There is a
good piece today on a blog called Dissenting Voice that looks, while reviewing the latest book about the crisis in journalism, at what is one of modern journalism’s greatest failings: It’s obeisance to the conventional wisdom and the existing power structure. Robert Bensen, who teaches journalism at University of Texas at Austin, says that there is an “Ideology Problem” that is “afflicting mainstream news media.” Journalists, he says, “consistently accept two key components of the worldview of the powerful”:
– On economics, the naturalness of corporate capitalism is unchallenged. Issues such as wealth inequality, hunger, and child poverty must be framed as unfortunate problems to be solved by elites’ adjustment of the system, not as an evitable outcome of a pathological system that leaves economic decisions in the hands of a relatively few people.
– On foreign policy, the naturalness of U.S. domination of the world system is unchallenged. Direct U.S. violence and support for the violence of client regimes must be framed as actions that are necessary to maintain order in a chaotic world, not as imperialism designed to expand U.S. power and enrich elites.
These are “foundational questions of economy and nation” that cannot be addressed by ensuring that journalists have more knowledge — one of the basic precepts of Thomas Patterson’s Informing the News, the book being reviewed (I haven’t read the book.), Bensen says. That’s because these questions are not knowledge-based, he says. They are “about values.”
A technocratic journalism that brackets out such basic questions is, by default, a journalism that will be limited in its ability to analyze and critique systems of power because it will not reflect on its own values.
So, we end up with the failures exhibited by the press in the lead up to the Iraq War, in which nearly all mainstream news outlets took at their word Bush administration officials — and the hangers on that make up the permanent foreign policy establishment in Washington — who were itching to fight rather than questioning the information being provided by these so-called experts. This was never a question of knowledge — or the lack thereof — but of method and relationship. He describes the issue this way:
[T]he crucial “source problem” is not that journalists routinely draw on the greater expertise of others, which is inevitable in the practice of daily journalism, but that sources who reflect the views of concentrated wealth and power are, on average, given far more credibility and visibility. That produces a fidelity to ideology, not truth.
As he points out, there were plenty of other sources in the lead up to Iraq who were critical of the rush to war, but the mainstream press kept going to the same tired generals and politicians.
There was a robust anti-war movement, nationally and internationally, which included a wide range of people with extensive expertise on issues of weapons, diplomacy, and Middle East history. The problem was that most journalists reflexively allowed sources with power to define the issue and create the “facts.”
You can see the same thing with the economic meltdown and the collapse of the housing bubble. The press was caught flat-footed because we only heard from people like Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and the approved group of economists who kept saying that housing prices would never come down. We rarely heard from people like Dean Baker, a lefty economist who was predicting the collapse as early as 2003.
In many respects, this is just Journalism 101. It is what we teach students about beat coverage — the greatest danger for any beat reporter is that he or she will be co-opted, that the reporter will get too close with sources in power and forget for whom he or she is actually writing. The people in charge become the reporter’s friends, or people the reporter is afraid of offending, so the reporter stops questioning them, starts taking them at their word and dismissing the gadflies and critics floating around. This goes for the reporter who covers city hall and the police beat, as well as for the reporters in the Statehouse in Trenton — most of whom had seen Christie in action but never bothered to fully connect the dots until now — or in Washington, where reporters have become enamored of their TV appearances and other perks of covering powerful (mostly) men.
But it is more than co-optation by a source. There also is the notion of false balance, a fealty to a misinterpretation of neutrality and fairness that leaves reporters writing “he said, she said” stories on issues like climate change — 99 percent of the scientific community is on one side of this, but we treat deniers as having the same credibility as the rest — or the economy when there really is no balance needed for many of them.
Bensen points to a third issue: the impact of ownership of media — i.e., who owns the press and what kind of constraints, both overt and tacit, that places on reporting.
Overall, if we are to address the shortcomings of American journalism, Bensen writes, we have to own up to this.
[I]deology and ownership are key to understanding how journalism works, and therefore how to start a conversation about the aspects of journalism that don’t work well. Those who believe that capitalism and U.S. imperialism are good things are welcome to argue that, as are those who believe that a corporate-commercial media system produces the most democratic journalism. But these conclusions can simply be assumed or asserted without argument.
He goes on to point out that journalism’s failures are tied to a larger institutional, cultural and ideological failures, which is why this discussion cannot take place “outside a larger discussion of U.S. social, political, and economic dogmas, the failures of which are increasingly apparent.”
Though it is difficult to imagine rethinking the systems and structures of power that have brought us to this point—what would a world beyond capitalism and imperial nation-states look like?—that is the central task of politics, and therefore a central concern of journalism. Though it is difficult, people all over the planet, without the help of knowledge-specialists, are imagining and working to bring that world into being.
This not only will require journalists to start asking more difficult questions, but to reach out beyond the traditional base of sources to whom we turn regularly. And, as Bensen says, it will require more than technocratic effort to know more. It demands from us “reflection on, and a more honest articulation of, values than contemporary mainstream journalism has yet offered the public.”
Our job, as journalists, is not to be stenographers, though there is a need for some of that. It is to be critical interlocutors and observers, to ask hard questions and to make people in power uncomfortable. At our best, we are the institutional voice of the public, the people with the money and time (at least in theory) to dig into matters of public interest and get answers, or at least ask the questions that need to be asked. To do that properly, we need to step down from our perch among the power brokers and return to our roots.
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Hank Kalet 