MEDIA WATCH

Normon Solomon's
2002 P.U.-litzer Prizes
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Navel-gazing news:
the US media’s narcissism bias

By Susan J. Douglas

Can the network news be saved, or is it really too late? Conservatives and progressives argue over whether the news is biased toward the left or the right, but the most important and corrosive bias (aside from corporatism) is narcissism bias. The networks have apparently ascertained that Americans are most interested in their bodies and themselves, so that’s all their news divisions report about. The Arab streets? Who cares about that when you can watch an "extreme makeover"?

Back in the ’70s, sociologist Herbert Gans noted the extent to which ethnocentrism influenced the news; the United States was always presumed to be the center of the universe – its values, customs, and attitudes those by which every other society should be judged. Today, except for rampaging weather systems and the very briefest nod to national politics, viewers aren’t even asked to focus on their own country. Instead, they are urged to focus on their navels.

On Oct. 9, for example, as Congress debated giving President Bush authority to initiate war against Iraq, ABC News provided no coverage of the debate, no soundbites of the positions taken by different politicians. Instead, it ran a long segment on the wonders of yoga. Other recent hard-hitting pieces have focused on the merits of walking, healthy people who go to the doctor too frequently, and promos – posing as news items – for upcoming Diane Sawyer interviews with self-absorbed, drug-prone celebrities.

So some viewers may have been surprised when, on Dec. 16, ABC ran a highly self-satisfied piece chiding the British news media for its preoccupation with scandal and fluff. Poor Tony Blair struggled to get coverage of his meeting and joint press conferences with the president of Syria: Nine stories, including those about Princess Diana’s former butler and Blair’s own wife struggling with her media image, got priority over this international news story. Tsk, tsk.

One suspects that this pot-calling-the-kettle-black form of journalism is the latest defensive response to the escalating criticism of, and defections from, network news. The network news used to constitute appointment viewing in our home, despite its infuriations. No more. We watch to see what the lead story is and then go have dinner, rather than endure the endless "news you can use" stories about personal health and fitness. The average audience for each of the networks has dropped in the past several years from about 11 million each night to about eight million.

Two new and important books document the news media’s ongoing decline in standards and service, the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11 partially excepted. The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril is written by Leonard Downie, Jr., the executive director of the Washington Post, and Robert G. Kaiser, an associate editor at the paper – hardly radical media critics.

To drive home how the move toward conglomeration in the media industries has led to entertainment values dominating – and undermining – the news, Downie and Kaiser corralled Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings and showed them broadcasts from the early ‘80s, when each man had just become his network’s anchor. All were taken aback by how much international news was in the older broadcast, often leading the roster of stories. Each man admitted that no such broadcast could be put on today.

The collective wisdom at the networks is that Americans want stories about baldness remedies and pet massage, and the networks intend to make us happy. NBC often airs two medical features per broadcast. ABC, Peter Jennings noted, has slashed the number of foreign correspondents and substitutes international news with stories about health and personal finance.

In The Press Effect by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman, both from the Annenberg School of Communication, where Jamieson is the dean, the authors remind us of the lazy and sloppy news coverage of the 2000 election and, most timely now, of the Gulf War.

They revisit how an unverified [Ed. Note: See Media Watch brief, next page] and highly emotional account of Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital and throwing them on the cold floor, orchestrated by the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, was used by Bush I to shift attention away from US oil interests as a war motivator and toward the analogy that Saddam Hussein was the reincarnation of Hitler. They show that the much-lauded Patriot missiles, on the nose cones of which viewers were invited to sit from the comfort of their living rooms, usually missed their targets, a pesky fact under-reported at the time.

How much better will the news do this time, when censorship will be heavy, and viewers back home will be given a magnifying mirror to look at themselves instead of a larger window to look outside?

Downie and Kaiser assert that the move toward infotainment isn’t working and may actually be unprofitable in the long run. (They note that the Post and the New York Times, for example, are doing well financially while CBS News and the Miami Herald, which have declined in quality, have lost a greater share of their audience.) This may be wishful thinking on their (and our) part, but the media activism movement should include an explicit rebuke of the narcissism bias. The narcissism bias encourages political withdrawal and apathy – actions, or rather inactions, that serve the current administration all too well.

The narcissism bias is what made the country so unprepared for, and clueless about, Sept. 11 in the first place.

Source: In These Times

The 2002
P.U.-litzer Prizes

By Norman Solomon

Jan. 3— For more than a decade now, the P.U.-litzer Prizes have gone to some of America’s stinkiest media performances each year. The competition was fierce as ever in 2002. Many journalistic pieces of work deserved recognition. Only a few could be chosen.

While making the selections, I have relied heavily on research by the staff of the media watch group FAIR (where I’m an associate). However, the responsibility for bestowing the latest P.U.-litzers is entirely mine.

Here are the 11th annual P.U.-litzer Prizes, for the foulest media achievements of 2002:

"Kicking Out History" Award:
Multiple winners
Dozens of esteemed journalists and major media outlets qualified for this prize by reporting that the Iraqi government had ejected UN weapons inspectors four years ago. Actually, the inspectors left Iraq in December 1998 under orders from UNSCOM head Richard Butler just before the blitz of US bombing dubbed "Operation Desert Fox."

With notable disregard for historical facts, many reporters at leading news organizations flatly asserted that Saddam Hussein had "expelled" or "kicked out" the UN inspectors. Among the purveyors of that misinformation were Daniel Schorr of National Public Radio (Aug. 3), John Diamond of USA Today (Aug. 8), John McWethy of "ABC World News Tonight" (Aug. 12), John King of CNN (Aug. 18), John L. Lumpkin of the Associated Press (Sept. 7), Randall Pinkston of "CBS Evening News" (Nov. 9), Betsy Pisik of the Washington Times (Nov. 14) and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post (Nov. 17).

Some outlets were repeat winners, as when USA Today claimed in a Sept. 4 editorial that "Saddam expelled UN weapons inspectors in 1998." Other prominent newspapers also made the false information a centerpiece of the positions that they espoused. The New York Times declared in an Aug. 3 editorial: "America’s goal should be to ensure that Iraq is disarmed of all unconventional weapons. ... To thwart this goal, Baghdad expelled United Nations arms inspectors four years ago." On the very next day, the Washington Post editorialized: "Since 1998, when UN inspectors were expelled, Iraq has almost certainly been working to build more chemical and biological weapons."

Gold Standard Prize: NBC News
Too savvy to go along with the theory that TV news producers are professionals who should edit stories without fear or favor, the decision-makers at "NBC Nightly News" devoted 69 minutes of coverage to the Winter Olympics, which aired in early 2002 on NBC. It just so happened that competing news shows on other networks saw much less news value in the games – "ABC World News Tonight" gave them 30 minutes, and the total on "CBS Evening News" amounted to 10 minutes.

Fabrication-Of-Exoneration Award: Cokie Roberts
Commenting on George W. Bush’s dubious role as a member of the board at Harken Energy, reporter-turned-pundit Cokie Roberts dismissed the idea that Bush might have been involved in corporate malfeasance during his corporate endeavors. "The president was exonerated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, saying he didn’t do anything illegal or improper on insider trading charges," she said on July 8. "But the Democrats won’t let it go." Roberts did not mention that Bush’s lawyers asked the Securities and Exchange Commission for a statement that he had been cleared – and the SEC responded that its initial letter "must in no way be construed as indicating that [Bush] has been exonerated or that no action may ultimately result from the staff’s investigation."

Media Darwinism Prize:
Barry Diller
As a longtime media tycoon now at the top of the Vivendi Universal conglomerate, Barry Diller isn’t shy about depicting his success as part of an upward evolutionary spiral. "Media is going to continue its trend of consolidation, which mirrors the ongoing globalization," Diller told the Los Angeles Times in March. "This is a natural law. It is inevitable."

Self-Slander Prize: Ann Coulter
Coulter is a best-selling author who likes to attack the news media for supposed left-wing bias and irresponsibility. During an August interview with the New York Observer, she said: "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."

Self-Satisfaction Prize:
CNN anchor Jack Cafferty
On CNN’s "American Morning" program Aug. 5, Cafferty mixed candor with exemplary media arrogance: "This is a commercial enterprise. This is not PBS. We’re not here as a public service. We’re here to make money. We sell advertising, and we do it on the premise that people are going to watch. If you don’t cover the miners because you want to do a story about a debt crisis in Brazil at the time everybody else is covering the miners, then Citibank calls up and says, ‘You know what? We’re not renewing the commercial contract.’ I mean it’s a business."

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MEDIA BRIEFS

Latin America: freedom of expression in trouble

The fight against pressure on the media and laws limiting freedom of expression will be a test over the next year for authorities in Latin America and the Caribbean, where 261 journalists have been killed over the last 14 years.

Last year was one of the worst in the past decade for press workers in the region, due to the increase in restrictions on reporting and attacks from governments and criminal groups, said two of the main international organizations that monitor the rights of journalists.

The Inter-American Press Association (SIP) has reported that since 1988, 112 journalists have been killed in Colombia, 37 in Mexico, 21 in Guatemala, 20 in Brazil, and 19 in Peru.

Seven press workers were killed in Latin America in 2000, 11 in 2001, and eight in 2002.

Attacks on reporters is on the rise, increasing from 114 documented cases in 2001 to 170 this year, Linda Hemby, according to a spokeswoman for the El Salvador-based Journalists Against Corruption (PFC). (IPS)

HBO adds disclaimer
to Gulf War movie

Responding to a Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) activism campaign, HBO recently added a message to the end of its movie Live From Baghdad, clarifying the scenes that seemingly endorsed the fraudulent stories about Iraqi soldiers removing Kuwaiti babies from incubators. The film, a fictionalized account of CNN’s coverage of the Persian Gulf War, leaves viewers with the impression that these events actually happened. HBO’s message, which appears after the end of the credits, reads:

"While the allegations of Iraqi soldiers taking babies from incubators were widely circulated during the run-up to the Gulf War (the time frame of the drama of our film), these allegations were never substantiated."

Since most TV viewers don’t watch the entire end credits, it is doubtful that many people will ever see the clarification. And while it’s helpful that HBO has acknowledged a problem in its film, to say that the claims were "never substantiated" is an understatement. It would be more accurate to that attempts to confirm the story after the Gulf War uncovered evidence that it was a fabrication; for example, a senior Kuwaiti health official told ABC’s World News Tonight (3/15/91), "I think this is something just for propaganda." The main source for the atrocity report, presented in a congressional hearing as a Kuwaiti war refugee, turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US; she had been coached in her account by the public relations agency Hill &Knowlton. (FAIR)

New muzzle on Zimbabwe press

The last vestiges of the independent media in Zimbabwe face new pressure as the government prepares for next week’s launch of a repressive new licensing system which will give it the power to close any newspaper and to stop any journalist from working.

The latest incident in an escalating campaign by President Robert Mugabe’s government to muzzle the critical independent press is the firing of the editor of Zimbabwe’s Daily News, Geoffery Nyarota. Nyarota, the founder and editor of the country’s most widely read newspaper, was fired on Dec. 30 by the Daily News’s board of directors. The assistant editor, Davison Maruziva, resigned in protest at the action.

Although the Daily News board has suggested it fired Nyarota on managerial grounds, it appears the board chairman, Sam Nkomo, succumbed to pressure from the government. According to media sources, the board feared that the government would refuse to register the paper under the new regulations if Nyarota remained as editor.

The Daily News, launched by Nyarota in 1999, crusades against corruption and human rights abuses. Its stances earned it a large following and it overtook the state-owned Herald as the country’s largest selling newspaper. (Guardian UK)

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