief that they should refuse to sort out competing factual claims. This is the media's greatest weakness in dealing with political dishonesty.

While the press generally does a reasonable job of pointing out the most blatant instances of political deception, reporters attempting to remain objective often fail to evaluate claims that are misleading but not obviously wrong. This is especially true when it comes to politicians who are generally seen as honest. [...] Perversely, this strategy of dissembling and denial leaves journalists in the position of appearing to be "taking sides" if they point out deception.

The pressure to remain objective frequently reduces reporters to little more than stenographers transcribing the latest spin from politicians. Rather than sort out competing factual claims, they typically give equal play to both sides - even if one is misleading. This "he said/she said" form of journalism allows politicians to enter deceptive statements into the public record and leaves citizens with little or no basis to evaluate the truth of the matter at hand.
--Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan, All the President's Spin

TREND JOURNALISM:

Trend journalism attains authority not through actual reporting but through the power of repetition. Said enough times, anything can be made to seem true. A trend declared in one publication sets off a chain reaction, as the rest of the media scramble to get the story, too. The lightning speed at which these messages spread has less to do with the accuracy of the trend than with journalists' propensity to repeat one another.
--Susan Faludi, Backlash, pg 79

TRICKLE-UP JOURNALISM:

I began hosting Democracy Now! in 1996, when it was launched as the only daily election show in public broadcasting. Listener response was enormous. Suddenly the daily struggles of ordinary people - workers, immigrants, artists, the employed and the unemployed, those with homes and those without, dissidents, soldiers, people of color - were dignified as news. I call it trickle-up journalism. These are the voices that shape movements - movements that make history. These are people who change the world just as much as generals, bankers and politicians. They are the mainstream, yet they are ignored by the mainstream media.
--Amy Goodman, A Sanctuary for Dissent, 15 Apr 2004

REPORTING: [NEWS ~]

The daily rush to cover history on the run.

ROOFTOP JOURNALISM:

An era of jouralists parachuting into unfamiliar terrain, rushing to a hotel roof, and then announcing that something was going on around them. Sometimes before they have even found out what the story is or interviewed anyone. A typical example of this was the reporting from Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf War, and then reporting from Bahgdad during the invasion of Iraq. This form of journalism derives in part from the Information Age. Because real time coverage of events is possible due to satellite communications, many news organizations have closed down foreign bureaus to save money. As a result, they no longer have people on the ground in foreign countries who have kept up with the local politics and are familiar with the culture and customs.

VOMIT SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM:

-- here are all the facts, we're dumping them in your lap and good luck trying to figure out what they mean.
--John Miller, apparently paraphrasing Maxwell King of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Yesterday's News, pg 232
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