News of the World and the World of News Danny Schechter Editor and "News Dissector," Mediachannnel.org Democratic Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards says the United states is divided into "two Americas" -- one rich and one poor. But there are far more than two when it comes to the way Americans relate to, visualize and connect with the larger world. Americans live in a media saturated country where impressions are formed by images of what we see and hear. Public opinion is heavily influenced by news agendas. When a story is not on television, it often does not exist for most Americans. Our news organizations tend to cover the Americans in the world rather than what other peoples are doing and saying. Americans at war get extensive coverage; Americans involved in humanitarian work rarely do. Wars, coups and disasters get attention; the fight poorer countries are waging for development to wipe out killer diseases does not. Over the last twenty years, most networks have closed many of their overseas news bureaus, and rely on "breaking news" reports that avoid context and background. With show biz techniques infiltrating into news biz templates, formulas and formats, It is a paradox -- the more Americans watch TV, the less they seem to know about the world. This is tragic because global broadcasters have the power and reach to serve as watchdogs on power and promote transparency and accountability by our political leaders. While their branding stresses the idea of a global community linked by television, their content often promotes consumerism and celebrity worship. There often is a conflict between the commercial and market imperatives that drive their relentless pursuit for ratings and revenues on the one hand, and the larger global public interest on the other. TV broadcasters could devote more of their program time to explaining the divide between countries and cultures in conflict. They could be doing stories on conflict resolution, and those that work for peace and best practices. They could be doing a lot. They are not. WHY? As cable and satellite broadcasters now fragment TV audiences, 24 hour News networks became leaders in TV News. In the US, Fox News is positioned on the right and is not only seen as a mouthpiece for the Republican right and the Administration but has gone from a domestic news brand to an international one. It now is seen in 51 countries. THE RISE OF CNN CNN is more centrist. It has a number of channels. An international channel headed by a former BBC executive covers the world widely but it is not seen on most US cable outlets. During the Iraq war, CNN mounted two coverage teams -- one for the US audience and one for the rest of the world. They were often quite different in focus and approach perhaps because CNN understood that world audiences would not be attracted to cheerleading for war in the place of real news. When Ted Turner launched CNN on June l, 1980, he boasted it would be on the air until the world ended, playing "Nearer My God To Thee," as it was performed on the Titanic when it went down. He hoisted the UN flag over his Atlanta headquarters to express his global ambitions for a 24-hour news channel to unite one world under television. Turner was derided; CNN dismissed as the "Chicken Noodle Network." Operational control soon turned over to news pros who followed conventional thinking and TV formulas. Their fidelity was to the market, not Turner's mission. They packaged a video version of all-news radio. Among themselves -- and I was there -- they admitted that more news is not better news; their job was to fill the vacuum. Revolutionary in audacity but conservative in content, CNN branded itself as the place to go whenever you wanted to see news. Its signature was going "Live." Its baptism of glory came with the Persian Gulf War. As ratings rose, CNN's reputation rose with it. As cable penetration of households expanded, its influence grew. Two decades on, CNN is just one synergized component of a larger conglomerate TimeWarner, with multi-channels and websites. It has been called a "Media Planet," + On Its Own because of its size and power. It spawned clones and competitors locally, nationally and internationally: Fox, MSNBC, CNBC, Bloomberg and foreign challengers such as BBC and CBC. Their sameness overshadows their differences. They all look like news is supposed to look. There are anchors, sets, sound effects and graphics. Most of the serious programming consists of pundit-driven panels with "experts" out of central casting, picked for stereotyped stances and skills as putdown artists. They generate heat, not light. Except in crises, most of what we see on cable is not news but info-tainment, stock-market reports, weather forecasts, happy-talk chatter, soft features, celebrity interviews and dueling advocates. As the late journalist Michael Kelly explained: "You have this great maw that has to be filled. It can't be filled with facts. There aren't enough facts. It can't be filled with wisdom, because there are not enough wise people around. And it can't be filled with cleverness, because cleverness is hard to come by. So it's filled with blatherers." And high-speed car chases, burning yachts and other vehicles in distress. Meanwhile, in the ratings, Fox now seems to be beating CNN at its own game -- to the further corruption of Turner's founding vision. "CNN is reduced to the degradation of imitating its inferior - but much snazzier and jazzier - competition," critic Tom Shales wrote recently. "It has a more Fox-like look on the air, and that includes not only making its 'shows' more personality-dominated -- Lou Dobbs doesn't merely have his name above the title of 'Moneyline,' his name is part of the title -- but also making the promos much more aggressive, trashier and so excessively frequent as to be virtually inescapable." We are witnessing a diminishing commitment to journalism on the cable news networks. The form is there but the substance is shrinking as diversity of sources narrows and journalists are bailing out or being cut back at the newspapers whose content often sets TV's news agenda. On the air, there is a blur. It is hard to recognize who is even a journalist. Watch CNN and Fox as I do each morning, and you find the weather people having more face-time than journalists -- and they're not just commenting on barometric pressure. Next problem, the hyperactive story-count: more news in less time. This headline hit parade is interrupted by "Breaking News" signaled with heart-pounding noise and flashy logos. To keep you on fast forward, there is that ticker of moving type. So how do you retain any meaning? You don't. We end up with a scrambled understanding of events, as the anchors distort news by over-dramatizing incidents and pumping out visual footage with little time for interpretation, context or background. Correspondents who keep updating stories have little time to report them. They're forced to pretend to know more than they possibly can, while doing what the industry calls SLRs ("silly live remotes") -- standing in front of buildings for hours on end. Ted Turner promised more than he could deliver, as do all 24-hour cable-news-a-thons. Yes, there are some good programs and thoughtful journalists. But are they enough in a post-9/11 world when our survival depends on us all understanding so much more? The lack of global awareness in America is not just a media problem. Our schools and universities offer little in-depth instruction on international issues. They most focus on practical training, career preparation and standardized subjects, with standardized tests to measure absorption and performance. ELECTION '04 Parochialism seems to trump global awareness; It is not surprising that in our presidential election, John Kerry is frequently attacked for his French background with distorted putdowns. Zell Miller, the Democrat keynoting the GOP convention raved with a messianic fanaticism. "Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending. I want Bush to decide," he snarled. The delegates cheered him on with chants of "USA, USA." At times, a number of proclaimed enemies merged into one in his angry speech. The terrorists and the dissenters, the pundits and the press all were spoken of as an enemy. Our military was represented as the savior of our democracy: "it is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest." Clearly stressing America's superiority and right to do whatever it wants in the world is a core component of strategy that is driven by chauvinism, a sense of divine right, and crass appeals to patriotism. This is worldview that takes pride in not knowing about the world. It is not surprising that half of the members of Congress do not have passports and have never traveled outside the US. Global information and expertise is there when you go looking for it. The Internet is a portal into news and knowledge about the world, but in large part most Americans have little daily exposure to the larger world and do not use many of the tools that are there. THE GROWING GAP There is a growing gap between how many Americans view a changing world and how they understand America's place in it. A University of Maryland study released in June 2004 found "A majority of people in the world do not feel the world is going in the best direction, a view strongly linked to the view -- held by a majority -- that the United States is not having a positive influence in the world. A majority of world opinion views globalization positively, but large number of people -- especially in rich countries -- say that the rich are not fair in trade negotiations with poor countries and discriminate against the poor. In most countries the UN is well trusted." These are some of the findings from a new poll of 18,797 people from 19 countries around the world conducted by the international polling firm Globescan (formerly Environics International) and analyzed in conjunction with the Program on International Policy Attitudes of the University of Maryland. The polls were conducted November 2003 through February 2004 in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, France Germany, Great Britain, India, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, Uruguay, and the United States. Yet even as their studies identify a major gap between how they see "us" and what we know about "them," there is still far more interest about the world among Americans than is reflected in our media or among our politicians. This trend forms a part of this story but it receives little coverage because it points to misperceptions in the media and among political leaders. A new book "Misreading the Public" explores these misperceptions. The book asks: "Do American policymakers really know what the American public wants in US foreign policy?" Here is what it says: "Through extensive interviews with members of the policy community, the authors, Steven Kull and I.M. Destler, reveal a pervasive belief -- especially in Congress -- that, in the wake of the cold war, the public is showing a new isolationism: opposition to foreign aid, hostility to the United Nations and aversion to contributing US troops to peacekeeping operations. This view of the public has in turn had a significant impact on US foreign policy. But when the authors tested these assumptions in a national, in-depth poll, they found this to be a misperception." In short, the public believes one thing while politicians insist they believe something else. If the data points one way, why do political leaders prefer the other? Pollster Daniel Yankelovich, President and Founder, Public Agenda, confirms the validity of the study: " Misreading the Public" shows that Americans are not as isolationist, anti-UN, anti-UN peacekeeping, or anti-foreign aid as Washington policy makers believe; it demonstrates that Americans do not approach foreign policy from a narrow what's-in-it-for-us self-interest, but from a deeply moral commitment to our national responsibility for maintaining world peace and well-being; and it nails the fact that members of Congress systematically misread, misinterpret, and distort the public's stance on foreign policy. This leads to what the American movie star Groucho Marx used to call "the hundred dollar question": "why?" Why do these misperceptions persist? Wouldn't politicians benefit by responding to what the public really wants and believes? The answers to these questions take us beyond the realm of contested issues and bi-partisanship into the often sub-rosa worlds of interests and ideology. In a political and media system riddled with deceptions of every kind -- just follow the findings of the 911 Commission and the Senate Committees exploring the "group think" on pre-war Iraq "intelligence" on WMDs and the like -- self-deception is common. There is a tendency among politicians and journalists alike to conform to the dominant narrative, to be unwilling to question the conventional wisdom even when it is blatantly wrong. MY OWN INVESTIGATION That is what I found while writing a book on the media coverage of the war in Iraq ("Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception," Prometheus Publishers) and making WMD, a film about the media coverage of the war on Iraq where virtually all American media outlets boosted the war. One study found that of 800 "experts" on the air in the run-up to the war, only six opposed it. The evidence confirming this analysis is now in from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. They studied US war coverage and found "the guest lists of major nightly newscasts were dominated by government and military officials, disproportionately favored pro-war voices, and marginalized dissenters." Starting the day after the invasion of Iraq began, the three-week study covered the most intense weeks of the war (3/20/03-4/9/03). It examined 1,617 on-camera sources in stories about Iraq on six major evening newscasts: ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports, Fox News Channel's Special Report with Brit Hume, and PBS's NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. Among their findings: "Official voices dominate: 63% of all sources were current or former government employees. U.S. officials alone accounted for more than half (52%) of all sources." The New York Times Paul Krugman contrasted US and British coverage, charging that US outlets "behaved like state-run media." Geneva Overholser, a former ombudsperson at the Washington Post, now with the Poynter Institute, agrees. "The comments I've been hearing about U.S. media becoming ever more like state-run media seem to me to evoke something deeper than partisanship or ideology. What I sense is a narrowing of the discussion, an echo chamber of conventionalism. Sure, we have the appearance of controversy, what with our shouting heads and sneering pundits. But real debate -- substantive representation of viewpoints not currently in vogue, of people not currently in power, of issues not currently appearing in our narrowly-focused eye -- is almost absent" This total lack of balance on the screen concealed an unreported confluence of issues behind the scenes. It is a case of collusion, even complicity between broadcasters and the Pentagon. There, in the "patriotic correctness" of post 911 America, TV anchors and newscasters were fooled. Most bought the "Kool Aid" of US government claims. In the absence of any skeptics or alternative views, they surrounded themselves with experts from Beltway think tanks, Pentagon officials, retired military officers, etc etc. Soon most crossed the line from journalism to jingoism talking in terms of "we" as if the networks were fighting the war. They bought into the logic and inevitability of pre-emptive war, rarely challenging its skewed assumptions and flawed "intelligence." As one editor of the Washington Post explained after his paper and the New York Times issued modified "mea culpas" for their slanted coverage 'what's the point of raising these points, the war is going to happen.' Behind the scenes, media companies were lobbying the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the US broadcast regulators, for rule changes on media ownership, to benefit their bottom lines. A question was raised by some observers: "did the FCC agree to waive their rules if the media agreed to wave the flag?" This sounds like a crude conspiratorial explanation when in fact it just speaks to the common 'you scratch my back, I will scratch yours" way business is done in Washington where special interest lobbyist often wield real power. This relationship was involving the media and was, of course, not covered by the media. Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy told me: "The reason the coverage, in part was so tepid, was so timid was because these same media companies like News Corp Fox, GE, NBC, Viacom, CBS, were trying to curry favor to win the support of the Bush administration for this huge give-away on media ownership" U.S. Congressman Maurice Hensche went further explaining: "This is not something that happened yesterday. It didn't happen overnight. It has been going on here in the United States for about 2 decades at least. And it's been a process, it's been an organized, concerted, thought out, well planned, and well executed process, going on back to the Reagan administration, flowing through the first Bush administration and now being picked up successfully so far by the second Bush administration. "This is a plan, it's a plan, it's not serendipitous, and it doesn't happen accidentally, it's what they want. They want to be able to control the political discussion." And sometimes they have other interests. General Electric, the company that owns NBC and other cable channels won $600 million in contracts to aid in the "reconstruction" of Iraq. THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY What this analysis suggests is that there are reasons we see what we do -- or alternatively -- do not see what's important. The main one is because there are often unexamined or hidden interests at play. Here is an example: While the networks covered the formal speeches at the Republican National Convention in New York, public television journalist Bill Moyers took his cameras to glitzy parties where defense contractors entertained and lobbied members of Congress with power over government contracts and appropriations. His reports on the non-commercial PBS got closer to the truth of what was happening than all the hoopla and hype on the other channels. Similar reports at the Democratic convention did the same. These same patterns of coverage appear in coverage of the world at large when images take precedence over explanations. For example, we see the horror of events in countries like the Sudan and Chechnya without much background or reference to the role of oil or economic interests. Media analysts have documented similar gaps and omissions in coverage of almost every major military conflict. What is happening in the world is important and interesting -- when presented in a way that interests readers and viewers. Americans who mostly come from other countries are diverse and connected to the world from the Mid-western farmers who export grain, to the many companies that do business in China. Sadly our media is not doing it all it could to keep Americans informed despite the occasional stories about "why they hate us" in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. As President Bush vows to build a safer world, much of the world says they fear him more than Osama bin Laden. In a global age our world is increasingly interconnected and interdependent. America is not and cannot be an island unto itself. Sadly the first place to find news of the world is now in the world of news. I joined media to spotlight the problems of the world and found that the media is one of those problems. Can thinking people, globally aware people and media workers continue to ignore this problem? Making media matter is our responsibility too. WHAT CAN BE DONE? Complaints tend to be ventilated about the lowering quality of media. This problem demands to be addressed. Professor Robert McChesney's latest book is called "The Problem of the Media." He is one of the few academics who promote and organize a media reform movement. In his view, "The symptoms of the crisis of the U.S. media are well-known -- a decline in hard news, the growth of info-tainment and advertorials, staff cuts and concentration of ownership, increasing conformity of viewpoint and suppression of genuine debate. " He points out the ways in which the existing media system has become a threat to democracy, and shows how it could be made to serve the interests of the majority. There is no question that the public is open to, if not totally supportive of, media reform. A Pew Foundation poll some years back found that 70% of the American public was dissatisfied with the media, for a range of reasons, and that 70% of people in the media shared that dissatisfaction. When Lou Dobbs asked his CNN audience in late 2003 if "big media" monopolies should be decentralized, 5000 people responded and a whopping 96% agreed. Nearly three million Americans wrote to Congress and the FCC to protest new rule changes that would make for media ownership in fewer hands. Several political candidates also addressed the issue. Media coverage of the Dean campaign turned negative after Governor Dean took up the issue. "Who would think that this issue would arouse as much interest as it did?" asked the Washington Post's own media watcher Howard KURTZ who showed a stunning personal disconnect about public attitudes on one of the key issues he writes about. "Not me" he admitted. He characterized this broad public response as a revolution. The challenge now is how to stop the way the media is spun so blatantly to distort the truth. THE LEFT-RIGHT DIVIDE If conservatives are adept at using media for selling their ideas, liberal politicians tend to be vaguer and more responsive to questioners as if their interrogators are sincere in wanting responses. The whole Q&A format tends to simplify issues and result in incomplete responses. The truth is that show biz has merged with news biz with little real scrutiny of the issues and how they are formulated. On the left, there is more distrust and dislike of the media but not necessarily any agreement on what can be done to challenge and confront it. The MediaChannel.org, the organization I am part of, believes we can lobby on electoral issues and media issues at the same time. At Meachannel.org, we are trying to galvanize public interest on media coverage of elections because the coverage is so crucial to their outcomes. We set up "Media for Democracy 2004," a non-partisan citizens' initiative to monitor mainstream news coverage of the 2004 elections and advocate standards of reporting that are more democratic and issues-oriented. Media for Democracy educates and activates a growing base of concerned citizens by delivering alerts -- breaking news and analysis of mainstream media election coverage. A GLOBAL MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT A media and democracy movement is bubbling up from below worldwide, with parents calling for a more informative way of rating TV shows to safeguard their children, teachers promoting media literacy, activists asking for corporate accountability, consumers demanding enforcement of antitrust laws, media watchers critiquing news coverage, critics seeking more meaningful program content, producers creating alternative work and independent producers like me agitating for better and fairer journalism. From my own travels to Japan and conversations with Japanese media professionals, this analysis has resonance. When I visited NHK, I was impressed with the wide range of international news sources that are tapped for its newscasts. At the same time, the airwaves seem deluged with sensationalistic shows that dumb down information. I have heard many complaints from journalists in Japan about media trends that sound very much like the problems I am identifying and confronting. This means that the "problem of the media" is a global one -- that demands more international debate, discussion and action. Despite the language differences, we can and must work together. Profile Page Top "News Dissector" Danny Schechter, a former network TV producer (ABC,CNN) edits Mediachannel.org. His new film WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception) critiques media coverage of the Iraq war. He was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard and holds degrees from Cornell University and the London School of Economics. See www.wmdthefilm.com. For his books, see www.newsdissector.org/dissectorville Write: dissector@mediachannel.org