[Media-watch] Fake News

[David Miller {FMS}]

> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/arts/28RICH.html?pagewanted=print&positi
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> March 28, 2004
> FRANK RICH
> Operation Iraqi Infoganda
> 
> Real journalism may be reeling, but faux journalism rocks. As an
> entertainment category in the cultural marketplace, it may soon rival
> reality TV and porn. Television is increasingly awash in fake anchors
> delivering fake news, some of them far more trenchant than real anchors
> delivering real news. Even CNBC, a financial news network, is chasing
> after
> the success of Jon Stewart; its new nightly fake newscast, presided over
> by
> a formerly funny "Saturday Night Live" fake anchor, Dennis Miller, is
> being
> promoted with far more zeal than was ever lavished on CNBC's real "News
> With
> Brian Williams."
> 
> Turn on real news shows like "Dateline NBC" and "Larry King Live,"
> meanwhile, and you're all too likely to find Jayson Blair, the lying
> former
> reporter of The New York Times, continuing to play a reporter on TV as he
> fabricates earnest blather about his concern for journalistic standards.
> Elsewhere on the dial you'll learn that a fake news show ("The Daily
> Show")
> has been in a booking war with a real news show ("Hardball") over who
> would
> first be able to interview the real (I think) Desmond Tutu. At such absurd
> moments, and they are countless these days in our 24/7 information miasma,
> real journalism and its evil twin merge into a mind-bending mutant that
> would defy a polygraph's ability to sort out the lies from the truth.
> 
> This phenomenon has been good news for the Bush administration, which has
> responded to the growing national appetite for fictionalized news by
> producing a steady supply of its own. Of late it has gone so far as to
> field
> its own pair of Jayson Blairs, hired at taxpayers' expense: Karen Ryan and
> Alberto Garcia, the "reporters" who appeared in TV "news" videos
> distributed
> by the Department of Health and Human Services to local news shows around
> the country. The point of these spots - which were broadcast whole or in
> part as actual news by more than 50 stations in 40 states - was to hype
> the
> new Medicare prescription-drug benefit as an unalloyed Godsend to elderly
> voters. They are part of a year-plus p.r. campaign, which, with its $124
> million budget, would dwarf in size most actual news organizations.
> 
> When one real reporter, Robert Pear of The Times, blew the whistle on
> these
> TV "news" stories this month, a government spokesman defended them with
> pure
> Orwell-speak: "Anyone who has questions about this practice needs to do
> some
> research on modern public information tools." The government also informed
> us that Ms. Ryan was no impostor but an actual "freelance journalist." The
> Columbia Journalism Review, investigating further, found that Ms. Ryan's
> past assignments included serving as a TV shill for pharmaceutical
> companies
> in infomercials plugging FluMist and Excedrin. Given that drug companies
> may
> also be the principal beneficiaries of the new Medicare law, she is
> nothing
> if not consistent in her journalistic patrons. But she is a freelance
> reporter only in the sense that Mike Ditka would qualify as one when
> appearing in Levitra ads.
> 
> As for the mystery of Alberto Garcia's journalistic bonafides, it remains
> at
> this writing unresolved. His reporting career has not left a trace on any
> data bank. Perhaps he is the creation of Stephen Glass, the serial
> fantasist
> who once ruled the pages of The New Republic.
> 
> Back at Comedy Central, Jon Stewart was ambivalent about the government's
> foray into his own specialty, musing aloud about whether he should be
> outraged or flattered. One of his faux correspondents, though, was
> outright
> faux despondent. "They created a whole new category of fake news -
> infoganda," Rob Corddry said. "We'll never be able to keep up!" But Mr.
> Corddry's joke is not really a joke. The more real journalism declines,
> the
> easier it is for such government infoganda to fill the vacuum.
> 
> George W. Bush tries to facilitate this process by shutting out the real
> news media as much as possible. By the start of this year, he had held
> only
> 11 solo press conferences, as opposed to his father's count of 71 by the
> same point in his presidency. (Even the criminally secretive Richard Nixon
> had held 23.) Mr. Bush has declared that he rarely reads newspapers and
> that
> he prefers to "go over the heads of the filter" - as he calls the news
> media - and "speak directly to the people." To this end, he gave a series
> of
> interviews to regional broadcasters last fall - a holding action, no
> doubt,
> until Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia could be hired to fill that role. When
> the president made a rare exception last month and took questions from an
> actual front-line journalist, NBC's Tim Russert, his performance was so
> maladroit that the experiment is unlikely to be repeated anytime too soon.
> 
> There's no point in bothering with actual news people anyway, when you can
> make up your own story and make it stick, whatever the filter might have
> to
> say about it. No fake news story has become more embedded in our culture
> than the administration's account of its actions on 9/11. As The Wall
> Street
> Journal reported on its front page this week - just as the former
> counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke was going public with his parallel
> account - many of this story's most familiar details are utter fiction.
> Mr.
> Bush's repeated claim that one of his "first acts" of that morning was to
> put the military on alert is false. So are the president's claims that he
> watched the first airplane hit the World Trade Center on TV that morning.
> (No such video yet existed.) Nor was Air Force One under threat as Mr.
> Bush
> flew around the country, delaying his return to Washington.
> 
> Yet the fake narrative of 9/11 has been scrupulously maintained by the
> White
> House for more than two years. Although the administration has tried at
> every juncture to stonewall the 9/11 investigative commission, its
> personnel, including the president, had all the time in the world for the
> producer of a TV movie, Showtime's "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis." The result
> was
> a scenario that further rewrote the history of that day, stirring steroids
> into false tales of presidential derring-do. Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11
> widow, characterized one of the movie's many elisions in Salon. To show
> the
> president continuing to sit and read with elementary school kids "while
> people like my husband were burning alive inside the World Trade Center
> towers," she wrote, "would run counter to Karl Rove's art direction and
> grand vision."
> 
> To shore up the Rove version of 9/11 once Richard Clarke went public with
> his alternative tale on last Sunday's "60 Minutes," the White House placed
> Condoleezza Rice on all five morning news shows the next day. The
> administration is confident that it can reinstate its bogus scenario -
> particularly given that Ms. Rice, unlike Mr. Clarke, is refusing to take
> the
> risk of reciting it under oath to the 9/11 commission.
> 
> After 9/11, similar fake-news techniques helped speed us into "Operation
> Iraqi Freedom." The run-up to the war was falsified by a barrage of those
> "modern public information tools," including 16 words of Tom Clancy-style
> fiction in the State of the Union. John Burns of The Times, speaking by
> phone from Iraq to a postmortem on war coverage sponsored by the
> University
> of California journalism school in Berkeley this month, said of the real
> press back then: "We failed the American public by being insufficiently
> critical about elements of the administration's plan to go to war." What
> few
> journalistic efforts were made to penetrate the trumped-up rationales for
> war were easily defeated by the administration's false news reports of
> impending biological attacks and mushroom clouds. To see how the faux
> journalism sausage was made, go to http://www.reform.house.gov/min , where
> a
> searchable database posted by Representative Henry Waxman identifies "237
> specific misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq made by
> President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary
> Powell
> and National Security Adviser Rice in 125 separate public appearances."
> 
> Once the war began, the Defense Department turned a warehouse in Qatar
> into
> a TV studio, where it installed a $250,000 Central Command briefing stage,
> shipped from Chicago by FedEx for an additional $47,000. The set was lent
> authority by a real-news set designer, whose previous credits included
> ABC's
> "World News Tonight" and "Good Morning America." As for the embedded
> journalists who filled in the rest of the story, a candid assessment was
> delivered by Lt. Col. Rick Long, the former head of media relations for
> the
> Marine Corps, also speaking at Berkeley 10 days ago: "Frankly, our job is
> to
> win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to
> attempt
> to dominate the information environment. . . . Overall, we were very happy
> with the outcome."
> 
> The "news" of the war included its fictionalized Rambo, Pfc. Jessica
> Lynch,
> and its fictionalized conclusion, the "Mission Accomplished" celebration
> led
> by the president on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. (Mr. Bush said that the
> premature victory banner was the handiwork of the ship's crew when in fact
> it was the product of the White House scenic shop.) But for all that fake
> news, we still don't know such real news as how many Iraqi civilians were
> killed as we gave them their freedom. We are still shielded from images of
> American casualties, before or after they are placed in coffins.
> 
> Now that the breakdown in pre-9/11 security is threatening to dominate the
> real news, the administration is working overtime to overwhelm it with its
> latest, thematically related fake story line. Time magazine reports that
> employees of the Department of Homeland Security have been given the goal
> of
> providing the president "with one homeland-security photo-op a month." The
> Associated Press reports that the department is also hiring a "liaison to
> the entertainment industry" - with a salary as high as $136,000, plus
> benefits - "to make sure that dramatic portrayals of it are as accurate as
> possible." (The deadline for applications, do note, is tomorrow.) Of
> course
> "accurate" in that job description should be read as "inaccurate," since
> the
> liaison's real task, like that of the intrepid reporter Karen Ryan, will
> be
> to make sure that any actual news of our homeland security's many holes is
> kept on the q.t. According to E! entertainment news, we can even expect a
> new TV show, "D.H.S. - the Series," to which both Mr. Bush and Tom Ridge
> will contribute endorsements and sound bites.
> 
> When it comes to homeland security, you can be sure that the
> administration's faux news will always be good news - though this is the
> one
> story in which the real news can sometimes become just too intrusive to
> ignore.
> 
> 
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