The final post

It is with this entry that knohme duh ploom ends its semester reign over the world of the internet. There have been good times and bad, bad postings and even worse postings, and even a "comment" left by an internet porn proprietor who "read" a posting and "invited" the writer to "check out her site."

Indeed, it is through this cutting edge medium that the exploration of the relationship between the government of the United States and the mass media was examined closely. The postings here are certainly not exhaustive and absolute, but rather a hands-on partaking of this relationship.

Alas, the final post will deal with a popular topic over the course of this blog: President Bush. (Clearly writers like Dan Hallin and Lance Bennett point to the focusing on official sources--none more official than the president--as an inherent problem within the media, but too bad. We're not breaking any stories on this site, we're trying to understand stories broken elsewhere.)

And what a story we got from Sunday's NY Times to go out with--it deals with the government, defining before seeing, public opinion, and the mass media. Yeehaw.

Click here to be wowed.

http://nytimes.com/2005/12/04/politics/04strategy.html?hp&ex=1133758800&en=eded032aae63bdcc&ei=5094&partner=homepage


So we have a governmental figure using the mass media, in this case a televised "pseudo-event", to influence the public's opinion.

We must first define Lippmann's view on the news to discuss how Bush used it as an institution to frame his message.

"The press...has come to be regarded as an organ of direct democracy...The Court of Public Opinion , open day and night, is to lay down the law for everything all the time. ... the quality of the news about modern societyis an index of its social organization. The better the institutions, the more all interests concerned are formally represented, the more issues are disentangled, the more objective criteria are introduced, the more perfectly an affair can be presented as news. At its best the press is a servant and guardian of institutions..." (229, my emphasis).

So simply by carrying Bush's speech, which comes in the midst of a public movement away from supporting the war in Iraq, news organizations and networks made a conscious decision to make his speech "news". But as explored in the New York Times article, no real new substance was broached, no specifics about stopping the insurgency and ensuring American troops' safety were given.

Rather, the speech was clearly written to influence Public Opinion; not to necessarily outline plans to win the war but the make sure the American people would support it long enough that it could be won.

"He used the word victory 15 times in the address; "Plan for Victory" signs crowded the podium he spoke on; and the word heavily peppered the accompanying 35-page National Security Council document titled, "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq." Although White House officials said many federal departments had contributed to the document, its relentless focus on the theme of victory strongly reflected a new voice in the administration: Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who joined the N.S.C. staff as a special adviser in June and has closely studied public opinion on the war."

So, a political scientist who was by all accounts weaned on Lippmann wrote Bush's speech knowing he could manipulate the big PO by repeated imagery.

"This is not really a strategy document from the Pentagon about fighting the insurgency," said Christopher F. Gelpi, Dr. Feaver's colleague at Duke and co-author of the research on American tolerance for casualties. "The Pentagon doesn't need the president to give a speech and post a document on the White House Web site to know how to fight the insurgents. The document is clearly targeted at American public opinion."

Because President Bush knows anytime for the rest of his life he can call a "press conference" without answering questions and have it be reprinted and broadcast in full, and because he was able to freely give his message--which was crafted by someone who understands the relationship we've been studying all semester--he was able to reach the American people uninterrupted with the clear goal of changing their minds on the war.

It's not necessarily that he's a dirty politician, but rather a smart one, relying on a seemingly last ditch effort to join em if you can't beat em in order to get one final charge in on Public Opinion.

But if you care about the lives of strangers and wish the US would stop making enemies sooner rather than later, "one of us" joining up with a politcian has to be borderline scary.

Dr. Feaver and his colleagues wrote: "Mounting casualties did not produce a reflexive collapse in public support. The Iraq case suggests that under the right conditions, the public will continue to support military operations even when they come with a relatively high human cost."

Think about that.


I'll see you along the way. Good night and good luck. Stay Classy, America. Good night Chet, good night David. Courage. And that's the way it is.

Walter Lipp, man

The further we go in this semester, it seems the more hopeless, for lack of a better word, the world around us is. That is, whether it's news bias, personal or information, stereotypes, or even the tendency to ignore unions in reporting, it begins to seem almost impossible to walk outside, watch a man break a stick, and actually know if you just walked outside and watched a man break a stick.

Perhaps he was a transsexual, or even a hermaphrodite, or just a mannish woman? Maybe the stick was more twig than stick, or more baseball bat than twig?

Walter Lippmann's famed statement, "we do not first see and then define, we define and then see" calls into question if what we actually think we see is truly so, or if our preconceptions intrinsically morph our brains into creating a type of smoke screen to filter images into what we subconsciously want them to be.

Now, that's not to say everyone should go all Roland Barthes and call language a barrier that makes meaning further removed an extraneous step. But it is important to realize that Lippmann is in many rights correct--humans accrue knowledge which they unnecessarily use to shape what they see and learn in the future.

What's the point of retaining anything if you're not going to use it in the future?

That said, however, there are certainly negative aspects to working in stereotypes. Take for example the group below, which defined its stance on President Bush's Supreme Court nominees (several of which were never really in contention) months in advance, before hearing any criticism that might deter what they ended up seeing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/14/politics/politicsspecial1/14progress.html?pagewanted=all

"Though the group describes itself as an independent grass-roots organization, it receives millions of dollars from the president's largest fund-raisers, is run by former Bush campaign aides and draws heavy support from a Republican lobbying and consulting firm in Washington.
As a result, Progress for America often functions like an unofficial extension of the White House, advancing the president's policies alongside the Republican National Committee. "

By aligning itself with the administration regardless of any of Bush's future actions, the group predefines what it is to see. That is, by becoming more than a staunch supporter, the group doesn't allow itself the chance to even think about criticizing or disagreeing with a Bush policy, because it has already ascribed to a "can do no harm" view of the president.

Definitions do change what people see. Just ask recently defeated Rep. candidate for governor of NJ, who is claiming in the wake of his horrible showing at the polls that by being lumped in with President Bush--who he claims has gained a negative image in the last few weeks due to the horrific handling of Katrina--he lost an election that had little to do with the president.

That little "R" next to his name at the polls is the most basic of definitions we have in this country, and yet instead mobilizing a party line, it may have cost Doug Forrester the state.

Instead of focusing specifically on "the issues" the Forrester claims his opponent, Dem. Jon Corzine tried repeatedly to link Forrester to Bush, which he hoped would play on people's changing definition of Bush so they'd see a negative image of Forrester as well.

---As a result, he said, "it was not a foolish thing" that Mr. Corzine had sought repeatedly to link him to the Bush administration. "If Bush's numbers were where they were a year ago, or even six months ago, I think we would have won on Tuesday," Mr. Forrester told the newspaper, in his first interview since losing to Mr. Corzine, by 53 percent to 44 percent. "Katrina was the tipping point."---

The rest of the story is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/14/nyregion/metrocampaigns/14bush.html

I have refrained from using the name of the group in the first example until now in order to underlie my point. By calling itself Progress for America, the group seeks to predefine itself to the hoi polloi, so that they will "see" what the group wants them to see--a progressive, positive group seeking to improve the US, not a partisan group receiving millions a year from the president's own party to further his agenda.

By that logic, I am hereby renaming this blog "The greatest blog ever, by which all future blogs will be compared."

Now if that works, we'll really know Lippmann was on to something.

Blog Series

Read this awesome story about the conglomeration of the media.

Everything owns everything else.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/al/whitesox/2005-10-21-white-sox-chicago-press_x.htm

Go chisox or something.

BLOG CABIN --- Four Information Biases (That matter)...

In News: The Politics of Illusion, W. Lance Bennet identifies four information biases inherent in the news. They are: personalization, dramatization, fragmentation, and the authority-disorder bias.

Personalization examines the media's tendency to "downplay the big social, economic, or political picture in favor of human trials, tragedies, and triumphs..."

A good example of this type of bias can be seen in this story about Tulane students returning to their school after Hurricane Katrina. The story doesn't mention government actions or dollars committed to the clean-up; however this is not what appalled me after a closer inspection of the Web site of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. On the right, there lists the most e-mailed (ostensibly the most popular) stories from the day. Among those (excluding the sports stories--hell, I'd be emailing the heck out of what Pujols did the other night too) the second highest rated story is about diet do's and don't's during pregnancy, a story about an apparent plagiarism, and a mention of the Supreme Court decision to deny an abortion (personalization of the case and story).

Dramatization can be tough to analyze since journalism schools require students to learn to write stories and tell stories in their articles. It is the accepted form of communicating news. This BBC editorial--which ironically starts out criticizing reporters--is actually broken down into "chapters" about the Iraq war and referrendum situation. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4349248.stm

Fragmentation shows that over time, stories aren't interrelated enough to show the big picture. Because of this, finding meaning in lone stories is near impossible. Almost as impossible as finding a link to support this.

The Authority-Disorder Bias is perhaps the most obvious bias in our news media to see. Because official sources are quoted and followed for stories, their arrival at places of "disorder" is treated "objectively" as authority saving the day.

Look at this link. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/19/national/19flood.html.

Later gator.

Blogging Molly

Tocquville will henceforth be known as 'T'.

T is for touchy. T is for truth.

That's the short of it.

The long of it is, yeah, T has some really valid points. It's not just cynicism on my part or his part--it's reality.

Was he right in 1831? Yes. Consider the fact that the US then and now doesn't trust its populace to vote for the president on its own. The electoral college was established originally because our founders didn't really trust the people to be informed enough to make their own choice.

Back then, it was practicality. Now, I don't know what it is that allows a person with fewer popular votes to reach the White House. Make a difference! Your vote counts! Well, not really.

And if you really do want to see your vote have a chance to select a winner, you'd better pick one of two similar white men who have the funding to mount a campaign. T says that "...to place [one]self in contrast with so huge a body, [on]e is instantly overwhelmed by the sense of [one]'s own insignificance and weakness," which is precisely how'd you feel if you voted for Ralph Nader.

Free to make a choice? Sure. It won't really count in the end. Insignificane? Weakness? You bet.

As far as the mass media aspect, not only do the media dictate the discussion--as we've seen in McChesney, they are known for ignoring labor issues etc.--but they also dictate the discussion among those whose actually consume them. In other words, the words "mass media" are misleading. I would argue that at least half our class doesn't read a newspaper, and we're coming from a relatively privileged sector of the class.

It's hard not to agree with T in the context of the current administration.

If you're not with us, you're against us. Oh really? Makes sense. UN doesn't want US agression? Meh.

... represses not only all contest, but all controversy...

Is that why when the media reported Bush's rhetoric before the invasion of Iraq as straight news, without much discussion, people went along with it?

The reliance on official sources...

...allows official sources to brainwash the public...

and people can only change their minds when it's too late

So W fits T to a t. At one point, 76% of people supported the war. Saddam. 9/11. They're linked, I swear.

It's a democracy, sure, but you can't really have any tangible power--just ask the original 24% or the current 57% who don't want this war...

"Despotism would degrade men without tormenting them."

T is for Torment. Torment is when you can't vote because you're black in Florida. Torment is when you think you have a say but you're not listened to.

It's degrading that people on both sides will continue to be tormented by clone candidates under the veil of democracy.

Ask Ralph Nader.

Now, in the end, would you rather be able to vote in a flawed system, or live somewhere where you'd might step on a mine on the way to the first democratic elections in 50 years? T is a bit over-the-Top. But it can seem that there's no hope. America has it right in theory, maybe not in practice. Al Gore was a tool anyway. Obviously, I can still dream and try to make change without feeling like it's an impossibility. My Thoughts aren't controlled; I'm typing this, right?

Am I offended as an American? No. Do I trust my country not to have to cut the president's and first lady's head off at the guillotine because the people don't have cake to eat?

YES. And if all else fails, you can always post antiwar lyrics at the bottom of a faceless weblog.

T is for Tin Soldiers and Nixon's coming.

Virtually Classless---Examples of Structural Bias in the Meeeeedia

In The Problem of the Media Robert McChesney identifies three areas of inherent bias in the news media:

1--The reliance on official sources

2--The lack of context and contextualization (ie, the "big picture")

3--The covert corporate bias--dig here, not there, dig this, not that.

McChesney writes that journalists cover every thing a politician or official source says and does and makes that the news. Sending writers to quote leaders originally kept the newspapers from taking flak from the readership and it "is a crucial factor in explaining why the coverage of the U.S. presidency has grown dramatically...reporters are assigned to the White House and they file stories regularly, regardless of what is taking place" (69).

An example here is a speech in which W reiterated his stance that the US will stay in Iraq for some time to come. This is not and shouldn't have been treated as breaking news, since it's obvious based on every speech he's made in months that the US will stay there. Even the article goes on to discuss the image problem facing Bush. Reading between the lines, the article is more about Bush making a speech than the content of the speech. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/24/AR2005082401454.html

The fact is, the news is that Bush spoke, not really what he had to say. This, McChesney would argue, is part of the problem--the news covers leaders' meetings, speeches, lunches and dinners, without really discerning which actually directly impacts the country and its residents. Politicians, like everyone, talk a lot--but that doesn't mean everything they say is "news."

As far as his argument on the lack of contextualization, there are exceptions; however it seems that too often the larger picture is accomplished only through columns like this http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/politics/16assess.html?hp&ex=1126929600&en=a4c523ffedd97d22&ei=5094&partner=homepage, and not through regular news articles. McChesney takes issue with the fact that you have to go to a story called "news analysis" to see the "big picture."

The corporate bias cannot be fully explored in a link or two, but this Business Week smattering concerns four major corporations and their losses in Katrina without a single mention of the common man's losses, or damage done to neighborhoods, or school systems. http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8CK83TO4.htm?campaign_id=apn_home_down&chan=db

Still, I would have to disagree with much of what McChesney says in this argument, because America is a corporate nation, newspapers are owned by companies, and the average person will identify and understand an article on Wal-Mart than one on a local issue of welfare across the country. That said, his book does not discuss the issue of Enron/Kenneth Lay etc., and even he would have to admit that coverage of companies like Halliburton has been largely critical. I suppose he hates the idea that the only time corporations are dealt with in the news is when they make news for being in trouble.

the real post...i'm still smarter though

Tonight's top ten list (though it might be fewer than ten if I get tired)...

What we actually know about Hurricane Katrina

1. It happened! http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/08/27/national/main798725.shtml

In the above story, CBS/AP also report that New Orleans still had 20% of its residents within the city limits when she came. Whoops.

2. Thousands of people probably died, but likely not tens of thousands. Hard to treat that as good news, isn't it? http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09cnd-storm.html?hp&ex=1126324800&en=fa6ffd5834d3800e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

3. Everyone in the freakin' world knew that New Orleans was a ticking timebomb, including my meterologist friends, the Tragically Hip, New Orleans' own newspaper, and countless little kids who grew up hearing tales about how unsafe the city was in the case of a hurricane before bedtime.

Except Bush. http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,372455,00.html

4. There was a mandatory evacuation ordered before the hurricane's landfall. http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1761538,00.html

5. Kathy was down from level five to four when it hit land. http://www.capitalnews9.com/content/headlines/?ArID=146824&SecID=33

6. FEMA does offer a comprehensive plan for those in the path of a hurricane: http://www.fema.gov/hazards/hurricanes/hurricaf.shtm

7. Unfortunately, in a city where almost a third of the people live(d) below the poverty line, access to the internet and its endless information on preparedness seems as elusive as W when things are going wrong. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9163091/

8. Things were horrible in Miss. and Alabama too, you know. http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/29/hurricane.katrina/

9. This is the biggest Red Cross project in recorded history. http://www.nola.com/newslogs/breakingtp/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_Times-Picayune/archives/2005_08_30.html

10. Fair or not, the media HAVE kept Bush under scrutiny. He has yet to give a national address concerning his plan. http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,372455,00.html

Obie, did you really think I was gonna hang myself for littering?

I'm smarter than you

Dun Dun Dun....the media lied to us. ahahahahahahah. they lied about the hurricane. was there even a hurricane? who knows--it's all one giant lie. i've never ever seen New Orleans, so how can I trust that the media are showing New Orleans and not somewhere else?