[Media-watch] What Do Americans Know? Not Very Much

[Sigi D]

Hello, hello!
Danny Schechter writes about the state of the American
media and what Americans actuallly know.
Story  from 'Newsday' 2 July, 2003.
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Sigi

What Do Americans Know? Not Very Much

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vpsch023355487jul02,0,2481098.story
By Danny Schechter
Danny Schechter is the editor of the Web site
Mediachannel.org and the author, most recently, of
"Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception: How the Media
Failed to Cover the War on Iraq
July 2, 2003
Millions of Americans accept what they are told and
think they understand what they see. And what they are
told and what they see is most often news as a
manipulated commodity. But the facts that really count
rarely reach a significant number of the public's ears
or eyes.
Also, most reporters know governments lie, mislead and
deceive.They also know that the press is ostensibly
there to keep an eye on governments, to dissect errors
and omissions by offering more truthful
counter-narratives. That was the role an adversarial
media played during Watergate, during the Vietnam War,
and even, if distastefully, during the Clinton
administration.
Today, our media has abandoned this historic role,
That part of the public that remembers the great
journalists of the past knows it. Even journalistic
greats admit it. Just before his death June 11,
newscaster David Brinkley said of the medium that was
his life. "Television news has become so trivial and
devoid of content as to be little different from
entertainment programming."
But many in the public don't even expect the media to
be honest in its reporting. The Jason Blair affair at
The New York Times was the tip of an iceberg. Major
newspapers such as The Boston Globe and The Washington
Post have, in the past, been humiliated by revelations
that reporters falsified stories. Beyond simple
credibility, today's media system has fused news biz
and show biz.
News understanding (and misunderstanding) is driven
more by impressions and images than information. One
recent Gallup Poll survey reported that 40 percent of
the people believed weapons of mass destruction have
been found in Iraq. An early poll found a similar
percentage saying there was an Iraqi hijacker on 9/11.
In contrast, 44 percent of the public in England,
where the media is more critical of the government,
told the Daily Telegraph's Yougov Poll that they
believe their government and the Bush administration
misled them about the threat from Iraq. At the same
time, a CNN/USA Today Poll found that 56 percent of
Americans said the war was justified if weapons of
mass destruction are never found.
The general absence of comprehensive, thorough
reporting is particularly regrettable with Washington
under the control of an administration that has taken
public relations into the realm of "perception
management." Its corporate-trained communications
specialists have perfected a 24-hour spin machine
while coordinating every official utterance. They've
coined and tested repeatable catch-phrases to mobilize
opinion. They want to ensure that we regurgitate their
simplified phrases, and salute their patriotic stands.
In their world, propaganda is passed off as marketing.
Granted, because of cable television and the Internet,
the number of information sources available to the
public has exploded. But "in-depth" television
reporting is brief and ephemeral and rarely is
retained in the minds of the audience. Cable outlets
serve niche audiences. More diverse Web sites often
have limited constituencies. Weekly and monthly
opinion magazines such as The Nation, the Atlantic
Monthly, The New Yorker or Harper's may report in
genuine depth on issues of consequence but mostly have
relatively small circulations. Many appeal to an elite
segment of the population that thinks it's influential
and numerous, but is neither.
When it comes to newspapers, probably a couple of
million people a day read the nation's best known
daily - The New York Times. They think they are an
influential, important group and they believe they
have all the facts about everything that's going on in
the world. Indeed, for many of them, the Times is the
world. But the Times makes hundreds of errors annually
and its reporting is often influenced by its own
agendas. More importantly, Times readers really are
just a tiny segment of America.
All of the above represents a problem for our
democracy. The most important day in America isn't
Christmas. It's the first Tuesday after the first
Monday in November. There are more than 163 million
voters nationwide. Only a tiny percentage of them
could honestly be described as truly well informed
and, therefore, they don't amount to as much as many
media mavens delude themselves into thinking.
It is context, background and interpretation that give
information meaning. When that is missing, as it often
is, so is understanding. 

Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc. 


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