If we look at what our journalists have been writing about Iran, we can see a distinction between what we might call the ‘mainstream’ on one side and certain elements of the ‘left’ on the other. The distinction I want to make here is about the displeasure over the Iranian election and the subsequent discord in the streets. The mainstream argues that the displeasure and discord arose independently out of the population’s inherent desires for democracy in their country. The skeptical ‘left’ argues that the displeasure and discord has been created, funded, and stoked by American spooks in order to bring about ‘regime change.’
One of our problems in trying to figure out which of these positions is correct is how little we know about Iran, in general, but also, how little we know about what our own government and its intelligence service, the spooks I refer to, have been doing in Iran these many years. The problem is not just that the U.S. government would like to keep it’s skullduggery secret, but that the people responsible for investigating what’s going on in these areas has been lax and shirking those responsibilities.
What do I mean that journalists have a responsibility to tell us what’s going on with American spooks? I mean that the spook business is a very touchy subject, and despite whomever’s toes might be stepped on, journalists have an obligation to find out and explain to the American people what our spooks have been doing and why.
So, for example, if Iran should find out that American spooks paid for there to be roving bands of thugs roaming the streets of Tehran beating people up, they might take this as an act of war. In order to evaluate whether or not Obama should apologize for that provocation and do what would be necessary to prevent such illegal acts from occurring again, it would be important for independent observers, some journalists, to have investigated and explained to us what exactly American spooks had done. Yes, the President may say that he would never allow such a thing, and that the U.S. has had a policy of thoughtful watchfulness, but, we know that such statements can never be taken at face value. Presidents lie.
Should we have any expectation that journalists would try to ferret out the facts in this area? There are many reasons why we should not hold our breath. I want to look at some of the general reasons brought up here in this quote from Bagdikian’s book, The Media Monopoly, where he talks about some of the reasons you can’t expect journalists to tell you what’s going on, despite the fact they’re feeding you a lot of ‘news.’
Democracy and the Media
from the book
The Media Monopoly
by Ben H. Bagdikian
published by Beacon Press, 199
…No national paper or broadcast station can report adequately the issues and candidates in every one of the 65,000 local voting districts. Only locally based journalism can do it, and if it does not, voters become captives of the only alternative information, paid political propaganda, or no information at all.
Bagdikian is speaking about whether or not one newspaper or broadcasting organization could report on all or even a good portion of the 65,000 local voting districts in the United States. This would be a difficult if not too expensive task for any single entity. You could look at USA Today, a paper that tries to look at the country as a whole. It never can cover what goes on in more than a few localities before it becomes too big to carry. It also cannot hire journalists who would be able to say anything intelligent about more than a few local elections or issues. Bagdikian suggests that the only way for people to find something useful in a newspaper or broadcast, is to look for it in a local paper or broadcast medium.
There was never a precise pattern of each voting district with its own journalistic media. But there was once something like it. In 1900, for example, there were 1,737 urban places and 2,226 daily papers. This came close to an average of a paper for every city; most cities had competing dailies and weeklies. Papers were based in a single city, and most papers pursued the intense interests of their particular readers within that city. It meant greater detail of information and political analysis. Readers had strong loyalties to such papers and they provided a greater proportion of those papers' revenues than readers of the 1980s pay for their more bland dailies. In the past it meant more, smaller papers, and smaller papers meant it cost less to start new dailies. If existing papers ignored the interests of a significant part of the community there was a greater likelihood that an entrepreneur or politically oriented publisher would start a new paper to capitalize on the untouched audience. As a result, turn-of-the-century papers more readily reflected changes in the needs and desires of the body politic.
The idea here would be that our understanding of Iran depends on there being journalists in Iran who understand that place but write about it to explain it to us here in the United States. The question over these last several decades has been whether American journalists have spent enough time and effort looking into what’s going on in Iran.
Pursuit of advertising changed the versatility of American print media. It reduced the media's responsiveness to reader desires. Publishers became more dependent on advertising revenues than on reader payments. Ads swelled the size of the paper each day, requiring larger plants, more paper and ink, and bigger staffs, with the result that it was no longer easy for newcomers to enter the newspaper business. As the country's population grew and new communities arose, the old pattern disappeared. Instead of new papers to meet changing political forces, existing papers pushed beyond their municipal boundaries to the new communities and, increasingly, reached not for all the new citizens but for the more affluent consumers. Soon each metropolitan paper was pre-empting circulation in thousands of square miles with hundreds of communities and voting districts. The newly captured populations were inundated with ever-larger quantities of regional advertising, but the papers, and later the radio and television stations, could not possibly tell each community what it needed to understand its own problems and needs.
One of the reasons we have not had very many journalists looking into Iran, from Iran, has been the cost of such work. The papers and broadcasters have been cutting down on their staff just as the need for people to do investigative work has increased. But, in addition, as the need to cut down on staff has accelerated, the ability of those journalists remaining to cover the difficult and dangerous work of ferreting out what goes on with American spooks has been undermined. We might expect that issues of war and peace should make such work indispensable, but it is the most difficult, and so does not get such a high priority.
… Ironically, the programs that destroyed central cities as living complexes were encouraged by metropolitan newspapers, oriented as they were to the desires of real estate and other developers, but all the changes were destructive to the traditional daily sales of newspapers. …
One should also realize that news organizations can have different focuses for their reporting. You can report about the culture of Iran, so that you can promote trade and travel between Iranian and American corporations. This kind of reporting may never get anywhere near the question about the nature of the Iranian ‘regime,’ or the desires of American spooks to change it.
After World War II, mass advertising steadily destroyed competitive dailies; monopoly became the norm. In the new suburbs there were new dailies, but far from the number that had grown in American cities of the past. The new monopoly corporations in the central cities pushed outward to the suburbs, pre-empting the best advertising that might otherwise have supported a new local daily. …
The new pattern after World War II had a profound impact on the way news was reported. One change was a new category of "news" that was not really news. It was that gray area "fluff," part entertainment of interest to readers but mostly light material designed to create a buying mood as bait for more advertising. The addition of fluff made newspapers larger and drastically reduced the proportion of each paper devoted traditionally to its heart-the breaking news and commentary. The priorities of newspaper companies were quietly rearranged away from the reporting of important political events toward advertising-centered editorial matter. The new emphasis changed staffs, administrative operations, and leadership.
The new form of papers affected the attitude of readers. In 1900 newspaper subscribers paid twice the percentage of their personal incomes for their daily papers as do subscribers of the 1980s. In 1900 each paper meant more to its readers because the news dealt more closely with the reader's community and because each paper was more likely to meet its readers' political and social interests. The responsiveness of earlier papers to their particular readers represented sensitivity to social evolution; as social forces changed, papers were more likely to change with them. Papers in 1900 were more accountable to their readers because their financial fate rested on reader loyalty. The news, which, among other things, meant intense concern with politics and social change, was a more involving experience for individual citizens.
One of the reasons we should not expect journalists to investigate and report on what’s going on politically with Iran is that newspapers and broadcasting organizations, in general, are not that into talking about reality in that way. They are more interested, says Bagdikian, in the ‘fluff’ news that brings in advertisers and does not scare away politically motivated readers.
Responsiveness of each paper to its own social group was not an unmitigated advantage for society. It was easier for different segments of the community to see the world differently. Papers' special orientations often increased divisions within the community. But it is not clear that this was worse than the apathy resulting from a bland news system that avoids partisanship in a society whose political system is designed to be partisan. Nor is it clear whether the homogenized news for large areas serves citizens who are asked to make basic political decisions on a specific, local level.
The growth of monopoly and mass advertising diminished the amount of information about each community contained in newspapers. This changed newspapers long before broadcasting became a major news system, though radio and television soon adopted the same doctrine to meet their even greater dependence on advertising.
Newspapers neutralized information for fear that strong news and views pleasing to one part of the audience might offend another part and thus reduce the circulation on which advertising rates depend. Where once it was profitable to pursue particular issues and ideas of interest to the newspaper's particular group of readers, such pursuit now became a threat to larger profits. Newspapers, and later broadcasters, wanted all potential affluent consumers regardless of their personal political interests. Consequently, if a group as a whole were poor, as was true of some minorities, papers wished to avoid news of them and their issues. Problems affecting lower-income communities generally did not become news until they exploded and therefore affected affluent consumers.
In addition to not making waves with their advertisers or readers, news organizations will not want to make waves with American spooks. This means it will be even more difficult to find out about, report, or even remind their readers about what goes on in a politically sensitive place like Iran.
Blandness in the basic politics of the media became standard. Socially sensitive material of interest to one segment of the population might offend those with different opinions who, regardless of their differences, might possess the relevant quality of interest to newspapers-money to spend on advertisers' products. News became neutralized both in selection of items and in the nature of writing. American journalism began to strain out ideas and ideology from public affairs, except for the safest and most stereotyped assumptions about patriotism and business enterprise. It adopted what two generations of news-people have incorrectly called "objectivity."
The standard version of "objectivity" holds that it was created to end nineteenth-century sensationalism. To a large extent it did, and that alone made it appealing to serious journalists. "Objectivity" demanded more discipline of reporters and editors because it expected every item to be attributed to some authority. No traffic accident could be reported without quoting a police sergeant. No wartime incident was recounted without confirmation from government officials. 'Objectivity" increased the quantity of literal facts in the news, and it did much to strengthen the growing sense of discipline and ethics in journalism.
I want to argue here that authority figures are not at all above the fray, so to speak. In fact, political figures themselves have their own points of view and are, therefore, no less subjective. What they say is different partly, if not entirely, in how many problems they can make for a journalist who doesn’t bend to their will.
But the new doctrine was not truly objective. Different individuals writing about the same scene never produce precisely the same account. And the way "objectivity" was applied exacted a high cost from journalism and from public policy.
With all its technical advantages, "objectivity" contradicted the essentially subjective nature of journalism. Every basic step in the journalistic process involves a value-laden decision: Which of the infinite number of events in the environment will be assigned for coverage and which ignored? Which of the infinite observations confronting the reporter will be noted? Which of the facts noted will be included in the story? Which of the reported events will become the first paragraph? Which story will be prominently displayed on page 1 and which buried inside or discarded? None of these is a truly objective decision. But the disciplinary techniques of "objectivity" have the false aura of a science, and this has given almost a century of American journalism an illusion of unassailable correctness.
Why is journalism an essentially subjective enterprise? Why should we think that values are subjective? Why should all these decisions about accumulating the details about different points of view make any difference? My argument has been that the same preconceptions about which Descartes said there were theoretical problems makes journalists find theoretical problems with ‘point of view’ and ‘objectivity.’ Since Descartes had an impossible time trying to find an ‘objective’ point of view, a POV from which he could, say, determine whether he was awake writing in his study, or in bed asleep dreaming he was writing in his study, so, we should expect journalists to be in no less of a predicament.
"Objectivity" placed overwhelming emphasis on established, official voices and tended to leave unreported large areas of genuine relevance that authorities chose not to talk about. It accentuated social forces as rhetorical contests of personalities, with the reporter powerless to fill obvious gaps in official information or reasoning. It widened the chasm that is a constant threat to democracy-the difference between the realities of private power and the illusions of public imagery.
"Objectivity" tended to keep news superficial because too deep a pursuit of a single subject might bore or offend some of the audience. It strained out interpretation and background despite the desperate need for them in a century wracked by political trauma. Recitations of facts about world wars, genocides, depressions, and nuclear proliferation are useful but inadequate; mere recitations imply that all facts are of equal value.
The safest method of reporting news was to reproduce the words of authority figures, and in the nature of public relations most authority figures issue a high quotient of imprecise and self-serving declarations. Physical crime, natural disasters, and accidents were politically safe, which accounts for the peculiar American news habit of reporting remote accidents regardless of their relevance to the audience. News became more official and establishmentarian.
Could Descartes have gone to one of his friends and asked, say, I have had a problem in thinking about what’s been going on with me. Can you tell me whether I am awake talking to you, or in my bed right now asleep and dreaming I am talking to you? I’m saying, of course, the authority figure is in no position to answer Descartes’ question. He’s either awake talking about his philosophical problems, or dreaming he is. In either case, the person he’s speaking with cannot answer that question for him. The person is, for Descartes, no different than any of the other evidence that presents itself to Descartes. It either is real, or a product of his imagination, but itself cannot determine this question for Descartes. And so too, no authority can say whether Descartes is awake or asleep, or whether the story that the authority figure is giving is itself subjective, a product of just one point of view, among many, or an objective point of view, that decides which among many POV’s are real.
Perhaps the most powerful influence of the doctrine on working journalists was unconscious: It obscured and therefore made more palatable the unprofessional compromises with managerial imperatives and corporate politics. The subtle workings of the doctrine over the years and its rationalization of avoiding judgments made it easy for serious writers to remain silent about social ideas and political forces and to concentrate on contests of personalities. It produced the circular answer to the perpetual question "What is news?"-"News is news." By mid-twentieth century "objectivity" had achieved the status of a received truth. The first major crisis that "objectivity" created for journalists in this century centered on Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was created largely by the assumption that journalists are not obligated to write what they can demonstrate as true and significant unless it comes from the mouth of authority.
McCarthy paralyzed much of government and created hysteria throughout the country from 1950 to 1954 with lies and distortions. He made increasingly wild claims about Soviet agents in high places, including in the offices of the president of the United States, among generals of the U.S. Army, and in the Department of State. In the vast political wreckage McCarthy left in his wake, the senator did not disclose a single Soviet agent that had not already been exposed. Many competent journalists had evidence that McCarthy's statements were lies or clever distortions, some of it in the private admissions of the senator himself during his jocular drinking bouts with journalists and editors. But most journalistic organizations held to the doctrine that required use only of "official" statements by the most dramatic authority figure, and McCarthy was a United States senator.
Years of reappraisal within journalism after the debacle of the McCarthy years have not prevented subsequent failures of "objectivity" in an apolitical press. Race relations after World War II underwent powerful ferment, politically and socially, but not until they exploded in massive demonstrations and riots did they become major news, reported afterward mostly as police actions rather than as a profound change in the American scene. The same reluctance to report social forces made the persistence of structural poverty in a rich society an unreportable phenomenon until it became a physical phenomenon….
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media/DemoMedia_Bagdikian.html
So, when Obama says he’s done nothing to provoke the displeasure and discord in Iran, are journalists bound to take him at his word. You would think, from having read Bagdikian, that guys who want to get ahead in the business would. They should not be able to find any better authority on this issue than Obama, and therefore, let him have the last word on the issue.
Of course, American spooks may very well be plotting the overthrow of the Iranian state, as well as the French, say, but no journalist would ever find any of that worthy of notice until there might be some physical evidence of the plotting. But, they surely would not come forward with mere speculation about such plotting until they could, with such evidence, challenge the word of the President.
Hence, the secrecy. Not only will the American spooks plot to do whatever, but just as much effort will be put into covering up their tracks.
There will be no paper trail. There should be no witnesses. The President will have “plausible deniability”. Supposedly, then, journalists should have nothing to report.
However, the whole plot and cover-up and ‘journalist’s predicament’ depends on everyone accepting the main points about ‘points of view, ‘objectivity,’ and what makes spooks think they can disappear a whole people because they won’t give up their valuables without a fight. We can attack the otherwise hidden prerogative of spooks by questioning their underlying rationalizations. We may not know the details of who they’ve been corrupting, how much of our wealth they’ve been using to finance their corrupting, or what they’ve planned to bring about ‘regime change,’ but we can attack their assumptions about their mission statement. We can point out that no free people can be created, no conflicts can be resolved, by their nefarious plotting.
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