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I suppose the editors at Newsweek should be credited with acknowledging that “the analogy isn’t exact,” but I still find myself thinking they would have done better by not going there at all. Although, if I squint and cock my head just so, maybe they’re right: images of flag-draped coffins coming off planes on the evening news, an anti-war movement pressuring a president inextricably tied to a failed conflict of his own making, endless discussions of body counts and increasingly well-lit tunnels, and the looming menace of international communism. Check, check, check, and check. Okay, not so much.
For me, the most disheartening part of this kind of nonsense is that I thought Obama’s victory meant we could finally move beyond framing all of our foreign policy debates with inapt references to Vietnam. That said, at least Iraq isn’t being likened to Obama’s Munich. Wait just a second…
The Edge of the American West 
119 comments
February 4, 2009 at 1:51 am
saintneko
America’s Vietnam: The inescapability of of our past by those who had nothing to do with it.
February 4, 2009 at 2:40 am
Dia
I’m more interested in “Hitchens on the Pope”. I hear that shit is hella cool.
February 4, 2009 at 5:02 am
kid bitzer
could we just go back to those halcyon days of 2004-2008, and see how many magazine-covers talked about “bush’s vietnam”?
oh. none?
oh–you mean there was even a concerted right-wing campaign to bash anyone who even *mentioned* vietnam in the same breath as iraq? a concerted campaign that was successful in intimidating the press?
i get so fucking sick of our dysfunctional media. so totally in the pocket of the republican machine.
February 4, 2009 at 5:15 am
Don
. . . Although, if I squint and cock my head just so, maybe they’re right: images of flag-draped coffins coming off planes on the evening news, an anti-war movement pressuring a president inextricably tied to a failed conflict of his own making, endless discussions of body counts and increasingly well-lit tunnels, and the looming menace of international communism. . .
Which president are you referring to: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, or Nixon? Or did the Vietnam conflict begin even earlier?
February 4, 2009 at 5:50 am
politicalfootball
Yeah, the Vietnam analogies are tiresome. I wish Obama would just declare victory and go home.
February 4, 2009 at 6:08 am
silbey
Holy Hell, that’s a stupid cover. Is the article as inanely dumb as it promises to be?
February 4, 2009 at 6:20 am
John Emerson
You might have laid it on a little thicker about the egregious, despicable, lying malice required to print a cover like that two weeks into Obama’s presidency. Irony is not really enough.
The Republicans have been grievously wounded, but the media are completely unhurt, and there’s no evidence that they’ve changed their minds about anything or that they’ve learned anything.
For two or three years now I’ve been arguing here, there, and everywhere that the wretchedness of our present media is deliberate and purposeful, rather than incidental or careless. The faces we see and the names we know are unimportant, and complaining about them is silly. The problem is at the ownership and management level, and my theory is that it’s the outcome of the takeover of the media (even the struggling, heavily-indebted privately held media) by finance. When you look at the careers of the Kagan and Kristol and Goldberg and Glenn Beck, what other conclusion can there be? Glenn Beck in particular is far more objectionable than even O’Reilly or Limbaugh, and he’s been moving steadily upward even though his ratings have always been terrible.*
To me all discussions of the media should start with this fact, and beyond that, it’s also one of the most important factors that always needs to be taken into consideration whenever you talk about electoral politics or public opinion. The ambient political opinion of people who depend on free media and are not paying close attention ranges from center-right to hard right.
Between 2000 and 2008, with all the disasters, approximately 3% of Americans switched from the Republican column to the Democratic column. That’s the difference between W and L, and it’s an unquestionable W, but 47% of Americans are still deluded or worse.
My proposal here is pretty commonsensical and obvious, hardly a bold innovative theory, but hardly anyone ever says it and when I say it, either I’m ignored or I get resistance. Saying that management manages is regarded as a conspiracy theory, and Chomskyist (which it is), and Chomsky is still forbidden.
A further point: during the election you saw Clinton and/or Obama talking to Scaife, Fox, O’Reilly, the WSJ editorial board, the Washington Post editorial board, etc. They had to prove that, even though they’re Democrats, they’re not scary. I don’t say that they did the wrong thing, but there’s the explanation for the wimpiness of the Democrats. They finally believe that they can beat the Republicans, but they know that they can’t beat the impregnable evildoers in the media.
February 4, 2009 at 6:26 am
John Emerson
* My theory is that the hirings of Olbermann and Krugman were either mistakes, or hedges. The first knowing major media hire of a serious liberal was Maddow. We’ll see how long she lasts. MSNBC, the liberal network, still has Scarborough, Matthews, and a lot of centrist mediocrities. Shuster was hired instead of another Maddow, and Olbermann was not allowed to broadcast the conventions.
February 4, 2009 at 6:52 am
jazzbumpa
I totally agree with you, John. Yet, if you talk to anyone who is even remotely conservative you will hear about the liberal bias in the media. I’m convinced that every one of the 47% who voted for McCain believe it.
I don’t want to fall into a liberal/progressive = good; conservative = bad kind of dualistic thinking. But, and help me out here if I’m wrong: When I listen to Maddow, Hartman, and even Rabid Randy, before she got excommunicated, I got the truth, and actually learned things. Listen to (Rightist of your choice) and you get lies, misleading truths, sophistry, and all manner of illogic.
What’s a mother to do?
February 4, 2009 at 6:52 am
PorJ
I agree with John Emerson on many of the media’s problems and I wont call him a “Chomskyist.” But like Chomsky, I think he severely over-estimates just how powerful the media is. I would suggest a healthy dose of the work of Michael Schudson, for starters. Books like The Power of News and Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion are good places to start. But there is an enormous literature in Media Studies on this – going back to Paul Lazarsfeld’s The People’s Choice in 1940.
The real question is why do we want to believe the media *changes* attitudes, rather than re-confirms our pre-existing biases? I would recommend W. Phillips Davison’s classic “The Third Person Effect in Communication” (Public Opinion Quarterly, 47(1), 1-15.) for the answer. Basically, we all like to believe that others are more persuadable than ourselves.
The media is conservative; that is, it re-confirms our worldviews, whether via OUR selection, or by exploiting stereotypes and tropes we instantly recognize (without questioning). That’s why research is now 90% of advertising – because discovering what people want to hear is more important than being creative.
That’s why Newsweek talks about Vietnam – even if the analogy is ridiculous to any serious historian. Its because Newsweek believes its (older, sixties-loving, well-educated) readership wants to place Afghanistan in an easily-understandable context. I don’t know if that’s what its readership does, in fact, want to read (circulation is way, way off) – but its the perception that its editors believe and act upon.
February 4, 2009 at 6:52 am
Buster
I always thought the better comparison for the American war in Afghanistan was the Soviet war in Afghanistan, an idea worked out a little by the CSM here. But, since the USSR’s venture in Afghanistan is often dubbed the Soviet Vietnam, I suppose folks are just reducing their analogies…
February 4, 2009 at 6:53 am
Barry
kid bitzer
“could we just go back to those halcyon days of 2004-2008, and see how many magazine-covers talked about “bush’s vietnam”?”
Gee, when even republicans were trying to disassociate themeselves from Iraq, why would anybody think such a thing?
Also, to extend John’s, when somebody engages in a war of choice for political gain, through f*cking lies and things go like sh*t with a large dose of Bushian ‘I don’t give a f*ck’, and spends years telling us that everything is Hunky Dory, then savage, unrelenting criticism is rather the duty of the media.
Or can’t you tell the difference between George ‘f*cked things up for 8 years’ Bush and Barack ‘Been in Office for 2 Weeks’ Obama?
February 4, 2009 at 7:42 am
John Emerson
I have no problem with being called Chomskyist. One of the gig problems with liberals is that they want so badly to have a dialogue with conservatives, and refuse so absolutely to have a dialogue with leftists.
The problem with the Newsweek cover wasn’t the Vietnam analogy at all. It’s putting Obama on the spot after two weeks in office and demanding that he solve a problem Bush spent seven years creating, and doing this after having been very feeble about calling Bush to account during that period.
As I understand PorJ is telling us that hundreds of billions of dollars a year are being spent on advertising even though it’s ineffectual. Not impossible, but hardly very persuasive.
In considerable areas of this country (magnified by the electoral college) , you can go your entire life without ever hearing a liberal opinion on the free media (radio and TV), and a lot of people get their political opinions from a combination of free media and scuttlebutt they hear. I can’t imagine an ideological rightwing media not having an effect. Likewise, a large proportion of the electorate has been deliberately misonformed about the facts of the Iraq War (the role of al Qaeda, the existence of WMD). I can’t imagine that not having an effect. The TV networks are routinely repeating misinformation about Obama’s economic plan as we speak, in some cases weeks after it’s been debunked. I can’t imagine that not having an effect.
My guess is that PorJ is setting up an omnipotent-media straw man that no one ever claimed existed. We just saw how the whole political landscape was changed when 3% of the voters switched. If the media monopoly controls 5% of the voters, that’s an enormous proportion, not a small one.
The media is conservative; that is, it re-confirms our worldviews. No. It’s conservative, in the sense of conservative. For years before Olberman came along, there was no one confirming mainstream Democratic world-views, even though the Democratic share never fell much below 50%. Still less were the media confirming the worldviews of the 20% of the population which is left or liberal. During the Clinton impeachment the media piled on, but in the end it was just too ridiculous and about 70% of Americans disagreed. (They overplayed their hand, but it was a right-wing hand. I never said that the media were omnipotent.)
Just to anticipate criticism: the media are not conservative or Republican on every single issue, any more than most conservative and Republicans agree with each other on every single issue. They’re closest to the country-club Republicans and farthest from the religious right and the populist Republicans.But country-club Republicans have always known that they need a lot of useful idiots to stay in power.
February 4, 2009 at 7:53 am
politicalfootball
Seriously, am I not allowed to believe that the historical analogy between Iraq and Vietnam carries useful lessons? Am I wrong to fret that Afghanistan will become “Obama’s Vietnam”?
Seems to me that foreign interventionism in this allegedly post-imperialist era carries a set of well-known risks – yes, I’m talking about the Soviets in Afghanistan, too. One of the tragedies of Vietnam, for instance, was that it helped derail Lyndon’s ambitious domestic agenda.
Lyndon didn’t invent the idea of American intervention in Vietnam, he merely escalated. What is Obama’s stated position on Afghanistan? Well, I guess I’ve never actually heard him use the word “escalation.”
Anyway, as far as your conservative media bias goes: I haven’t read the Newsweek story – and I don’t suppose I will – but it seems to me that the Vietnam analogy in this context doesn’t play to conservative policy preferences, but liberal ones.
February 4, 2009 at 7:59 am
John Emerson
Seriously, PF, they’re putting Obama on the spot in an unjustifiable way. And nobody wants the Vietnam War any more. Liberals and conservative just have different reasons for disavowing it. There’s nothing liberal about saying “we don’t want another Vietnam”.
February 4, 2009 at 8:11 am
silbey
As I understand PorJ is telling us that hundreds of billions of dollars a year are being spent on advertising even though it’s ineffectual.
That’s not what PorJ said. Nor what the literature he described said.
February 4, 2009 at 8:24 am
John Emerson
I haven’t read the literature. I have no idea what his point is, because I don’t see where I overestimated the power of the media. What I did was say how the media is using its power and why they were doing that.
I haven’t read Chomsky for a long time, but I’m not sure that he overestimates the power of media either. On political issues it would seem that if the bulk of the media are misrepresenting the facts and framing everything in a slanted way, that that will have an influence on political opinion. This is especially so in foreign policy, or in fiscal policy, where most people have no direct knowledge and little understanding of the topic. (There’s a little more reality check in product advertising, since people can see for themselves with Coke v. Pepsi or Ford v. Chevy.)
The idea that if media reconfirms attitudes it doesn’t change attitudes strikes me as classically simple-minded. It can do one thing with one person and the other with another person, or with a single person it can do one thing some of the time and the other thing the rest of the time.
February 4, 2009 at 8:34 am
PorJ
In considerable areas of this country (magnified by the electoral college) , you can go your entire life without ever hearing a liberal opinion on the free media (radio and TV).
Really? So, for instance: some of the commentary by Jeff Greenfield, on CBS, can’t be categorized as “liberal”? What about the commentary on programs like NBC’s “Meet the Press”? There is no “liberal opinion” ventured on that show? I would categorize CBS and NBC as national in reach. If I’m arguing a strawman, then you’re engaging in hyperbole with statements like this (or you define “mainstream liberalism” differently than I do).
I can’t imagine an ideological rightwing media not having an effect.
I didn’t say it doesn’t have an effect. The billions spent on advertising DOES have an effect. The effect is to re-confirm the biases and stereotypes we’ve developed from a wide variety of influences: our parents, our religious choices, our education system, our interpersonal communication, etc. Studies of media effects and voting patterns have re-confirmed this – that the media is best at pushing us in the direction we are pre-disposed to go, rather than changing our minds. The effect of the right-wing media is exploit existing biases in an attempt to make people behave in a predictable manner. This includes things like subtle appeals to racism (i.e.: “the 3am” ad that Hillary Clinton used to such great effect worked to pry white liberals from Obama for a while). Behaviorism 101 tells us to watch how people act, not what they say. Racism not only transcends partisan political labels, but the “conservative” position on racial equality is, unfortunately, the most popular one in the US (based on electoral behavior) and remains available for exploitation by advertisers and politicians. That’s not the media’s fault, even if I grant that it contributes.
We just saw how the whole political landscape was changed when 3% of the voters switched. If the media monopoly controls 5% of the voters, that’s an enormous proportion, not a small one.
Who is this 5%? Are you or me part of it? Where do I find these people controlled by the “media monopoly”? That’s a serious question – not snark. A lot of Schudson’s work discusses this. The answer is: nobody is “controlled” by the media, but the most susceptible to persuasion by the media are the shut-ins, the elderly, the uneducated, and the people without identifiable social networks (churches, family, etc.). But even these people don’t act in completely predictable patterns, nor is there behavior “controllable” by the media.
Think about this rationally for a minute: if 5% of the US population of 300 million is controllable, then you have a consumer and voting base of 15 million people whose behavior can be structured in predictable ways. If this were true, advertising would be so much easier and efficient.
February 4, 2009 at 8:38 am
politicalfootball
Obama is on the spot. He’s president of a country that’s engaged in military activity in Afghanistan – military activity that he has by-and-large supported – and he’s going to be held responsible for the outcome of that adventure. Mostly, it’s correct and appropriate that he be held responsible.
Sure, I have a certain amount of sympathy for Lyndon, and he was in many ways a tragic figure where GWB was merely a loathsome buffoon. In the end, though, the outcome in Vietnam was Lyndon’s fault.
But you see? Here I am again, analogizing to Vietnam when the best and the brightest of EOTAW have already disposed of that analogy as useless.
February 4, 2009 at 8:44 am
politicalfootball
PorJ, like Emerson I have trouble grasping what you’re arguing here. At the time of the Iraq invasion, something like 70% of Americans thought that al Qaeda and Saddam were collaborators, and that Saddam had WMD. The WMD thing was highly dubious even at the time and foreign media picked up on this fact. The al Qaeda thing was stone bullshit from Day 1.
I would propose that if, say, France had a similarly freakish media environment, they’d have been right with us in Iraq. Surely the fact that the U.S. media was promoting the WMD-al Qaeda link was an important factor in the differences in public opinion, no?
February 4, 2009 at 8:44 am
ari
Remind me, pf, how long has Obama been president? And yet already you’re willing to concede that Afghanistan and Iraq are his fault. Such thinking makes me wonder which part of PorJ’s points you’re illustrating.
That said, sure, three years from now and thousands of policy choices down the road, I’m willing to revisit the question of Obama’s culpability in our various military adventures. Even then, though, the analogy to Vietnam will likely be incredibly strained, obscuring far more than it reveals.
February 4, 2009 at 8:51 am
silbey
Here I am again, analogizing to Vietnam when the best and the brightest of EOTAW have already disposed of that analogy as useless.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that Obama isn’t on the spot or shouldn’t be held accountable. I’m certainly not. What I am arguing is that 1) labeling Afghanistan as “obama’s vietnam” two weeks into his term is extremely premature and 2) Vietnam exists as a political myth in American politics that has nothing to do with the war itself; labeling it that way makes it a partisan issue immediately 3) it’s dumb because the followup question is “what vietnam?” 1965? 1968? Tet? Chicago? Rolling Thunder? What? Essentially it’s a cutesy historical way of saying “All sorts of bad stuff” and about equally as useful.
At the time of the Iraq invasion, something like 70% of Americans thought that al Qaeda and Saddam were collaborators, and that Saddam had WMD.
And that fits PorJ’s point. The American people were predisposed to believe bad things about Hussein and so the propaganda campaign didn’t have to do much more than push them in a direction they already wanted to go. To fit with the “propaganda controls people’s minds” you’d have to convince Americans that Al Qaeda was linked to the Pittsburgh Steelers (though, in Arizona, I suppose…)
(By the way, if the media is large-C conservative and they can control people, how exactly have the Democrats managed to beat the Republicans in two straight elections?)
February 4, 2009 at 9:11 am
John Emerson
PF, it’s not as if Afghanistan has heated up just now. And while Obama is going to have to make some decisions, there’s no reason to highlight that with an ominous-looking cover two weeks into his term, especially if you’d been treating Bush with kid gloves for seven years. Obama is stuck with cleaning up Bush’s messes, and it will be a tough job, but that doesn’t justify “Afghanistan: Obama’s Vietnam?”
Think about this rationally for a minute.
Let’s just don’t, OK? I find rationality offensive.
Greenfield is not liberal. He’s not even a Democrat. He’s a aging centrist who plays insider games. I can see where a big part of our disagreement lies.
Based on the way you arguing, I question the methodology of the research you’re citing. You still seem to be making a binary division between “changing minds” and “reconfirming”, as though you were working with an absurdly simple model. People start out with a complex and contradictory mess of convictions and prejudices, and the media reconfirms and recruits some of them, and subordinates, ignores, or casts doubt on others. By doing this it changes people — not into their total opposite, but into a different version of themselves.
The answer is: nobody is “controlled” by the media, but the most susceptible to persuasion by the media are the shut-ins, the elderly, the uneducated, and the people without identifiable social networks (churches, family, etc.). But even these people don’t act in completely predictable patterns, nor is there behavior “controllable” by the media.
I plead guilty to having used the word controlled instead of some better word, “convinced” or “influenced” or “swayed” perhaps. My point was that the number of people involved did not have to be large, and that 5% is a lot.
Since I did misspeak, your point is good. But otherwise,even these people don’t act in completely predictable patterns would be a red herring. It’s been pretty well established that nothing much in the social science is completely predictable, and I wasn’t saying, though perhaps it seems that I did, that the media has completely predictable control. (I don’t get your attempt to locate some specific 5% demographic which is controlled by the media. Talking about the media swinging 5% of the vote in a specific election does not require isolating a stable 5% sector of media-controlled voters.)
It also looks like you’re talking about media point events rather than long term influences. So obviously the political advertising and news coverage in October-November 2008 didn’t change very many people’s minds. On the other hand, almost everyone voting had been barraged by the media over their entire lifetime, so we’re not just talking about a single event or time period, but the whole long formation period of our “predispositions”.
Finally, things like foreign and military policy and finance where people do not have direct experience are a bit more influenced by media than, e.g., racism or attitudes toward education and taxes. And I can’t see how deliberate misinformation about the facts can fail to have a powerful, negative effect.
Last, again, I don’t see where I overestimated the power of the media in my first post, or why you thought that I did.
February 4, 2009 at 9:21 am
John Emerson
PF: At the time of the Iraq invasion, something like 70% of Americans thought that al Qaeda and Saddam were collaborators, and that Saddam had WMD.
Silbey: And that fits PorJ’s point. The American people were predisposed to believe bad things about Hussein and so the propaganda campaign didn’t have to do much more than push them in a direction they already wanted to go. To fit with the “propaganda controls people’s minds” you’d have to convince Americans that Al Qaeda was linked to the Pittsburgh Steelers (though, in Arizona, I suppose…)
How does that fit Silbey’s point? That’s just goofy. Suppose the media had uniformly said the opposite. Would the American people have flatly refused to listen? Even suppose that the two sides had been given equal time in the national media, which they absolutely weren’t. Would that have changed nothing?
Even with the media barrage, there was considerable popular skepticism about the Iraq invasion. There’s always been plenty of anti-war sentiment, back to WWI, and the pro-war people have always won. There’s an old, repectable argument (e.g. Walter Lippman) that public opinion should play no role at all in forming foreign and military policy, and as far as I can tell it’s been effectively dominant for almost a century now.
February 4, 2009 at 9:26 am
John Emerson
P.S. By “effectively dominant” I mean that almost everyone in the media biz and in the military-diplomatic-intelligence-IR biz believes it and acts on that basis. I don’t mean that most average citizens believe it. It gets a bit circular and self-referential at this point.
February 4, 2009 at 9:26 am
politicalfootball
Remind me, pf, how long has Obama been president?
How long was Lyndon president when he took over responsibility for the American presence in Vietnam?
And yet already you’re willing to concede that Afghanistan and Iraq are his fault.
Of course I’m not willing to concede that. I used the word “fault” as regards Lyndon, because I am prepared to find fault with Lyndon. Afghanistan is Obama’s responsibility and Obama faces a lot of pressures to fuck it up that are reasonably analogous to what Lyndon was dealing with. If Obama fucks it up, it will be his fault.
(The preceding also answers silbey’s “which Vietnam” query.)
If the Newsweek analogy is off, then that’s the fault of the specific analogy. To say that there are no useful lessons – heck, even obvious lessons – in Vietnam for Obama seems blinkered.
For years after Vietnam, America was victimized by “Vietnam Syndrome” – the malady that kept Jimmy from bombing Iran when Americans were held hostage, and that kept Reagan from escalating in the Middle East when the marine barracks in Lebanon was bombed.
Ronnie and GHWB did a lot to get us over Vietnam Syndrome. GWB finally got us over the hump, and I think it’s a goddam shame.
February 4, 2009 at 9:46 am
Barbar
Economists have done some research into the “Fox News effect.” This paper, for example, finds that there is such an effect — i.e., Fox News actively increases the Republican Party vote share.
I think the fundamental bias in these discussions is the natural tendency to take one’s own beliefs as caused directly by truth while treating opposing beliefs as if they’re caused by institutions, propaganda, self-interest, ideological blind spots, and so on. There doesn’t seem to be a way around that, though.
(BTW Emerson, I randomly came across your discussion of Ed Lazear’s paper on Economic Imperialism at your blog. What a mind-blowingly annoying paper.)
February 4, 2009 at 9:46 am
politicalfootball
2) Vietnam exists as a political myth in American politics that has nothing to do with the war itself; labeling it that way makes it a partisan issue immediately
I do think you’re on to something here. I am definitely not down with the whole “post-partisan” thing. The reflexive liberal loathing of military adventurism that was encouraged by the Vietnam experience seems right on (to coin a phrase) to me.
But if we’re no longer allowed to talk about “Vietnam Syndrome,” then we need some other way for Afghanistan and Iraq to become partisan issues. Early signs, however, indicate that Obama intends to pursue bipartisan escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, if not Iraq – a particularly galling prospect, given that our guy tarred his presidential opponent as as a warmonger in
19642008.February 4, 2009 at 9:47 am
silbey
How long was Lyndon president when he took over responsibility for the American presence in Vietnam?
This is not relevant, as Vietnam was not “Vietnam” when LBJ became President. If two weeks into LBJ’s term, Newsweek had run a cover with “Johnson’s Burning of the White House!” it would have been equivalent.
Afghanistan is Obama’s responsibility
And that’s what you think Newsweek is trying to imply? I don’t.
(The preceding also answers silbey’s “which Vietnam” query.)
It does? Your assumption is that Afghanistan *isn’t* already screwed up.
That’s just goofy. Suppose the media had uniformly said the opposite. Would the American people have flatly refused to listen
Do you have an actual example of the media selling the American people on something that they weren’t predisposed to?
there was considerable popular skepticism about the Iraq invasion.
Which is it? Either the media shapes public discourse, in which case we all supported the Iraq War, or we don’t in which your above comment is accurate. If there was skepticism about the war, then the media wasn’t doing a very good job of it, were they?
February 4, 2009 at 9:51 am
Barbar
If there was skepticism about the war, then the media wasn’t doing a very good job of it, were they?
Whoa, massive goalpost-shifting. “How can there be propaganda if YOU saw through it?”
February 4, 2009 at 9:57 am
drip
I don’t read Newsweek, and won’t read the article, but it seems to me that Obama would be analogous to Nixon, not Johnson. In either case its a horrible analogy, though not as bad as Munich. I wish Obama well, but I have this bumper sticker . . . .
February 4, 2009 at 9:58 am
John Emerson
Silbey, I’m not willing to flipflop between “The media control everyone’s mind” and “The media only confirm our predispositions”. I didn’t say the first thing and never would, and the latter is ridiculous. I say that the media have very substantial influence on the way people think, both in the long term and immediately, but more so long term. I don’t see any problem with that. And my main point is that the bulk of the media nowadays have a deliberate center-right to hard-right agenda, to the point of dishonesty.
In the case of war, the military-IR-intelligence people in power increasingly recruit the media before doing anything. They don’t need unanimous public support.
February 4, 2009 at 10:02 am
John Emerson
The war LBJ inherited was a rather small one. He escalated it and, while he was continuing and expanding Kennedy’s policies, I think of him as an originator rather than as an inheritor.
Nixon cashed in on the war in an egregious way, and in 1968 was able to run simultaneously as the peace candidate and as the war candidate.
The fact that it was a Democratic war made it almost impossible to work within the system. Maybe if RFK had lived….
February 4, 2009 at 10:14 am
silbey
Whoa, massive goalpost-shifting. “How can there be propaganda if YOU saw through it?”
I’m puzzled. How is it goalpost shifting to say that pointing out that saying that there was a large amount of skepticism about the war undercuts an argument for media mind-control?
But we’re now arguing for degrees of influence here, and that’s an impossible thing to resolve in a comment thread.
February 4, 2009 at 10:29 am
PorJ
Barbar, thanks for the link to the “Fox News Effect” article. A couple of points:
1. This article does not appear to have been through peer-review yet, and I found a couple of serious problems regarding assumptions (although I will say I think it was done quite well). I think there’s much good stuff in it.
2. Here’s the kicker: We find that Fox News significantly increased voter turnout, particularly in the more Democratic districts. The impact of Fox News on voting appears to be due, at least in part, to the mobilization of voters, and particularly conservative voters in Democratic-leaning districts.
The article proves my point: Fox News didn’t change voters’ minds – it doesn’t turn Democrats into Republicans. It motivated more voters who were already pre-disposed to vote “conservative” (whether registered Democrat or Republican) to act than people who were pre-disposed to vote “liberal.” That’s a clear media effect, but it conflates a behavioral shift with an attitudinal one. Part of the problem here is using “voting” as a proxy for ideology.
February 4, 2009 at 10:32 am
Barbar
Oh I hadn’t realized there was a debate about media mind-control. When Emerson wrote:
“People start out with a complex and contradictory mess of convictions and prejudices, and the media reconfirms and recruits some of them, and subordinates, ignores, or casts doubt on others. By doing this it changes people — not into their total opposite, but into a different version of themselves.”
I hadn’t realized he was saying:
“No matter what you believe, the media is capable of putting whatever ideas it wants in your head.”
I thought he was saying, you know, what he was actually saying.
February 4, 2009 at 10:37 am
eric
This article does not appear to have been through peer-review yet
It has.
February 4, 2009 at 10:37 am
silbey
hadn’t realized there was a debate about media mind-control
Keep up, please.
February 4, 2009 at 10:43 am
Barbar
Keep up yourself silbey; you might want to read the rest of my comment.
February 4, 2009 at 10:47 am
John Emerson
My proposal here is pretty commonsensical and obvious, hardly a bold innovative theory, but hardly anyone ever says it and when I say it, either I’m ignored or I get resistance.
I seem to have succeeded in communicating successfully with a few people here, but what Silbey and PorJ are saying is exactly what I always meet up with, and I don’t understand why. I’ve never claimed media omnipotence.
February 4, 2009 at 10:55 am
PorJ
That’s interesting to me that the Fox News article made it through peer-review using the Lazio-Clinton race in 2000 as a key control. Here’s where some of the boundaries between disciplines cause problems. This might be O.K. in Economics, but the assumptions involved in saying (essentially) Fox news didn’t report on the NY Senate race so we can use it as a control, I don’t think that would fly in Political Science or Media Studies. Plus there’s the imprecision of the category called “non-Republican” voters (i.e. the assumptions embedded in that label go beyond simply not registering as a Republican).
But I’m neither a political scientist nor Media Studies PhD, just a historian who looks at the media – so I’m ready to stand corrected. As I said, there’s a lot of good material in the piece, and I’m ready to believe its conclusions. My concerns are more methodological.
February 4, 2009 at 10:58 am
John Emerson
My concerns are partly methodological: I’m not willing to flipflop between “The media control everyone’s mind” and “The media only confirm our predispositions”.
February 4, 2009 at 11:00 am
eric
the assumptions involved in saying (essentially) Fox news didn’t report on the NY Senate race so we can use it as a control,
That’s not what they say. They use the NY Senate race as an object of study, noting it was the most-reported such race on Fox.
February 4, 2009 at 11:05 am
silbey
you might want to read the rest of my comment
I did.
February 4, 2009 at 11:12 am
Barbar
silbey: OK if you were joking I’ll admit that it flew way way over my head. Heh.
I’ll repeat that there’s a serious bias in most of these casual discussions, which is that my beliefs seem to be caused directly by the truth, while your beliefs are clearly the result of mechanical processes (pre-existent ideology, self-interest, news media, and so on). I don’t see a way to get around this though.
February 4, 2009 at 11:23 am
Barbar
PorJ: after having established the Fox News effect, I think the paper tries to use the generally-uncovered Senate races to see if the effect is general (go Republicans!) or candidate-specific (go Republican I saw on FOX!) FOX did cover the Clinton-Lazio race heavily, but the effect on that race was apparently similar to the effect on other Senate races.
February 4, 2009 at 11:26 am
politicalfootball
The war LBJ inherited was a rather small one. He escalated it and, while he was continuing and expanding Kennedy’s policies, I think of him as an originator rather than as an inheritor.
A reasonable view, I think, and one that you share with Newsweek, which says:
Lyndon’s Vietnam was a small-scale affair when he took over, and so is Obama’s Afghanistan.
I’m puzzled as to why anyone is reading the Newsweek article – or my comments, for that matter – to suggest that Obama is to blame for Afghanistan in the way that Lyndon became culpable for Vietnam.
Given the content of the article, though, Newsweek probably would have been better served by that cover if the title had included a question mark.
February 4, 2009 at 11:28 am
ari
Mostly, it’s correct and appropriate that he be held responsible.
Does that help, pf?
February 4, 2009 at 11:34 am
John Emerson
I didn’t even read the article. The cover was completely unforgivable, and basically conjectural. If Obama does what we think he might do, and if it turns out as badly as Vietnam did, Afghanistan will have been Obama’s Vietnam. But that’s two big guesses, and it’s also vastly different than what an honest publication would do, or what Newsweek itself would do if Bush were in office rather than Obama.
February 4, 2009 at 11:37 am
ari
Anyway, pf, I don’t really think you think that. My real point in the post was that the media frames our foreign policy debate. (I think I even said that. Yup, there it is; I did.) Which is to say, it’s not clear to me whether the media shapes public opinion — though I think it’s possible in some instance — so much as public discourse. And so, when Newsweek calls Afghanistan Obama’s Vietnam, that sets limits on the options we have for our discussions. Which is one reason why lousy historical analogies are dangerous.
February 4, 2009 at 11:38 am
ari
The article is merely dull, John. The cover, as you say, is flat stupid.
February 4, 2009 at 11:40 am
John Emerson
Could someone please explain to me the reason why the idea that the media shapes public opinion seems impossible to so many people? Or the idea that the media have a conscious and purposeful political agenda? These seem to me to be the default conclusions. I’m starting to wonder whether I’ve bumped into yet another academic discipline which is worse than useless.
February 4, 2009 at 11:41 am
silbey
which is that my beliefs seem to be caused directly by the truth, while your beliefs are clearly the result of mechanical processes (pre-existent ideology, self-interest, news media, and so on).
Fair enough: there is the sense of “they’re wrong and I’m right.”
I should note that I have no problem thinking that many of my beliefs are influenced by pre-existent ideology, self-interest, and the news media.
/heads back to watch more FOX
February 4, 2009 at 11:42 am
ari
But John, not everybody is saying that. In fact, as you note, most people seem to be agreeing with at least some of what you’re suggesting. From there, it’s just a matter of degrees. We can all get along in Obama’s America.
February 4, 2009 at 11:42 am
Ahistoricality
I came to more or less the same conclusions about the media as John Emerson back in the early 90s, after a little exposure to Edward Herman (Chomsky’s longtime collaborator) and Frankfurt School theory. A couple of issues which seem to be missing from the discussion (if I may):
* The media’s influence is not absolute, but it does define the acceptable range of ideas — something like Overton’s Window, to use the modern jargon — by both inclusion (e.g. Glenn Beck) and exclusion (e.g. the expulsion of Dan Rather) and by sheer weight (e.g. the predominance of Republican officials on last Sunday’s talk shows). What issues get traction (Tom Daschle’s tax problems) and which ones don’t (Sam Wurzelbacher’s tax problems) is a function of media attention which is, largely, a function of (as John Emerson pointed out above) management.
* The media rarely changes people’s minds about basic principles and party identification, but it does have a significant influence on the willingness of people to act (vote, write, shop etc.) on those principles with regard to specific issues. Repetition has a powerful effect on our understanding of truth (something Hitler understood intuitively and has been borne out by social psychological research recently), crowding out actual truth by constant exposure.
February 4, 2009 at 11:42 am
politicalfootball
ari, you’re struggling with verb tenses and context, I think. Take a look at the end of the sentence preceding the one that you quote, with particular attention to the verb tense:
and he’s going to be held responsible for the outcome of that adventure.
I wish I were more sophisticated with grammar. The “be” in the sentence you quote isn’t referring to the present, but the future. Maybe its subjunctive, like the first sentence in this paragraph. Anyway, my point was unambiguous in context.
February 4, 2009 at 11:45 am
ari
pf, you’re digging in on a very minor point, especially considering that the lack of ambiguity seems only to have been in your own mind. But really, it’s not worth the fight, as I’ve already said that I don’t really think you think that. I just think you’re trolling me a bit. Either that or your refuse to acknowledge that I was writing about the cover.
February 4, 2009 at 11:47 am
ari
Obama is on the spot. He’s president of a country that’s engaged in military activity in Afghanistan – military activity that he has by-and-large supported – and he’s going to be held responsible for the outcome of that adventure. Mostly, it’s correct and appropriate that he be held responsible.
Put another way, pf, I’m happy to grant your point about tense, if that’s what you’d like (though it gets pretty confused up there, from the first sentence, “is on the spot,” to the last, “that he be held responsible”). In other words, you were pretty unclear about when Obama would be held accountable. Now? Next week? Or three years from now, as I suggested? It matters. And the Newsweek cover suggests a rush to judgment on the part of the editors there. Again, though, this is a pretty minor point.
February 4, 2009 at 11:53 am
politicalfootball
And so, when Newsweek calls Afghanistan Obama’s Vietnam, that sets limits on the options we have for our discussions.
Any effort to frame a debate necessarily limits the options. The question is, is a particular framework for a debate misleading. For instance, the question above about media influence was framed at one point as: Is the media controlling peoples’ minds? I would argue that this is an incorrect framework for the conversation – not that no framework is appropriate.
It’s possible that the congnoscenti understand the uselessness of the Vietnam experience in understanding Afghanistan, but the original post doesn’t really articulate why this is so, and I still don’t get it.
So: How does the Vietnam analogy inappropriately limit our options in discussing Afghanistan?
February 4, 2009 at 11:55 am
politicalfootball
pf, you’re digging in on a very minor point, especially considering that the lack of ambiguity seems only to have been in your own mind.
Goddamit, my comment was brief and directly responsive to your comment. If I’m digging in on a little point, it’s your little point, not mine. And the lack of ambiguity is directly in my language, as I demonstrated. If you’re going to insist on a tendentious reading of my actual words, I can’t help you.
February 4, 2009 at 11:57 am
John Emerson
Ari, why do I have to argue this every goddamn time? To me it’s a truism and a starting-point, and should be central to everyone’s thinking: To me all discussions of the media should start with this fact, and beyond that, it’s also one of the most important factors that always needs to be taken into consideration whenever you talk about electoral politics or public opinion. But responses always range from resistant to non-committal to hedged agreement, especially when I argue that Graham and Sulzberger are active bad guys. People will always give me Fox, but not the Times and usually not the Post. And I’m always, always hearing the incompetence dodge, and rhetorical questions wondering how anyone could ever write something as wrong as that, when it’s totally clear why they’re writing things as wrong as that. People always zero in on individuals with bylines, but that’s not where the problem is.
I’ve started wondering whether people are dreaming of getting through to Czar Graham or Czar Sulzberger and setting them straight, and maybe getting a column on the editorial page, or maybe even becoming the new editor and making things right.
February 4, 2009 at 11:57 am
ari
Sorry you’re getting frustrated, pf, particularly given that I’ve granted that it’s a small point. Again, though, I’m not willing to let you completely walk away from the ambiguity of your phrasing. Your comment was a bit of a quagmire, some might say.
(Seriously, dude, I’m just trolling you back. I’ll stop now.)
February 4, 2009 at 12:01 pm
ari
John, if it makes you feel better, I don’t read the Times any more, I’ve long since stopped listening to NPR except on long car trips, and I never ever considered the Post op-eds anything but a joke. Oh, and other than a few instances of backsliding, and a couple of voyeuristic moments during Katrina, I completely stopped watching tv news after the 2004 election.
February 4, 2009 at 12:03 pm
ari
Crap, I just saw your substantive comment, pf, which indicates that you weren’t trolling. Now I see why you were so annoyed. Sorry about that. It just didn’t occur to me that you really believed that the analogy could be useful in this instance.
February 4, 2009 at 12:05 pm
John Emerson
Yeah, but the point is that the shape of the media puts a tremendous handicap on any Democrat. Even after they whipped the Republicans, they still have to deal with an unreconstructed, unrepentant media. I think that may be one reason why the Democrats are so craven. They know that in the end, McConnell and Boehner will get the benefit of the doubt, regardless of how few members they have or how stupid their proposals are.
February 4, 2009 at 12:23 pm
PorJ
When we get into these fine distinctions, concerning cause and effect, etc. we need to admit that most of us (and I’m including myself) are flying relatively blind in terms of the literature. Anybody around here have a Mass Comm PhD? I assume most of us are historians, political scientists, economists, sociologists, etc. We all naturally gravitate to the critics and bodies of literature that correspond to our own biases – whether its Chomsky, Schudson, or even Spiro Agnew (granted, not a lot of Agnew fans in here. And yes, like John Emerson, Spiro Agnew argued that the problem with the media was consolidation in the hands of an unrepresentative few who used the public airwaves to advance their economic and political agendas at the expense of the American citizenry. He even attacked the NY Times and Washington Post by name!).
There’s an entire body of literature around this question that I think most of us are unfamiliar with, so we need to acknowledge our own limitations (bias) in taking it on. For instance: Dallas Smythe’s Audience Commodity Theory certainly has something to say about media power that would complicate what we’ve been discussing, yet nobody has mentioned it.
There are no simple truths here, and to accuse commentators of being “simplistic” (as was done earlier in the thread) misses the point. When it comes to discussing the media, everyone has a preferred schema that relates to their larger ideas about human agency, autonomy and social influence, and we could argue who’s theory is more “reality-based” all day without getting anywhere.
February 4, 2009 at 12:37 pm
John Emerson
Anybody around here have a Mass Comm PhD?
I’m increasingly convinced that I’m dealing with an academic pathology here. It’s like we’re being told that you have to be a geologist to recognize an earthquake. I don’t regard the idea that the political media influence people’s political ideas to be a controversial one that requires specialist endorsement before it can me accepted.
Believe it or not, I’ve heard of Spiro Agnew! And in previous arguments of this type I’ve even said that he had a point: the media consensus during the fifties and sixties tended center-left. My belief is that that changed in 1984. The second Reagan election took the heart out of liberals and Democrats (they’ve never quite recovered), and the media decided that they’d have to accommodate themselves to the new order. Reagan’s bitterest critics either pulled in their horns or else disappeared (Nicholas Von Hoffman and Gary Wills).
I don’t think that Agnew talked about media consolidation, though, which came after ward, under Reagan, ans was part of the way that finance gained control of the media.
February 4, 2009 at 12:38 pm
politicalfootball
And the Newsweek cover suggests a rush to judgment on the part of the editors there.
The Newsweek cover was put out in the context of Obama being in office for a matter of days – a period of time in which it would be absurd to blame Obama for the current state-of-play.
If you remove all knowledge of context from a hypothetical Newsweek reader, then yeah, it’s pretty unfair. But jeez, the Inauguration got some pretty big media coverage, as did the election, and I think people understand that the guy just got into office.
I mean, I share your low opinion of Newsweek readers, but they’re not that dumb.
February 4, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Pete Jones
To cut through the media bias thread for a second…
I completely agree that to make the analogy now is not constructive and probably perpetuates myths about the nature of the Afghanistan conflict and the historical reality of Vietnam.
But while watching HW Fields’ lecture on six lessons for the new President via Britannica Blog, I was thinking about Presidential legacies. Fields argues that Truman’s legacy wasn’t just improved by historians digging into his decision making and determining- wow, stuff was messed up then but Harry did a decent job and made some good long term choices. History itself, in addition to historians, helped polish HST’s legacy. Immediately after his term, things looked pretty bad. Korea was unpopular and people were confused about why we were even there. Twenty years later America rebooted its sense of what an “unpopular, distant war” truly was. About this time, S Korea looked like a productive democratic place, especially in comparison to North Korea.
So I wonder in a parallel example- will a decade long unpopular war in a faraway land (Afghanistan) reboot the collective anger we have over Iraq? The lesson could be useful for Obama. I doubt that we will talk about Iraq as Bush’s Korea or Afganistan as Obama’s Vietnam, but the analogy could be instructive.
February 4, 2009 at 1:09 pm
politicalfootball
John, as best as I can reckon, you’ve got a three-part argument, two parts of which I agree with entirely:
1. What the media does is important – it matters for America, as David Brock might say.
2. There are systematic biases in the media that largely favor conservative ideology.
3. Those systematic biases are almost completely the result of the ideological bent of media owners, and those owners are subject to no significant influences other than perhaps their advertisers – who are subject to no influences worth mentioning outside of the conservative ideologies they want to promote.
It’s No. 3 where my gripe lies – and even there my gripe is a matter of degree and emphasis.
February 4, 2009 at 1:09 pm
silbey
I’m increasingly convinced that I’m dealing with an academic pathology here. It’s like we’re being told that you have to be a geologist to recognize an earthquake.
You know, you could avoid being insulting if you tried. The above (and calling my point ‘goofy’ earlier) isn’t going to convince anyone, it’s just going to piss them off.
There may actually be a well-developed literature on this stuff that would be worth understanding before concluding that your analysis is supreme.
February 4, 2009 at 1:24 pm
John Emerson
PF, on #3, I say it’s interest and not ideology. I think that when finance gained control, low taxes, deregulation, free trade, and union-busting became the overwhelmingly dominant issues. And for whatever reason, the media seem to have been successfully recruited by the military-IR-intelligence establishment. I regard all of those stands as “conservative”, but I’m not saying that the big guys have a consistently conservative ideology, certainly not on social issues. They’re big enough players that they can do things pretty much their own way.
Silbey, I’ve been following this issue for seven years and arguing it for most of that time, and I haven’t noticed that arguing civilly is much more effective. Even among sympathetic people there’s a glass wall there that I’ve been butting my head against, and I’m pretty burned out. I am genuinely puzzled about why.
My sources on the dishonesty of the press are internet sources: Somerby, <edia Matters
February 4, 2009 at 1:25 pm
politicalfootball
It’s like we’re being told that you have to be a geologist to recognize an earthquake.
It’s like being told you have to be a historian to think about how Vietnam compares to current conflicts!
But yeah, a lot of people by into the myth – promoted by the media – that media folks are somehow experts whose work shouldn’t be subject to criticism by the proles.
February 4, 2009 at 1:30 pm
John Emerson
Media Matters, Firedoglake, and Crooks and Liars, plus two books by Eric Alterman and a couple of books about the Clinton scandals. To me the right-wing slant of the media is open and shut, granted only that the media’s bias is eclectic and independent — they’re not taking order from anyone but owners and advertisers.
As for the idea that the media, short term and long term, influence public opinion, I just don’t see how that’s arguable. I can only presume that the studies being referred to are methodologically defective in some way. I certainly don’t think that I should withhold judgment on the question until I’ve reviewed the literature.
February 4, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Barbar
In fact Emerson’s analysis is almost certainly flawed to some extent, because I don’t see how he can specify how an unbiased media should behave, other than by saying he personally wouldn’t have any problems with such a media. Perhaps he’s right that 1984 marked the death of the old liberal media regime, but in 1984 Reagan won the electoral college 525-13.
February 4, 2009 at 1:45 pm
John Emerson
Basically an unbiased media would not repeatedly make inaccurate attacks on one side, and also would not at the same time suppressing accurate criticisms of the other side. And they would correct errors when brought to their attention.
I have never claimed that the media are omnipotent (that’s my third repetition of this point). I don’t actually know how the media spun the 1984 election, but afterwards they realized that the world had changed. Finally, the media of today are not the same as the media of 1984 — they’re much more dominated by finance, in a process which has been well chronicled.
I really don’t think that we need to get into theory of knowledge here. The things I’;m saying aren’t that abstruse. I am willing for someone to come forward with a sharp and detailed argument that I’m wrong, but I’m not interested in “Mr. Emerson Has Failed To Conclusively Prove That X” or “We Have No Real Way Of Knowing That X” or “Mr Emerson Has Failed to Consult The Literature about X”.
February 4, 2009 at 1:48 pm
politicalfootball
because I don’t see how he can specify how an unbiased media should behave
Well, any enterprise that purports to discern reality is going to have its challenges, but in the same sense that we can specify how the academy ought to behave or how science ought to be conducted, we can specify how an unbiased media behaves.
One fundamental problem is that there’s a big chunk of the media that has gotten out of the reality-discernment business altogether, and that (I contend) is a bad thing.
but in 1984 Reagan won the electoral college 525-13.
If I’m reading Emerson correctly, you’ve got his cause-and-effect backwards. He’s saying that election knocked the stuffing out of the liberals in general, including the liberal media.
February 4, 2009 at 1:54 pm
John Emerson
The actual points I wanted to make, which were derailed by methodological argments, were 1.) the Newsweek cover is another piece of evidence, among many, that political journalism is not going to improve and 2.) we should quit talking about bad political journalism as though it were surprising and inadvertent. Bad poltical journalism is deliberate and the responsibility is with management, the owners, and the advertisers.
Those are the points that I want to get to that I almost never do, because of the preliminary argument I always have to have.
February 4, 2009 at 1:54 pm
jim
Shorter Newsweek: Barry Lyndon.
February 4, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Barbar
I thought we had established that the bias of the media is largely based on things like agenda-framing and prioritizing. Obviously inaccuracies and error correction play a role, but it doesn’t seem like the core of the problem.
I never claimed that you claimed that the media are omnipotent. My point was that once we move into the realm of ideological bias based on framing and setting priorities, there’s no longer a nice neutral objective basis for saying how the media should behave. If 47% of voters in the country are right-wing nutjobs, what implications does that have for an unbiased media? What if 60% of the country votes for Reagan (an event which, according to you, preceded right-wing media domination)?
Of course *you* personally don’t have to come up with an objective basis for saying how the media should behave: as long as you find the media objectionable, you can consider it biased and ridiculous. (I know I do.)
February 4, 2009 at 2:13 pm
John Emerson
Barbar, there’s a tremendous amount of flat-out misrepresentation and deliberate inaccuracy, which is repeated over and over again after it’s been refuted. Just follow it on Media Matters or Crooks and Liars. There’s a whole category of zombie lies that people still believe even though they were refuted 10 years ago.
Part of the problem is just the attempt to find neutrality and consensus and centrism. I’d be much happier with ideologically diverse media. But if we have to have a consensus centrist media, it should be accurate and fair.
February 4, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Urk
count me as an Emersonian in this instance.
February 4, 2009 at 3:46 pm
polticalfootball
Barbar, in many instances, the political makeup of the American public doesn’t matter. If the following for creationism increases dramatically, that shouldn’t change how the media covers the Kansas Board of Education’s effort to dilute science teaching.
Truth isn’t something you measure against some political barometer, even if discerning the truth is often challenging – and it’s the media’s proper job to report the truth.
I’m fond of quoting Colbert, who says that reality has a well-known liberal bias. Colbert gets it.
February 4, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Barbar
Yes, I understand that reality is real and truth is true. So is Afghanistan Obama’s Vietnam?
February 4, 2009 at 5:23 pm
PorJ
I don’t think that Agnew talked about media consolidation, though, which came after ward, under Reagan, ans was part of the way that finance gained control of the media.
Agnew *absolutely* was concerned about media consolidation. And if you believe that media consolidation is a product of the Reagan era, then I would suggest looking up the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 (ironically signed into law by Nixon). Do you have any idea what happened to the daily newspaper industry between 1964 and 1980? When Agnew was speaking, there were 3 national networks, lucky TV markets had 4 channels to choose from (UHF was still a joke), Cable TV was in its infancy and Tim Berners-Lee hadn’t given us the Web yet. There is no question that there exists a far more diverse set of media outlets and media ownership groups (and user-friendly, cheap media production tools) today than in 1969. The effects of media consolidation were far more prevalent between 1965 and 1975 than they are today; Walter Cronkite’s average nightly audience was more than the current three network newscasts plus CNN combined. Rupert Murdoch,the Dolan family, John Malone, etc. might have more money but they can only dream of the power once held by William Paley or David Sarnoff.
And “finance” was always intimately intertwined with “the media.” Why do you think Prescott Bush was a Director of CBS in the 1930s when he was an investment banker? The Paley family couldn’t raise all the necessary capital from their Cigar business.
As I said: we’re all arguing from enormous amounts of (historical, theoretical, analytical, and other kinds of) ignorance here. And I include myself, even if I published some stuff related to this.
February 4, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Charlieford
Too much worring about media bias, too little about the nature of the war in Afghanistan. (Let me suggest reading up on the conflict: Nir Rosen’s and Anthony Cordesman’s works are excellent places to start, and available on the web.) The “Vietnam” analogy isn’t entirely unuseful. In the discussions I’ve been a part of it’s been bandied about for more than a year, meant to highlight issues such as the terrain, porous borders, guerrila tactics, the tenacity of the people defined as “the enemy,” deep cultural differences between US and Afghan peoples, the vagueness of the goal, etc., etc. But call it what you want: a quagmire; a long, hard slog; an unwinnable war . . . it matters little. The war is what’s important.
February 4, 2009 at 5:35 pm
polticalfootball
So is Afghanistan Obama’s Vietnam?
Depends on how you are invoking Vietnam – I’d have to read the article behind that headline to have an opinion.
February 4, 2009 at 5:46 pm
polticalfootball
Here’s a bit of media criticism that I wish somebody would write: This article in the LA Times has been criticized by Greenwald and Hilzoy, among others, for its absurd misrepresentation of Obama’s potential rendition program. But nobody has noticed the remarkably Orwellian second sentence of the story:
No. Wrong. Obama has never said – never suggested – that interrogators won’t be harsh. They will continue to say mean things about the suspects’ mommas, and call them bad names and whatnot. What they won’t do is torture people.
There’s a difference, and Barbar, we can argue all day about whether there is really a difference, but there is.
February 4, 2009 at 5:53 pm
John Emerson
I grant you the Agnew point. Agnew was right. Reagan and later Republicans were perfectly happy with media consolidation, and it’s worked for them.
I have conceded many times, here and elsewhere, that before 1984 the media probably were liberal in some sense.
As far as I know, the vast majority of the media are owned by enormous conglomerates with an interest in low taxes. Obviously finance has never been entirely separated from the media, any more than it’s been separated from any other area of business. But the privately owned media are fewer and fewer, and many of them have increased obligations to finance. (And the inheritance tax is a second way that media are recruited into the Republican Party; the publisher of the Seattle Times said in so many words that that influenced his Presidential endorsement).
There’s not more variety of newspapers than before; there’s less, by far. An enormous proportion of radio is owned by a few big companies. There are a total of about 7 TV-cable networks, all as far as I know controlled by big finance (counting Murdoch as big finance).
It makes a difference if a media group is free-standing or if it’s a subsidiary of a conglomerate with larger interests, and as far as I know almost all of them are. Obviosuly they’re all capitalist organizations.
Alternate media are definitely a resource, but so far they don’t match the major media.
February 4, 2009 at 6:05 pm
RobinMarie
Newsweek be stupid.
February 4, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Mr. Sidetable
Ari, why do I have to argue this every goddamn time? To me it’s a truism and a starting-point, and should be central to everyone’s thinking…
Why can’t everyone just admit that I’m right, without me having to provide some actual, you know, evidence? After all, I’ve been saying it louder and louder for seven years, so shouldn’t everyone just agree with me by now?
But seriously, your post above–with its frequent use of the phrase “as far as I know,” and its repeated mention of “big finance”–is kind of unclear in the image it gives of media ownership in the U.S. You particularly singled out the case of newspapers. The largest newspaper companies in the U.S.–Gannett, McClatchy, New York Times Corp., Tribune Company–all have “larger interests,” but they are quite narrowly confined to the media sector.
So, while these companies are conglomerates, they are MEDIA conglomerates–they own newspapers, websites, magazines, radio stations, cable channels, and local TV affiliates. You give the impression that most media outlets are owned by giant corporations with a wide range of interests in completely different businesses, which simply isn’t the case.
If what you’re lamenting is the passing of independent, private ownership of the local newspaper, then yes, that ship sailed decades ago. But most of the newspapers in the U.S.–papers that people are increasingly not reading, because they are turning to Web-based sources of information–are owned by companies that are primarily in the newspaper (or media) business. So if you’re talking about “conglomerates” in the sense of large firms that are active in lots of different media businesses, then yes, that’s exactly who owns most newspapers today. But if you mean “conglomerates” as in companies that make shoes and turbines and toothpaste and also newspapers, then that’s just not true. (See Ben Bagdikian’s “The New Media Monopoly,” which outlines who owns what pretty thoroughly.)
February 4, 2009 at 7:30 pm
silbey
Silbey, I’ve been following this issue for seven years and arguing it for most of that time, and I haven’t noticed that arguing civilly is much more effective.
Then you had a choice about whether to be polite or insulting and you chose insulting. Why?
February 4, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Walt
I believe that one media conglomerate that we’re all familiar with does indeed make turbines.
February 4, 2009 at 7:45 pm
PorJ
As far as I know, the vast majority of the media are owned by enormous conglomerates with an interest in low taxes.
This is a history blog, so let’s put this in historical perspective: In 1930 America had three national radio networks: 2 owned by NBC and one by CBS. NBC was a wholly-owned subsidiary of GE, Westinghouse and RCA (Hoover’s antitrust division would force GE and Westinghouse to divest themselves of NBC stock in 1931). Douglas Craig’s Fireside Politics explains very clearly the tight linkage between the Republican Party and NBC (and the Democratic Party and CBS). Craig gives specific details on how the networks tightly controlled political discourse on the national airwaves between 1930 and 1945. No single media company in America in 2009 has the power of NBC in 1935.
In 1970, FM radio and cable TV were (essentially – both started in the 1940s but didn’t catch on) in their infancy. Even if I grant you that there currently exists “about 7 TV-cable networks” that’s more than there were in 1969. And, if you want to argue that the editorial line of all 7 is identical (which, as you point out yourself above is difficult to sustain in light of the difference between MSNBC and Fox), the Fairness Doctrine regulated the political content of the three national networks of 1970. There is far more political difference today between between MSNBC and NBC – despite identical ownership – than existed between CBS, NBC and ABC in 1970.
And as to political effect of media consolidation, think about this: In 1970, of the 862 [TV] stations in the country, only 82 operated independently of the three networks, and by 1995 there were 1,532 stations, of which 450 were independent of the three major networks (thus allowing networks like Fox, the WB, and UPN to come into existence). In 1968 Walter Cronkite could declare a war over and clearly alter the national political dynamic (or, at least make the President think he could). Who has that power in 2009? It will take much, much more media consolidation to produce another media figure with that much political power.
February 4, 2009 at 7:57 pm
John Emerson
Because I always do that, Silbey. This is the blogosphere, not the university, and I’m a desperate man with nothing to lose.
Mr. Sidetable: This argument, which I’ve had dozens of times, consists of four points.
1. Since 1994 or earlier the media has been unfair to Democrats.
2. During that same period, political journalism has been not only center-right or right, but also inaccurate, dishonest, and silly. And I do think that it’s downright silly to argue the idea that the media don’t influence public opinion.
I would like to take these for given. When I’m talking to people who have been paying attention to these things and have seen what’s going on, usually I can do this. But not everywhere. After seven years I’m always astonished when people haven’t figured this part out.
3. My first original point is that too many people focus the argument on the individual reporters, TV talking heads, and columnists, when the problem is systematic enough that it can only be systematic. There’s no random assortment of rightwing and leftwing demagogues, or of rightwing and leftwing incompetents, or of rightwing or leftwing liars. It’s always center-right to far right, with a few demoralized slumps from the center-left. So my argument, and this is a sticking point for a lot of people, is that most of the managers and owners of the major media want a right-wing media, and that that’s where we should be looking for the source of the problem.
4. The speculative part of what I’ve been saying, and the part that I’m actually willing to argue about, is the reasons why media management and ownership goes that way. And actually, this is something I’d like to talk to intelligent, informed people about, because is just my own theory and I’d like to hear other theories.
And I thought I might be able to do that here, but I had to go through such a tangle of objections to the earlier points, plus the additional point (which I’ve never had to argue before) as to whether the media influence public opinion and voting, that I don’t think that we ever got even to #3 on my list. So I’ll have to postpone my discussion of #4 to some other place and time.
February 4, 2009 at 8:02 pm
John Emerson
I have ever said that the media before 1984 was better than now. I dated the collapse of the liberal media to 1984, which I did because I was conceding, as I have for a good long time, that the phrase “liberal media” was meaningful before 1984, but that we’re living in a different regime now. And it wasn’t only Democrats who lost; moderate Republicans lost too.
February 4, 2009 at 8:05 pm
John Emerson
“never”
February 4, 2009 at 8:12 pm
andrew
Vietnam analogies have been around since the Vietnam war, and some are made better than others, are more applicable than others, and so on. But why is this Obama’s Vietnam and not, say, the rest of the nation’s too (aside from the fact that the nation already had Vietnam, even if many individuals living in it did not)? Is it one analogy for one person, another for everyone else? That seems like more of a problem to me than the fact that Vietnam is mentioned.
February 4, 2009 at 8:13 pm
John Emerson
Viacom, the owner of CBS, is the second-largest media company in the country. Disney, the owner of ABC, is the fourth. NBC (as a division of G.E.) is the fifth. In some ways this should insulate the network news divisions. Their owners are powerful and in theory should be diversified enough that they would have more resources for news and more economies of scale to produce news more efficiently. But size can also mean that news becomes a smaller and potentially less important part of a company’s purpose, farther away from its core values, just another contributor to the bottom line.
Fox.
A media corporation whose media are mostly not news might be motivated to use its news operations to support low-tax politicians.
February 4, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Barbar
But why is this Obama’s Vietnam and not, say, the rest of the nation’s too
The best hypothesis in my opinion is that this title gets more attention to this particular article, makes people more likely to buy Newsweek at a newsstand, etc. “Obama’s Vietnam” will get more attention than “Afghanistan: the American war that’s been going on forever and ever like you give a shit.” An alternate hypothesis is that the media is generally biased against Obama (seems pretty clearly wrong) or against the Dems. That the media is often biased against the Dems is pretty clear, but Obama’s had a pretty easy time of it on military matters; there’s really no larger pattern against him that I can see.
February 5, 2009 at 6:29 am
PorJ
Interesting that you would choose Viacom as an example of media consolidation. On 12/31/2005 (you posted a link to the 2004 State of the News Media website) Viacom spun off CBS:
The Viacom story is well-known in media regulation. Broadcasting and print are slow-growth, low-earnings compared to other media properties, so disaggregation had already begun (its going to stop now with the economy in shambles and anything producing a profit is worth more than a drag on share price). And yes, National Amusements (Sumner Redstone’s family) continues to control both firms (Viacom and CBS) but guess which one matters? With his debt problems and family problems, he would sell CBS in an instant if he got a decent price for it.
A media corporation whose media are mostly not news might be motivated to use its news operations to support low-tax politicians.
1. I’m simplistic?? I’m asking for precision – you are saying “might.” Yeah, sure. It “might” and it “might not.”
2. Who is a “high tax” politician that any large (or highly-regulated) corporation wants to support? Who proudly campaigns on raising taxes anymore? Ralph Nader? When, in the history of the capitalistic media system in the US, did profit-making media corporations campaign for higher-tax politicians? FDR forced NBC and CBS to fire commentators who disagreed with his policies (why do you think Father Coughlin had to put together his own network of low-power stations in the late 1930s?), but I don’t see that as “support” – rather, “fear.”
3. I have ever said that the media before 1984 was better than now. How do you define “”better” or “worse” here (again: precision)? If your problem is media consolidation, then “better” would seem to be diversity of outlets and ownership (that’s what I understood). So: if the media are more diverse today (and even in the category of newspapers there are more alternative weeklies being published today than in 1970) then was the “liberal media” regime before 1984 that involved less diversity and speech content regulation (Fairness Doctrine) “better” or “worse”?
Look: believe it or not, I support MORE regulation. In particular, the pre-1996 ownership caps and minority set-asides. I actually do read Robert McChesney, Douglas Kellner, Noam Chomsky, Bill Moyers, Eric Alterman and the scholars and critics who have made your argument far more persuasively than you have. But I also read scholars and critics you do not seem familiar with – Schudson, Jesse Walker, William McGowan, etc. and others. My position is things are far better today, in terms of diversity of outlets and ownership, then they have ever been. Media consolidation has had troubling effects, but its still preferable to the old regime. But simply saying things are improving isn’t enough; regulation is about trade-offs, and we traded off too much in 1996. The worst possible moment for media consolidation (on the national scale, in terms of ownership in few hands) in US history was about 1970. The best moment for diversity was about 1994, right before the Republican Congress took over. Reagan’s deregulation was not Newt Gingrich’s/Bill Clinton’s (which was far worse). These distinctions matter.
February 5, 2009 at 6:33 am
Michael Turner
So is Afghanistan Obama’s Vietnam?
Maybe it depends on what your definition of “‘s” is.
And maybe that’s in the eye of the beholders. Which beholders? As many beholders as Newsweek can imagine buying a copy of this one off the rack. Beholding in the cover in as many different ways as Newsweek market researchers can figure.
Really, can we start back at a point on which both PorJ and even an I-didn’t-read-the-article/I-find-rationality-offensive supposed Chomskyan would agree? Newsweek is in business to make money. That means selling newstand copies and retaining subscribers. Its covers should grab attention. It’s a media business imperative. Controversial cover? Ka-ching! (Potentially, anyway — they want every “cancel my subscription!” note to be followed by more than one new subscription card.)
That’s why we’re a gazillion posts into this comment thread already. Newsweek is hitting the jackpot on this one.
I feel so . . . manipulated. But also kind of envious of their calculated chutzpah.
Now let’s get to the problematic semantics of that possessive. How can Afghanistan even be Obama’s war already — much less his “Vietnam” — considering he’d hardly been in office a few days when Newsweek laid out that cover?
Before Afghanistan became Obama’s war — which, as commander in chief, it clearly is, now — it was a war Obama said he was willing to fight, if elected president. More than willing, he sounded downright enthusiastic about it. From “The War We Need to Win”, a speech on August 1st, 2007, long before most Americans felt he was a serious contender for the office, he said:
He goes on at considerable length. I have to say, at some point in reading it, the repetitions of “Pakistan” started to resonate with “South Vietnam” in my mind. Perhaps I’m showing my age (53). Draft-bait, I was, for a while there. Or so my mother made me feel, when reviewing my disastrous high school report cards.
Which gets us to whether, and/or in what sense, “Obama’s Afghanistan” can be equated with “Obama’s Vietnam.” As silbey points out above, when LBJ took office (at a comparable casualty count), Vietnam wasn’t yet “Vietnam”. Whereas Afghanistan has been “AFGHANISTAN!!!111!1!” since not long after 9/11. As media spectacles, they don’t compare in other ways. I mean, how does the name “Pat Tillman” hit you? A real solar plexus zing, eh?
OK, so none of the parallels are exact. Their poppy growers are under the Taliban, the enemy. The Golden Triangle’s poppy growers were ultimately under Air Marshall Ky, supposedly our friend. (Thanks for all the junkie Vietnam vets, “friend”.) I could go on. What remains is this: Afghanistan is a lot more like Vietnam than Iraq ever was, and Obama pledged, long before being elected, to solve the problem of Afghanistan with (among other things) more troops. Does it have anything like the same quagmire potential? You have to admit, it’s not a bad question. It Can’t Happen With Obama, you say? Reread the story of the Pentagon Papers — it’s like a morality play about the ability of liberals to rationalize as lethally and fallibly as Republicans. The beginning of corruption is the belief that it can’t happen to you.
So I parsed that possessive “‘s” of the cover’s “OBAMA’S VIETNAM” as “__ may be facing something like the same choices LBJ faced upon taking office, but with a media profile for the war a bit more like what Nixon faced with __”.
That’s what I took from the cover, anyway. I’d been thinking along those same lines already, and watching the trends, for a while. And, as it turned out, that also what I got from the article. So I wasn’t very surprised. It’s not exactly a new idea, after all.
Then again, for all I know, Newsweek’s researchers have my demographic worked out down to three places past the decimal point: “baby boomer information junkie, consumer of All Things Wonky, will read the whole article, not so much because he doesn’t know what it will say, but more so he can talk knowledgeably about what it didn’t say. Two newsstand copies bought annually, max. 5-10 website visits, but with no ad click-thrus. Subscription potential: P=0.000.”
Maybe Newsweek had also worked out, to some similar degree of accuracy, how the same cover would hit other demographics in their different ways. They might even have a meta-demographic database entry for some prototypical John Emerson, with the text field annotation: “Disproportionately good for business when you consider the microscopic scale of his demographic; monitor his flaming in blog comments; with the pig-headed obstinacy displayed by this type about not even reading articles like our ‘Obama’s Vietnam’, we’ll probably get a few more readers who figure that, if he won’t read it, it’s probably worth reading.”
February 5, 2009 at 6:34 am
politicalfootball
Here’s an observation about media bias: I’ve never heard of a local metropolitan daily come out against anything that could be reasonably characterized as city development. It’s my belief that stadiums, which are often a really egregious example of wealth transfer to the wealthy, are always supported by local media.
Question: Does anyone know what the LAT’s stance was on the NFL? Did that newspaper encourage the city to stand up to the NFL?
February 5, 2009 at 7:03 am
politicalfootball
Michael T gets it right. I am puzzled by how folks are reading this Newsweek cover completely out of the context in which it appeared. What real person looks at this cover and thinks: “Wow, that article must assert that Obama is responsible for the current state of play in Afghanistan”? I can’t imagine anyone who would think that. Newsweek is quite reasonable in assuming that Obama’s recent inauguration is common knowledge.
The secondary objection to the cover is that it sets up Obama to be blamed for the stuff that’s going to go wrong that isn’t really his fault. But that’s just the way life is, folks. Quarterbacks and presidents get the blame – and the credit. That’s where the bias is; it’s not some specific anti-Obama thing.
February 5, 2009 at 7:07 am
Charlieford
The analogy has a history: R. W. APPLE JR., “A NATION CHALLENGED: NEWS ANALYSIS; A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam,” New York Times, October 31, 2001. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9906E6DF1230F932A05753C1A9679C8B63&scp=8&sq=Apple%20afghanistan&st=cse
February 5, 2009 at 7:35 am
John Emerson
PorJ, my point #4 is the one that I actually wanted to talk about, but that discussion required the acceptance of points #1-#3 in order to be meaningful, and I don’t believe I’ve got that yet.
The open question for me is “Why are the media behaving the way they are?” My conjectures have been 1. control by finance 2. advertiser pressure and 3. colonization by the IR-military-intelligence establishment. I mentioned #1 here because it seems most likely, with #2 coming along with. I really don’t think that the ideological convictions of the owners are the reason, nor is consumer demand. For some reason people like Kristol and Beck and Jonah Goldberg and the Kagans get media real estate. WRT Limbaugh and O’Reilly, viewer demand is certainly a factor. But the total absence of any such person to the left of center still needs explanation. (Olberman is actually center-left, and along with Maddow, unique).
So in the context of 1-2-3, if you have better explanations, bring them forward. Do you think that there’s something there? Because without 1-2-3 we have nothing to talk about.
You seem to be continuing an argument you were having elsewhere with someone else. The long digression about the omnipotence of the media was unnecessary, because I never said that. The refutation of my belief that things were less monopolized at some point in the past was off the mark, because I never said that the media are more monopolized now. My argument has been that the media bias (if you want to call it that) is now center-right and hard right, whereas before about 1984 it was center right to left-liberal. (The hard left has never had a major media presence, to my knowledge). And media consolidation or the degree of it is not my main point at all. It’s the influence of finance on media, not the particular mechanism by which that influence is expressed. Some of the biggest newspapers are still privately owned, but heavily indebted. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune just declared bankruptcy primarily because of extraordinary debt incurred during two or thee buyouts in four or five years. Knight-Ridder almost went under.
P.S. I did not “choose” Viacom. That citation mentions three media groups, with a fourth on another link, and you choose Viacom because it fits your argument.
P.P.S. If your problem is media consolidation…. It isn’t. You’re arguing with someone else. My problem is the systematic rightwing slant of the media, and my conjecture is that control by finance is the cause.
P.P.S. I come from the political blogosphere and I dealt with this topic politically. To me it’s here and now, a patient-bleeding-on-the-table situation — what motivated me was a flood of hints that, even though the Republicans are whipped, the media are as bad as ever. “What’s going on here?” is my question.
I’m not trying to develop a media theory to publish a few years down the road. You can do that, if you wish. So standing right here, right now, do you think that media management has a systematic rightwing bias, and if so, why do you think that is?
February 5, 2009 at 7:52 am
John Emerson
PF, that cover and headline was unforgivable, for reasons that have been said above by me and other. I think you’re being obtuse.
What real person looks at this cover and thinks: “Wow, that article must assert that Obama is responsible for the current state of play in Afghanistan”?
Lots of them, PF. Lots of them. That kind of thing is how American media politics works now. There’s this steady drip of little digs and insinuations and hints and unflattering pictures and loaded questions and misleading headlines and misrepresentations, no single unit of which changes anyone’s mind, but which cumulatively poison the atmosphere.
One of the key demographics in elections where a 3% shift remakes the political world is the so-called “low information voter”, which I call the “whim” voter, or “ambient” voter. For someone like that a Newsweek cover seen at the right time could swing their vote, and an accumulation of similar graphics might recruit them solidly to the anti-Obama camp. It’s not the dead-end Republican 30%ers, but the wishy-washy centrists that I’m talking about. The dead-enders might be misinformed too, but they’re irrecoverable.
February 5, 2009 at 8:15 am
PorJ
1. Since 1994 or earlier the media has been unfair to Democrats.
I don’t concede this point in its entirety. At times it has, at others time it has not. “Media” is a remarkably imprecise term, and I don’t believe the “media” as single entity is the same in 2009 as it was in 1994 (even if I grant that “the media” is a single entity, which I do not). And, since you would like to talk “systemically”: what happened in 1994 is that Congress got taken over by Republicans. Much of the country followed this conservative lead (including President Clinton and many centrist Democrats). The FCC reflected this political shift. I believe, systemically, the problem is political not managerial; if you want the media to be “more fair” to Democrats, get them elected more often. You might even see Rupert Murdoch throwing fundraisers for Hillary Clinton. “The Media” doesn’t care about labels like “Democrat” and “Republican” – it cares about who is most easily exploitable. And I’ll refer you to Daniel Hallin’s idea of the Sphere of Consensus/media argument. Media follows politics; if there is no political opposition, there is no serious media debate. That may not be a good system, but its a problem with the political system first, Journalism second (and BTW, my handle – PorJ – comes from a discussion thread at BitchPhD about this specific argument: Politics or Journalism – who is to blame?)
2. During that same period, political journalism has been not only center-right or right, but also inaccurate, dishonest, and silly. And I do think that it’s downright silly to argue the idea that the media don’t influence public opinion.
I don’t concede that political journalism, between 1994 and 2009, has been anymore “inaccurate, dishonest, and silly,” then at almost any other point in US history (this is a history blog after all). Look at the Thomas Jefferson/Callendar feud in Virginia, look at the press in the Jacksonian era. The idea of an “objective” or “accurate” or “honest” or even “serious” press is a relatively recent invention (about 100 years old). I think Agnew got a lot of support for the idea that the professional press in the “objective” era was “inaccurate, dishonest and silly.” I also think journalists themselves are ashamed of their own role in the McCarthy years, when their reporting was often “inaccurate, dishonest and silly” – and dangerous – because they tried to observe norms of objectivity that were not tenable. Do you want to go back to norms of objectivity? Why do you think Fox News says they are “fair and balanced”? Because they would love the media to be more “objective” or “fair” to the Democrats.
BTW: there’s a whole body of literature – Herbert Gans, Gaye Tuchman, Edward Jay Epstein, etc. that can be dropped into this conversation to seriously complicate the discussion. but I wont do it.
I never argued that it was silly to argue that the media influences people/public opinion. In fact, I said the media does influence people. But (again) the largest and most important (but not sole) influence is to reconfirm pre-existing biases and stereotypes (i.e. being small-c conservative) rather than changing people’s minds. And that complicates the idea you’ve posited that managerial imperatives=editorial decision-making because all decisions are undertaken with this capitalistic imperative in place. When we’ve decided on a commercial system, we’ve decided on a bias that is going to be small-c (status quo) conservative, regardless of party labels.
I just think we’re arguing at two different levels of precision of complexity. I’m guess I’m too much of simpleton to grasp the conspiracy you’ve outlined. But thanks for the debate.
February 5, 2009 at 8:46 am
John Emerson
OK, we have nothing to talk about. I think that, using the splitting methods you use, it’s extremely unlikely that you will ever contribute anything useful to any political debate. Whether your methods will work in more leisurely academic pursuits, I don’t know. It seems unlikely to me, since your main, one-size-fits-all idea seems to be “it’s more complicated that and you are being irrational”.
When you named Jeff Greenfield as representative liberal, I should have known that either you have no understanding or awareness of today’s media, or else that you are an instance of exactly the problem I’m trying to address. Greenfield is a defeated liberal or ex-liberal at best, but he’s mostly been a process wonk all along, and counts as a liberal or a Democrat only when the media are trying to claim “balance”. Contrast George Will or dozens of others.
There’s no conspiracy theory. What I’m saying is 1.) that there is a rightwing trend in contemporary media (“media” doesn’t strike me as such a terribly difficult word as it does you) and 2.) that it is not a matter of individual reporters or commentators, but a systematic and pervasive management problem. I may be wrong about both points, but it’s not a conspiracy theory to say that management manages. It’s a conspiracy theory, for example, when you say that and Anglo-Dutch conspiracy controls the federal reserve. I’m surprised that someone of your exquisite scrupulosity would use a term so erroneously and crudely.
I do not remember any point in the Clinton administration when the media were supporting Clinton the way they supported Bush, and there’s no evidence that they’re going to support the Democrats now that they’re in firm control of electoral politics. Talk to me in two years.
A thoroughly fruitless discussion, but good exercise, I guess.
February 5, 2009 at 9:23 am
Michael Turner
PF: What real person looks at this cover and thinks: “Wow, that article must assert that Obama is responsible for the current state of play in Afghanistan”?
Emerson: Lots of them, PF. Lots of them.
It’s just that kind of solidly substantiated opinion that makes me dread the next time I’m made the feckless audience of some crank wandering up to me at a bus station, when my bus isn’t due yet for hours.
Now, when someone like Juan Cole parses the headline as something more like “Will (could) Afghanistan become Obama’s Vietnam”, as most bloggers apparently have in reaction to this Newsweek piece (and others, and also in reaction to the fact that Obama ordered a couple of air strikes in his first week), it’s probably worth our time to give him a hearing.
The standard narrative on LBJ is that he had to prove he wasn’t “soft on Communism” in order to get his Great Society programs passed by Congress. Obama’s predicament might be similar; just substitute “Islamist terrorism” for “Communism”. For all we know, Obama always understood this potential dilemma for precisely what it is, and might be grateful to see U.S. opinion on involvement in Afghanistan, which features no major partisan divide, eventually shift against the war without a partisan divide opening up in the process. As long as he can calibrate troop commitments to U.S. popular support, it might be a wash, it might present him with few political risks to re-election.
It’s no way to run a war, of course, but the usual Clausewitzian quips apply: war is “politics by violent means”, but also “a wrestling match.” Both are fundamentally imbecilic when you get down to it, but that doesn’t make the nonviolent solutions clear to anyone involved who refuses to see them, nor does it prevent lots of very smart people from getting chewed up in the process of resolution.
The problem of getting out is complicated by the fact that the first significant attack on the U.S. mainland since [um, whenever; you people are the historians] was launched by guests of the Taliban planning it in Afghanistan. U.S. involvement in Indochina didn’t start when the Viet Cong rammed airliners into major centers of financial and military coordination in the U.S. So long as there’s a steadily growing recognition of the Taliban as Pashto nationalists, and effective containment of, and engagement with, that nationalism, and a growing disconnect between the Taliban and violent, globalized jihad, there’s probably some hope of non-partisan disengagement. So long as it’s seen as a War on Terror, however (which Obama formally ended, but which he can’t extinguish as a political meme), he’s got a “softness” problem leaving him poliically exposed.
So maybe the crowning irony here is that Obama’s real problems with Afghanistan will stem from precisely the points where the analogy to Vietnam breaks down. For Vietnam, we at least have some idea of what mistakes were made — from having made most of the possible mistakes. Afghanistan is more of a blind grope forward in that respect. Then there’s the other suspect analogy: Some people talk about applying the “lessons of Iraq” to Afghanistan. But I really have to wonder about that, to the extent that those lessons involve highly culture-bound strategies for “winning the peace”. When I read about how things are going in Iraq these days, it sounds like the return of sanity — a slow, tentative return, to be sure — to a secular, technologically developed, bureaucratically organized, well-educated society, one that’s perhaps more like our own than, say, Saudi Arabia’s. Ba’athism wasn’t all bad, and maybe it’s past time to admit it. Afghanistan, that’s something else again. Ba’athism? Afghans should have been so lucky.
February 5, 2009 at 9:27 am
John Emerson
Could you explain your point about PF and I more clearly, Michael?
February 5, 2009 at 10:14 am
Michael Turner
Could you identify a real person matching PF’s supplied description, John?
February 5, 2009 at 10:17 am
Urk
you know, if the focus is just on this cover then it’s alot easier to argue that the media [let’s call that “that what reports what is considered “news” and defines, by practice what is and isn’t “news.”] isn’t hardwired to serve the interests of the Republican party. But if you look at not only the pundits, but who appears on the Sunday news shows, who gets the commentary gigs, etc. then I think it’s a lot harder to deny.
Saying “hardwired” is in some ways my way of saying that i can see what’s happening but I’m not certain why exactly. but it seems odd: when the Republicans control the gvt. then the reporting apparatus is largely compliant. When the Republicans are in the opposition, then the reporting apparatus rediscovers it’s fundamental responsibility to make sure that oppositonal viewpoints are represented. You can make a practical argument to explain the former and an ethical argument to explain the latter, but I don’t really see how you can make an argument that this isn’t largely the case.
so, I don’t know whether it’s finance or some effect of a loop between the audience and the media itself, or the effect of 40 or so years of high profile Republican bitching about “the liberal media” or what. I suspect, as in most cases, it’s complex and involves all of these factors. I’d lean towards (depending on the outlet) finance and/or a desire to differentiate from perceived “liberal bias” pulling the coverage rightward which influences the audience which influences the coverage, etc.
Where the Newsweek cover becomes useful is that it’s an example of what is considered in bounds or out of bounds and how that changes depending on the party/ideological persuasion of the person or group discussed. One doesn’t have to believe that people come to the direct intellectual conclusion that “Obama is responsible for Vietnam” to believe that leaving the equation “obama + Afghanistan = Vietnam” hanging out there in the air [since more people are going to read the headline than read the story] is likely to effect the terms of the debate regarding the war in Afghanistan, and who (both personally and in terms of party affiliation) is responsible for the outcome there.
Now, yes, he is the President, and it is now, his responsibility. and there are facile paralells to Johnson taking office in 64. But the historical analogy, which gives this story terms-of-debate-setting power, is not only faulty, it could have been more accurately applied to Bush. And if it’s all about selling magazines, why the assumption that it wouldn’t have sold magazines then but would now?
In other words, why did most of the major media outlets assiduously avoid tying Iraq or Afghanistan to Vietnam to the president when the president was Bush, in their own narrative voice rather than reporting that someone else had suggested for the last 5 years? And why are those particular gloves off now? As I suggested upstream, I think it’s complicated, but I think that suggesting that the media is “hardwired for” or “colonized by” the Republican party is a useful way to think about it.
February 5, 2009 at 10:26 am
Urk
maybe shorter and more clear: “Obama, Afghanistan, Vietnam” in the headline can become “Obama + Afghanistan = Vietnam” can become “Obama is responsible for Afghanistan becoming like Vietnam” through a combination of the perceived authority of historical analogies, the perceived authority of mainstream news mags, the influence of openly right wing oppositional media who want the connection to be made, and vernacular flows among people many of whom won’t even read the story. Is it a sure thing, a mind control conspiracy? of course not, but it’s likely enough, and if it isn’t this meme it could be another one. and, it’s exactly the kind of thing that most major media avoided doing during the past 5 years when such analogies would have been more appropriate.
February 5, 2009 at 10:30 am
John Emerson
Yes, Michael. I spent decades among low-information voters. I tried to avoid them, not always successfully. I once spent half an hour talking to one, and she changed her mind several times in the course of an hour. Most of her shifting reasons for voting were utterly ludicrous.
I’m sure that you’ve never met any of these people, God bless you, but I have.
February 5, 2009 at 11:23 am
Barbar
Have you ever met a low-information Democratic voter, John?
February 5, 2009 at 11:31 am
John Emerson
I couldn’t tell about the one. She switched several times. I’m sure they exist.
February 10, 2009 at 4:18 am
drip
See what you did? Newsweek has all but given up!
February 13, 2009 at 7:55 am
Buster
Now Newsweek is just messing with you.