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In Defense of the Mainstream Media

January 23, 2012   ·   1 Comments

Source: NYTX

By Marie Burns:

In what long-time political player David Gergen called “one of the most explosive moments … in debate history” and “one of the harshest attacks that we’ve had on the press … in a long, long time,” Newt Gingrich attacked John King of CNN and the media in general when King asked Gingrich at the top of last Thursday’s GOP presidential debate about an interview Gingrich’s second wife Marianne gave to ABC News about how their marriage ended. King asked Gingrich if he would “like to take some time to respond to” his ex-wife who had claimed he had asked her to “enter into an open marriage” at the time he “was having an affair.” The audience applauded when Gingrich said he didn’t want to respond but he would. Here is what Gingrich had to say, in full, with the exception of some interjections:

I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that. (APPLAUSE) Every person in here knows personal pain. Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things. To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary a significant question for a presidential campaign is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine. (APPLAUSE) My two daughters wrote the head of ABC and made the point that it was wrong, that they should pull it, and I am frankly astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate. (APPLAUSE)

King said, “… this story did not come from our network,” and Gingrich continued:

John, John, it was repeated by your network. You chose to start the debate with it. Don’t try to blame somebody else. You and your staff chose to start this debate with it. (APPLAUSE) Let me be quite clear. Let me be quite clear. The story is false. Every personal friend I have who knew us in that period said the story was false. We offered several of them to ABC to prove it was false. They weren’t interested because they would like to attack any Republican. They’re attacking the governor. They’re attacking me. I’m sure they’ll presently get around to Senator Santorum and Congressman Paul.

I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans. (APPLAUSE)

A few of those applause lines were reportedly standing Os.

When King asked candidate Ron Paul about the matter, Paul said, “I think too often all of us are on the receiving ends of attacks from the media. It’s very disturbing because sometimes they’re not based on facts and we suffer the consequences. You know, sometimes it reminds me of this idea of getting corporations out of running campaigns. But what about the corporations that run the media?” This remark, too, received audience applause.

Later, Gingrich press secretary R. C. Hammond told Politico that King’s raising the issue of Gingrich’s past infidelities was “nothing but modern-day muckraking at its worst.”

Some pundits more or less agreed. Roy Peter Clark of the media observer site Poynter, writes that he is no fan of Newt Gingrich’s, but he came up with ten reasons as to why Gingrich was right to attack King. Many of Clark’s reasons centered around the assertion that marital fidelity is not a predictor of leadership ability.

Howard Kurtz, a reliable stooge for the right (or just a reliable stooge), who bills himself as a non-ideological media critic, faulted his CNN colleague John King:

I must say that I thought it was a misstep for John King, who is a fair and seasoned and balanced reporter, to make that the very first question of the debate. Everything that happened after that, even when Mitt Romney stumbled about his tax return, was indeed an afterthought…. The timing does not look good for those who believe the media are biased or out to hurt the Republicans. I think ABC News should have done the story much earlier or done it next week. When you drop a bombshell like that, though even though the allegations are recycled, so close to the voting, it does I think in an unintentional way create sympathy for Newt Gingrich who is already surging in the South Carolina polls.

Is it ever-so-slightly possible Gingrich was playing to the audience? PBS’s Gwen Ifill tweeted, “Let me just say Gingrich was not this outraged this afternoon when I asked him about Marianne.” This brings me to my point. Much of the media coverage centered on the exchange between Gingrich and King, reporting that Gingrich “blasted,” “ripped,” “seized control of,” “shut down,” “eviscerated,” “slammed,” “attacked,” “destroyed,” “torched,” etc., King. My subject is as much the audience reaction as it is Newt Gingrich’s – and Ron Paul’s – remarks.

Some observers, like Michael Brendan Dougherty of Business Insider expressed surprise that Gingrich’s criticism of King and the media was “so easily swallowed by the audience from a twice-divorced, two-timer like Newt Gingrich.” There’s no surprise about it.

Last week, Public Policy Polling, a left-leaning, reliable polling firm, published the results of a poll of how much Americans trust the major U.S. television network news outlets. The results were what you might expect:

Fox News tops the list for both the source Americans trust the most and the one they trust the least…. 68% of Republicans pick Fox as their most trusted source, with no one else even hitting double digits…. Democrats trust everything – except Fox News…. Republicans meanwhile don’t trust anything except Fox News…. Independents are with the Democrats. They trust everything except Fox News.

The results for Republicans looked more dramatic when Kevin Drum of Mother Jones charted them.

(Last September a Gallup poll found similar results, but did not single out individual media outlets:

Seventy-five percent of Republicans and conservatives say the media are too liberal. Democrats and liberals lean more toward saying the media are ‘just about right,’ at 57% and 42%, respectively. Moderates and independents diverge, however, with 50% of independents saying the media are too liberal and 50% of moderates saying they are just about right.”)

What is concerning about the Public Policy Polling results is the effect on conservative news consumers’ grasp of facts. Their mistrust of the mainstream media has increasingly untethered them from reality. As Kevin Drum remarked,

Liberals don’t immediately dismiss as a conspiracy everything they hear from the news media that doesn’t fit their preconceived notions…. Increasingly, conservatives … want to believe the world is a certain way, and they’re just flatly not willing to countenance anything that might challenge those beliefs. This is not a healthy development for a modern democracy.” [Emphasis added.]

That is, the PPP poll shows that voters are not polarized. Conservative voters are polarized. They only trust right-wing media, and they believe any stories that counter what they hear on right-wing talk radio or Fox “News” are just not true. Indeed, mainstream media, except for Fox “News,” is – in their view – one big conspiracy to misinform them public and get voters to accede to a liberal agenda that is “taking away their freedoms.”

How did this happen? It turns out there is a conspiracy, albeit an open one, to discredit the media. Paul Waldman of the American Prospect wrote in a post titled, “The One-Sided Media Cocoon,”

If you are a consumer of conservative media, you get constant reminders — every day, multiple times a day — that you absolutely must not believe anything you hear or read in any news outlet that is not explicitly conservative…. Americans are not ‘polarized’ when it comes to the media, because that implies that both sides have drifted apart to similar degrees…. It’s the conservatives who refuse to believe anything that anyone but Fox or conservative talk-radio tells them.

Never was that more obvious than in Newt Gingrich’s attack on the media. You and I know that his charge that “the elite media [are] protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans” is ridiculous. As Dave Weigel wrote in Slate,

The ‘elite media’ isn’t running stories about the personal scandals of those other guys, because those scandals don’t exist. That wasn’t the point: Gingrich was saying that all criticism of Republicans from the media should be suspect. He expanded on that in his victory speech. The hated elites, he warned, ‘have been trying for half century to force us to quit being American and become some other kind of system.’

Gingrich’s audience agreed with him. So did the home audience. As Marjorie Connelly of the New York Times reported, exit polls showed that “for nearly two-thirds of voters, the recent debates were an important factor in their decision; for about 1 in 8 they were the most important factor. Mr. Gingrich was considered by many to have done particularly well in the debates; he received the votes of about half of those for whom the debates were important.” As Lucas Shaw of Reuters noted, several Fox “News” analysts said that John King swung the South Carolina primary to Newt Gingrich. Mike Huckabee “said that Gingrich should take King out to a steak dinner for his tough questioning during Thursday night’s debate.” Karl Rove, too, acknowledged, “Taking on the media is always good in a Republican primary. John King couldn’t have set up the question in a more positive way for Gingrich to just nail it and haul it right out of the park.” Ultra-conservative columnist and Fox “News” contributor Charles Krauthammer agreed: “I think that channeled to the electorate the fact that he would be a guy who can articulate the conservative philosophy and take on opponents without fear, and that accounts for this amazing victory.” This is exactly what Gingrich himself said in his victory speech: “It’s not that I’m a good debater. It’s that I articulate the deepest felt values of the American people.”

I don’t mean to suggest that media-bashing was the only factor that tipped the scale in Gingrich’s favor. Certainly his racist remarks “articulated some of those deepest-felt values” in a state where the Confederate flag still flies over the capitol building and the vast majority of Republican voters are white. And attacks on Mitt Romney’s “liberal past,” not to mention his Mormon religion, hurt him in a voting population where many believe Mormons are not Christians and only a Christian is qualified to lead a “Christian nation.” Gingrich’s Southern roots helped him, too. But the right’s mistrust of the mainstream media, and Gingrich’s encouragement of that mistrust was a factor.

As for “liberal media bias,” that’s a myth. Ron Paul was right. Corporations run the media. And in this case, Mitt Romney was right, too: “Corporations are people.” Jason Easley of Politics USA writes,

A new study of the mainstream media coverage of the 2012 election found that every single Republican candidate received more positive coverage than Barack Obama. Over the course of 23 weeks The Pew Center’s Project For Excellence in Journalism studied the media coverage of the all the 2012 presidential candidates, and their results should put an end to the myth of liberal media bias. The study found that every single Republican candidate received more positive media coverage than President Obama….

Obama is getting so much negative coverage, not because his support has vanished, but because the media wants a close 2012 election. Close elections increase viewership, which drives ad revenue…. The mainstream media is not objective. They aren’t going to be fair. For profit corporate news divisions place profits ahead of journalism. They aren’t going to do the right thing, and most of the time they are going to be working against you.

The New York Times eXaminer is dedicated to calling out the New York Times when “mistakes are made” in straight news coverage and editorial content. But that is an effort to improve the quality of coverage and to inform readers of mitigating facts and alternative views, not to discredit the paper as a Democratic or liberal organ. It is not. On domestic issues, the paper is, by and large, moderately liberal to moderate in both its coverage and its content, although it is fair to say that in its effort to attract a national and international readership, it has moved more and more into the moderate column. Former Times public editor Daniel Okrent wrote in 2004 that “of course” the Times is liberal. Its hometown is New York City. “The Times has chosen to be an unashamed product of the city whose name it bears,” Okrent wrote. The Times‘ recent failure to cover large public protests taking place in the city, most notably of course the Occupy Wall Street movement, especially in their print edition, are good examples of how the Times has dropped the “liberal” ball. A friend of mine, who has a particular interest in public protests, says she goes to Al Jazeera, which is based in Qatar, to find out what protests are going on in New York City. New York’s Daily News, not exactly a liberal rag, also has had much better coverage than has the Times of the Occupy protests.

But as Jack Shafer of Reuters wrote recently, “media bias” is inevitable. In fact, it is impossible to avoid. Besides, Shafer points out, “the ‘truth’ does not necessarily reside in the center: A centrist is potentially as biased as any lefty or righty. Or to put it in the Texas pejorative, as Jim Hightower does in a book of the same name, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”

On the right side of the road, there is a yellow-striped Newt.

Marie Burns blogs at RealityChex.com

By marieburns

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