MEDIA
Media:
mil Ind Media complex? gulf war 1 Nintendo War; drones ; DoD cooperates to make warnography movies (TV? NCIS) nb FBI very media friendly; TV coverage of both gulf wars often (retired) generals to discuss tactics, not WHY we in a war. Mil made a video game as recruiting tool.
Research tools:
who owns what database: http://www.cjr.org/resources/index.php
http://checksandbalancesproject.org/investigations/
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/right-wing-media-outlets-are-booming-in-the-trump-era-report/
no lnx
Right-wing media outlets are booming in the Trump era: report
Written by Alex Henderson August 26, 2019
Right-wing media outlets have traditionally experienced their biggest growth when a Democrat was in the White House. Many far-right outlets knew how to turn fear-mongering over President Bill Clinton in the 1990s or President Barack Obama in the late 2000s/early 2010s into major advertising revenue. But in a report for Axios, Sara Fischer explains that some right-wing outlets have been enjoying substantial growth under a Republican president: Donald Trump.
Citing a Columbia Journalism Review analysis of right-wing websites using Comscore data, Fischer reports that RedState, the Washington Times and the Washington Examiner are among the outlets that have been thriving during the Trump era. Those sites, Fischer notes, “are experiencing major growth by widening their coverage. Their goal is to cover whatever is capturing the world’s attention that day, from human interest stories to trending entertainmentdevelopments.”
Fischer notes that although the right-wing Weekly Standard folded in late 2018, other websites on the right continue to “rank high” in terms of “engagement on Facebook” — and Fox News, according to Fischer, remains “the #1 news site on Facebook” in 2019 “in terms of reader engagement,” according to the analytics company Newswhip.
Podcasts that have been thriving in the Trump era, Fischer reports, include “The Joe Rogan Experience” and “The Ben Shapiro Show.” Shapiro, she points out, has “built a megabrand aimed at targeting younger conservatives.”
Fischer stresses, however, that although “conservative media remains strong across most major media platforms,” some “left-leaning outlets” — including HuffPost— “rank highly” in the Trump era. But Trump’s presidency and the 2020 election, she writes, continue to benefit right-wing media.
“Typically, the opposition party has a media explosion in response to whichever political group is in power,” Fischer reports. “But the economic stress of the media industry, combined with the Trump-driven conservative strategy of broad messaging, has upended that dynamic.”
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/robert-reich-here-are-9-simple-rules-media-should-adopt-stop-getting-played-trump
media trump
9 suggestions:
1. Stop treating Trump’s tweets as news.They’re not news; they’re his gut feelings at the moment.
2. Don’t believe a single word that comes out of his mouth.You have a responsibility to tell the public when he’s lying.
3. Don’t fall for the reality-TV spectacles he creates. (For example, his meeting with Kim Jong-un was pure theater.) They’re not news, either.
4. Don’t let his churlish, thin-skinned, vindictive, narcissistic rants divert attention from what he’s really doing.Your viewers and readers may love how sensational and bizarre they are, but they’re distractions.
5. Focus on what he’s really doing, and put the day’s stories into this larger context. He’s
– Undermining democratic institutions,
– Using his office for personal gain,
– Sowing division and hate,
– Cozying up to dictators while antagonizing our democratic allies around the world,
– Violating the rule of law, and
– Enriching America’s wealthy while harming the middle class and the poor.
He may also be colluding with Putin.
6. Stop reporting about the Republican Party and start reporting on Fox News, which is both Trump’s propaganda tool and his focus group for how to build power by dividing America with lies and hate. There’s no Republican Party any more. Only Trump and Fox News.
7. Keep track of what his Cabinet is doing– Sessions’s attacks on civil rights, civil liberties, voting rights, and immigrants; DeVos’s efforts to undermine public education, The EPA’s and Zinke’s efforts to gut the environment; all their conflicts of interest, and the industry lobbyists they’ve put in high positions.
8. Don’t let Trump use your journalistic goal of “balanced” reporting against you. Giving equal time to the truth and to lies from Trump’s enablers and followers isn’t “balance”. This isn’t a contest between right and left, Republicans and Democrats. This is between democracy and demagogic authoritarianism.
9. Finally, don’t let him rattle you. Maintain your dignity, confidence, and courage. Our democracy depends on you.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/09/09/how-the-conservative-media-is-taking-over-the-republican-party/?utm_term=.e690c039f9e6
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/09/09/how-the-conservative-media-is-taking-over-the-republican-party/
no link charts
How the conservative media is taking over the Republican Party
By Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins September 9, 2016
Megyn Kelly (right) interviews Donald Trump during the Fox News special “Megyn Kelly Presents” on May 17, 2016. (Eric Liebowitz/FOX)
When Donald Trump hired Stephen Bannon of Breitbart News as his new campaign chief, it was a sharp departure from the usual approach to staffing a presidential campaign.
That’s because Bannon, instead of bringing traditional experience as a professional election strategist, had been serving as the executive chairman of a site famous for conservative attack commentary and undercover scandal-stoking videos. Former Fox News Channel head Roger Ailes is also reportedly assisting Trump as he prepares for his upcoming debates with Hillary Clinton. Fox News host Sean Hannity acknowledges that he’s actively advising Trump and using his airtime to advance Trump’s candidacy.
Such blurring of the boundaries between a political campaign and the news outlets that cover it may be unusual – but it’s no departure from Trump’s long record of forging strong connections with conservative information sources.
Trump had a regular Fox & Friends segment called “Monday Mornings with Trump,” which appeared almost weekly from 2011 until he launched his presidential candidacy. He gained popularity among conservatives as the most prominent “birther,” repeatedly and publicly questioning whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, in defiance of the factual record. During the 2016 nomination race, Trump relied on national talk radio hosts to beat back criticism from rival candidates about his deviations from conservative orthodoxy. In fact, Trump’s most significant primary and caucus defeats were in Iowa and Wisconsin, where local conservative radio personalities bucked this trend by actively opposing his candidacy.
This kind of thing does not happen in the Democratic Party.
In our new book, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats, we show that the two parties have very different relationships with the news media.
The Republican Party is the political vehicle of an ideological movement that has spent decades building a conservative media infrastructure. This alternative information ecosystem has undermined supporters’ trust in mainstream news sources.
By contrast, the Democratic Party relies on a variety of more specialized outlets that match their supporters’ diversity. Much more than Republicans, Democrats treat mainstream journalists as legitimate arbiters of disputes over political facts — such as a candidate’s place of birth.
[Republicans and Democrats can’t even agree about how they disagree]
[How different are the Democratic and Republican parties? Too different to compare.]
Today, Republican voters report that they trust only Fox News and other explicitly conservative news outlets. Democratic voters, in contrast, say they trust and consume a wide variety of mainstream news outlets. The figure below shows each group’s net trust (percent trusting minus percent distrusting) of these networks and their mainstream alternatives.
Similarly, Republicans don’t trust scientists and other academics to be politically neutral. Because Republicans view both the mainstream media and academia as disproportionately populated by liberals — an accurate perception, to be sure, as the evidence in our book indicates — they conclude that these institutions cannot be respected as objective authorities. Instead, Republicans rely on research supplied by ideologically aligned sources such as conservative think tanks. As a result, Republican voters, activists, and politicians are more likely to live in an information cocoon, walled off from ideologically inconvenient evidence.
The conservative news media are a parallel power structure, rivaling Republican Party leaders
Over the last several decades, the conservative media universe has become a powerful, though unruly, faction of the GOP itself. Political figures often move back and forth between elective politics and positions on television or radio. Seven Republicans were talk radio hosts before entering Congress (including current vice presidential nominee Mike Pence). Ten became radio hosts after leaving the legislative branch.
Conservative media exerts enough political power among the Republican electorate that some critics, even within the party, fear that its leaders have more influence than traditional Republican leaders and organizations, and stir up dissension and rebellion among the party faithful.
Both conservative media influence and elite fear of this influence have a long history, which our book recounts in detail. As we show, conservatives have dominated talk radio since the 1950s.
Media figures have regularly become movement operatives who both foment popular rebellion and maintain political connections. Clarence Manion, who served on the board of both National Review and the John Birch Society, helped instigate Barry Goldwater’s grass-roots campaign for the presidency. Popular conservative media figures advanced anti-communist crusades in the 1950s and the Christian Right in the 1970s. Ronald Reagan retreated to radio to build his base between his unsuccessful presidential run in 1976 and his successful campaign four years later. Rush Limbaugh helped bring Republicans back to power in Congress in 1994. Fox News stewarded the tea party to prominence in 2009.
Political science has been slow to recognize the political parties’ very different relationships to the news media
With notable exceptions, little political research has recognized the asymmetric relationships between the media and each political party. Most contemporary studies of cable news, for example, test their effects by exposing individuals to Fox News Channel or MSNBC and look for similar effects on their subjects’ political views. But in the real world, these sources have audiences of much different-sizes and play very dissimilar roles within each party.
The chart below illustrates the relative primetime viewership of Fox News and MSNBC. The Fox audience has been three or four times as large as that of MSNBC since 2002; it now serves as a major news source for the Republican base.
Scholars have had great success analyzing the natural experiment of the gradual geographic spread of access to Fox across the country from 1996 to 2000. These studies show that as Fox was introduced to cable systems, it increased Republican voting, especially in conservative but Democratic-held districts; reduced legislator support for President Clinton’s positions; and made legislators more likely to support the Republican position on divided congressional votes. The effects were strongest in areas with more Republicans and closer to Election Day, suggesting that Fox helps mobilize the Republican base.
Unfortunately, these studies were done when Fox’s ratings were only one-fifth their current level — roughly equivalent to those of MSNBC at the time. The studies also came before the channel became uniformly conservative across its prime-time lineup. In other words, political science research probably understates conservative media’s influence – and significantly so. Even so, comparative studies of the two channels show that MSNBC and its kin do not have a parallel impact on Democratic voters or politicians. Right-wing news stands alone.
Democratic candidates don’t turn to liberal media figures in the same way. In fact, there is no left-of-center equivalent of Fox News.
It would be difficult to imagine Hillary Clinton hiring the editor of Salon or Daily Kos to oversee her campaign or relying on Rachel Maddow as a major adviser. While the ideological nature of the GOP is reinforced by Republican voters’ reliance on intellectual and media authorities that explicitly claim a commitment to a conservative worldview, Democratic voters don’t depend on openly liberal media for their political information.
And although many have tried to build a left-wing version of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News, from the Air America radio network to Al Gore’s Current TV, they regularly fail – suggesting that a liberal counterpart to the conservative media universe will never exist. This long-standing partisan asymmetry is likely to remain the same in the future — especially if 2017 brings the advent of Trump TV.
https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-news-trump-2534506140.html
Trump Effect on Climate News
By Jeremy Deaton
All press is good press—except when it isn't.
For those who are happy about President Trump's attacks on climate science and policy, this will come as bad news. By shining a spotlight on the issue, Trump drove media coverage of climate change last year.
New analysis from Media Matters for America finds that,following a year of lagging coverage of climate change, 2017 saw network news programs scramble to report on Trump's full-scale assault on federal climate policy. The spike in coverage coincided with an increase in concern about climate change—Americans are now more worried than ever about the carbon crisis.
What's more, the heightened awareness comes in spite of the fact that broadcasters fell short in several key areas. "Even though corporate broadcast news coverage of climate change increased between 2016 and 2017, the quality of coverage remained poor across the board, primarily because the networks centered their climate coverage around Donald Trump while largely neglecting other important climate stories," said Lisa Hymas, director of climate and energy programs at Media Matters for America.
Here are the key takeaways from the report.
Trump drove coverage of climate change in 2017.
The nation's broadcasters didn't spend a lot of time on climate change last year, but when they did, it was almost always in response to Trump. Segments that dealt with his policies or featured statements from members of his administration accounted for 79 percent of the total time given over to climate change. Roughly half of all climate segments centered on his decision to pull out of the Paris agreement.
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left right not mirror/symmetrical
social media bots
http://www.alternet.org/media/democrats-unsolvable-media-problem
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Another study, cited by The Guardian [no link]Tuesday, concludes that the growth of conservative media has cemented this gap.
Conservative newspaper The Wall Street Journalwas found to publish inaccurate information on the topic, according to a report by Media Matters for America.
"Out of 93 climate-related opinion pieces published in the Journal during the time period examined, 31 featured climate science denial or other scientifically inaccurate claims about climate change (33 percent)," Media Matters for America said.
A 2013 study found that those Americans who consumed news from conservative news sources such as Fox had a higher distrust of science and scientists, than did those who read or watched non-conservative media.
Breaking through to those who fiercely deny the existence of climate change is no easy task, the Ohio State University researchers concluded.
9/16
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context: PWL MEMO
media:
Lewis Powell recognized the significance of favorable public opinion as fuel for policies that benefit large corporations over people. The Powell Memo outlined how corporate ownership and influence in the media could be leveraged to craft a favorable image of big business and its ambitions.
The Powell Memo on Television:
"Moreover, much of the media − for varying motives and in varying degrees − either voluntarily accords unique publicity to these "attackers," or at least allows them to exploit the media for their purposes. This is especially true of television, which now plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our people."
(Direct link to this quote in the Powell Memo)
Powell believed that the media of his day abetted and promoted anti-business views. He recognized that if the largest companies were going to influence the trajectory of American politics, they would have to improve their standing in society by deflecting popular criticism, especially on television. Powell supported an increase in media presence of pro-corporate ideologues who could label viewpoints critical of corporations as biased. Yet rather than focus on how corporations could enhance their image on TV, Powell endorsed the notion of attacking the media's alleged liberal bias, directly or through surrogates. Since Powell’s memo, right wing groups like Accuracy in Media (AIM) have obsessed for decades over creating a "liberal media" bogeyman, accusing mainstream news broadcasters of a left-leaning bias, thereby threatening their claim of objectivity (and possibly undermine their support among corporate advertisers) and effectively shifting the news frame in a conservative direction. (See more on AIM in the "Complaints" section below).
The media landscape is significantly more conservative and partisan today than it was in Lewis Powell's day in part due to the decades-long campaigns waged by AIM and others (see Fairness and Accuray in Reporting). Top-level news programs like Fox News regularly accuse other mainstream media outlets of a "liberal bias," though studies on the subject repeatedly show no basis for the claims. A recent study by Media Matters ofSean Hannity's hour-long show about liberal bias, for instance, concluded that his claims were based onselectively edited quotesfrom media personalities to make them appear more opinionated.[james o'keefe]
The Powell Memo on Media Ownership:
"Most of the media, including the national TV systems, are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend upon profits, and the enterprise system to survive."
(Direct link to this quote in the Powell Memo)
In spite of his complaints about the news media's bias, Powell pointed out the leverage that companies had (even then) over media outlets they owned or advertised through. Powell insinuated that such leverage can be used to promote or restrict certain content. Corporations have since tightened their ownership grip over the broadcast media while funding groups that succeeded in destroying the Fairness Doctrine (see below) and attacking independent media.
According to author Ben Bagdikian's 1983 edition of "The Media Monopoly," fifty companiescontrolled the majority of the U.S. news media. Now, just six major companies dominate the U.S. media--General Electric, Walt Disney, News Corporation, Time Warner, Viacom and CBS. In particular, News Corporation's Fox News channel has become infamous for its ideological bent and repeated factual distortions. Polls by the Pew Research Center, the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, and NBC/Wall Street Journal have correlated greater levels of misinformation among Fox News viewers when compared to other mainstream media outlets.
Major damage to the media's willingness to balance commercial and public interests resulted from the removal of the Fairness Doctrine, which was designed to ensure that broadcasters present opposing viewpoints about public issues. (The Fairness Doctrine should not be confused with the equal-time rule, which requires TV and radio stations to provide equal coverage to any opposing political candidate that asks for it.) Although Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, saying it violated the broadcasters' free speech rights, members of Congress have recently proposed to reinstitute the rules as a check on the increasingly partisan bias of cable news programs. The FCC has since declared the doctrine and some 80 rules that go along with it "outdated and obsolete."
The Powell Memo on Media Complaints:
"Complaints − to the media and to the Federal Communications Commission − should be made promptly and strongly when programs are unfair or inaccurate."
(Direct link to this quote in the Powell Memo)
Despite the increased concentration of corporate ownership over major news media, conservative activists continue to follow Powell's advice by complaining to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about biased coverage against the political right wing.
According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003—99.8 percent—were filed by the Parents Television Council (PTC), a conservative activist group founded in 2001 by L. Brent Bozell III. Bozell is a leading right-wing media watchdog and President of the Media Research Center (MRC), a $13 million/year operation (2010) that "educates and mobilizes the general public against runaway liberal media bias." Funding for MRC and the PTC come from dozens of conservative and family foundations, including Scaife, Koch, Bradley, Olin, Castle Rock (Coors), and others. (See page 24 of MRC's annual report, Media Matters and ExxonSecrets).
While corporate front groups and right-wing ideologues label and attack "liberal media bias," many companies directly counter specific instances of unfavorable media coverage. Koch Industries has invested considerable resources into attacking stories and reporters and promoting selected articles and blogs through a public relations website called KochFacts.com. Staff from Koch Industries directly pressure journalists and writers through publicized letters of criticism, enforcing a fabricated narrative of victimization that closely matches the rhetoric of Lewis Powell.
Other corporations have invested in different strategies to influence public perception. The public relations industry has grown to a size ($3.36 billion in 2010 according to Ad Age) and level of sophistication that might have been unimaginable to Powell. Today it is common for reporters to be outnumbered by public relations professionals in important hearings by three to one, as was the case in hearings regarding the BP oil spill.
Although heavily influenced by Lewis Powell's ideas, the development of public relations experts and organizations began before the Powell Memo. Founded in 1969 by Reed Irvine, Accuracy in Media (AIM)was built to provide "fairness, balance, and accuracy in news reporting." In his memo, Lewis Powell recommended that pro-corporate propaganda be promoted in the interests of "balance, fairness and truth." Soon after the Powell memo was written, AIM (which started as an all volunteer group) began receiving significant funding from major conservative donors like Richard Mellon Scaife's foundations, whose finances come from Scaife's industrial business fortune.
In 1972 AIM started publishing the AIM Report, a newsletter dedicated to "correcting" serious media errors. AIM began buying stock in major media corporations in 1975, which enabled its representatives to attend news companies' annual shareholder meetings and exert direct pressure on media executives. (Powell addressed this tactic specifically in a section of the memo titled "Neglected Stockholder Power.") By 1984, Accuracy In Media was powerful enough to bully PBS into showing a pro-war documentary AIM produced attacking PBS' coverage of the Vietnam War.
Recently AIM has pushed to cease funding for public broadcasting and has questioned the "validity of concerns about global warming."
An overall shift in the mainstream media's ideological tone was already apparent in the mid 1980's. As Lewis Lapham wrote in Harper Magazine's 2004 "Tentacles of Rage" article:
"By 1985 the Wall Street Journalhad become the newspaper of record most widely read by the people who made the decisions about the country's economic policy; the leading editorialists in the New York Times (A. M. Rosenthal, William Safire) as well as in the Washington Post (George Will, Richard Harwood, Meg Greenfield) ably defended the interests of the status quo; the vast bulk of the nation's radio talk shows (reaching roughly 80 percent of the audience) reflected a conservative bias, as did all but one or two of the television talk shows permitted to engage political topics on PBS."
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koch conf aspen:
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/climate-deniers/koch-industries/the-kochtopus-media-network/
The effort to defeat the tougher food standards heated up late last spring and summer, when lobbyists said they went on high alert.
On July 12, White House visitor logs show a who's who of food company chief executives and lobbyists visited the White House. The group met with Valerie Jarrett, Obama's senior adviser, and Melody Barnes, then director of the president's Domestic Policy Council. Among the group at the meeting: CEOs of Nestle USA, Kellogg, General Mills, and top executives at Walt Disney, Time Warner, and Viacom, owner of the Nickelodeon children's channel -- companies with some of the biggest financial stakes in marketing to children. Those companies have a combined market value of more than $350 billion.
Two people who attended -- lobbyist Scott Faber of the Grocery Manufacturers Association and Kolish of the Better Business Bureau -- said the group told the White House that it opposed government action and favored voluntary initiatives. Other participants and the White House have declined to describe the meeting or did not respond to requests for comment.
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http://www.armoudian.com/kill-the-messenger-coming-soon/
http://www.amazon.com/Kill-Messenger-Medias-Role-World/dp/1616143878
70 min talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89dTQnhfuxk
3rd time charm on media consolidation?
---
Brulle:
… In 2008, you had two candidates that were saying we’re going to take action, and today … [there's] tremendous polarization. What does your research find? What’s the reason for that? What’s going on here?
First you have to understand public opinion on climate change. This is a peripheral issue. This is not one of the burning issues in the American public’s mind. It’s that the Gallup poll goes around every month and asks, “What’s the most important problem facing the United States right now?” And of course, 80 percent [say] the economy, jobs, maybe war. Somewhere down around 1, 2, 3 percent, in comes environment, crime, things like that.
So these are very peripheral issues. They are not what most people worry about on a constant basis, OK? …
The other thing that the literature on public opinion chose is that when you call up people and ask them for their opinion on a peripheral issue, they will search their memory to try to come up with an answer, and they will probably go to the most recent thing they saw on TV, or the most recent thing they read in the newspaper or something in the media and say, “Oh, yeah, this,” and they’ll come up with an opinion about it.
So what you find is that the public opinion on climate change is largely driven by media coverage. … And there’s actually a pretty quick decline function, [which means] that if people don’t see it week in and week out, something else is going to pop into their mind, and the concern about climate change is going to [be], “Oh, I saw a FRONTLINE last night; I’m concerned about it today,” and next week, “Oh, Kim Kardashian got divorced; you know, I’m all about that.”
It’s replaced. You have this decay function, very quick. Some people say it’s about 30 days. You know, it depends. Certainly quarter to quarter that we were testing, there is no carryover; it’s gone in a quarter for sure.
So what that means is that in order to have levels of concern about climate change high, you have to have a lot of media coverage of it, and it has to be constantly repeated over and over again, and that will raise levels of concern in public opinion.
So what gets media coverage? Well, fights among elites usually bring a lot of media coverage. So if you have a presidential [candidate] debate one side on climate change, the other side against climate change, you get a lot of media coverage. You have disagreeing elites, you’re going to get more media coverage.
What has been the media coverage? What did you find?
Media coverage on climate change peaked in 2007 and 2008, and it’s been declining back to about 2002 levels in the current time. So you see a great big sort of hump as public opinion went up, media coverage went up.
What we were able to explain is, what drives media coverage? And we looked at a number of factors. Weather disasters, nope — doesn’t affect public opinion at the national level. It might affect that locality, but you’ve got a lot of weather all over the place in the United States, so weather has had no significant impact on climate change public opinion.
Scientific information promulgation about climate change has done nothing but go up and up and up, and climate change public opinion has gone up and down. So while information increases, public opinion goes up and down. There is no statistical relationship between providing information about climate change and levels of public concern.
I know that that’s a big blow to a lot of people in the climate change communication field, but that’s what we found: no relationship.
… One major factor that drove a lot of concern about climate change was Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth. That really got a lot of media coverage. It put it into the public agenda in a very big way.
It wasn’t the number of people that saw it, that actually went to the movie theater, but it was the media coverage pump that climate change got in response to Al Gore’s movie. We know that Al Gore’s movie drove that pump, and so we know that that movie had a really significant impact on climate change concern in the United States.
The other thing that has a lot of impact are what we call “elite cues.” People have certain ideological beliefs, and they look to opinion leaders on matters that they don’t have direct experience [with] for guidance. So people that trust and listen to Rush Limbaugh hear [him] say that global climate change is a hoax. “Well, I trust Rush; I believe him.” And so their opinion follows it, and you call them up and you say, “What do you think about climate change?,” and they say, “I think it’s a hoax.” Or they believe Al Gore and know it’s real. They follow their ideological leaders, or their thought leaders have this big, big impact, so what we call elite cues.
The president stands up and says, “Climate change is real, and we have to do something about it,” and several senators stand up and say, “We have to do something about it,” [that] has a big impact on public opinion.
What was especially impactful is when Republicans would stand up and say, “We have to do [something] with climate change,” because you get a [Sen.] John McCain [R-Ariz.] standing up and say[ing], “Climate change is real, and we need to deal with it,” suddenly the Republicans are like, “Oh, he is our party leader; I guess this is true,” and it overcomes. The elite cue is, “Climate change is real; we need to get onboard with this,” and people’s opinions follow.
Now, what can drive it down? Elite cues going the other way. … Other things drive it down, things like our economy collapses, … like the Great Recession that drove it way down; the number of war deaths, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan. We’re having all these wars; we have all of these people dying in these wars. That replaces and pushes out climate change concern.
So what we see is this dynamic that really tells us that we need to focus on having elite cues, or the elites coming to some sort of agreement that climate change is real, that we need to address it, before you’re going to see public opinion is going to change. …
In a nutshell, media coverage has fallen off, and people are talking about it. If they had to sum it up, what would you say?
… What we have now, since the media isn’t covering it and the elites aren’t talking about it, is we have levels of concern that approach a similar period around 2002-2003. Now it goes up and down and bounces around a little bit, and everybody jumps on these little blips, but statistically it’s pretty much the same thing.
… [The] 2009 levels of concern aren’t any different than 2010 levels of concern; they are both about statistically the same, which is to be expected, because we’re not talking about it, and so we’re not having factors that are going to change.
You have the committed populations on both sides of the issue that are attentive publics that have their core beliefs, that it’s real and we have to do something about it, or it’s not real or it’s a hoax, so we don’t have to do something about it. And those remain relatively stable.
But the people in the middle that are going to change their opinions are basically just, “Huh?” They are not paying attention to it because it’s not a major issue, and so when you call them up, you just get a random distribution, so you end up with no change.
So you end up with pretty stable public opinion on climate change now. … The sociology term is, our political science stream is punctuated equilibria [until] we have some event that shifts the whole nature of the debate. I … expect that it will remain pretty much where it is for a while unless we have unexpected events or something like Al Gore’s movie comes along again.
But I think that was kind of one out. I don’t think [you're going] to get a climate change movie that gets that kind of attention anymore.
… The media coverage is what, off the mat?
I’ve been charting television coverage of climate change in the major news networks — NBC, ABC, CBS — since 1980, and what we’re seeing in 2011, which is the last four years, I have it back at the levels that it was in 2002. It’s almost virtually no coverage or very, very little coverage of climate change in the major news media, and that’s pretty much paralleled in The New York Times, the major press media and the major magazines.
… The mass American public [is] really just not thinking about it. It’s not in the media. It’s not in the presidential campaign. So it’s really gone back to its very peripheral status and will remain there until some sort of factor changes it. Now, it could be an intervention by social movement; it could be actual physical events. It could be the upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] report that’s due out in 2014, [which] will refocus attention on it.
Historically those haven’t worked; they get kind of a media blip and then it goes away. The scientific information argument is really quite thin, so that I don’t expect that that’s going to have this major impact. Maybe if the Arctic Sea completely melts or the Arctic Ocean ice pack completely melts, maybe that will have an impact. But we really don’t know, and the sociology is not very good at predicting those kinds of events.
Random House, Penguin Publishing Houses To Merge
by Lynn Neary
October 29, 2012 3:00 PM
Listen to the Story
Executives of the publishing giants Bertelsmann and Pearson announced on Monday that they will pursue a merger of their publishing houses, Random House and Penguin. The united publishing companies are set to become a large and influential force in publishing.
Copyright © 2012 National Public Radio. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
We got news today of a wedding of sorts between two titans of the publishing industry. The European conglomerates that own Random House and Penguin have agreed to join forces. The new effort will be called the Penguin Random House.
NPR's Lynn Neary reports that the agreement comes as the publishing business struggles to turn a profit in the age of eBooks and Amazon.
LYNN NEARY, BYLINE: Under the consolidation agreement, the German company Bertelsmann, which owns Random House, will control 53 percent of the new company. The British conglomerate Pearson, which owns Penguin, will control the remaining 47. The agreement brings together two of this country's biggest publishing houses. Random House alone is home to some of the most popular authors in the world.
After a bruising months-long fight between media corporations and the Federal Communications Commission, a government website came online today that will feature political ad data from television stations around the country.
This means that detailed files about political advertising — which show who is buying political ads, how much they are paying, and when the ads are running, among other information — will finally be available online. In the past, those interested in the files, which are by law public, had to travel to stations to get physical copies.
Insisting on Transparency—Even from the Media
Though the new system is far from perfect, it will likely give the public and journalists a new window into how an expected few billion dollars are spent on political ads on local television this election cycle.
For now, only the affiliates of the top four broadcast networks in the top 50 markets will have to upload their political files to the FCC site. (The Sunlight Foundation has a map of the missing markets here.) All broadcasters will have to start complying in July 2014. And the rule is not retroactive for political ad data — so the site will only have information on political ad buys going forward.
ecoterror law art:
One illustration of the role advertising plays in dictating news coverage is the case of a public television station which lost its funding from Gulf and Western in 1987 because it showed a documentary which was critical of corporate development activities.[[223]](http://www.elawreview.org/elaw/382/ecoterrorism_a_critical_analys.html#_edn223)The chief executive of Gulf and Western complained that the documentary was "virulently anti-business if not anti-American."[[224]](http://www.elawreview.org/elaw/382/ecoterrorism_a_critical_analys.html#_edn224)For further illustration of the role of advertising on media coverage, the manager of corporate communications for General Electric (which now owns NBC) has stated: "We insist on a program environment that reinforces our corporate messages."[[225]](http://www.elawreview.org/elaw/382/ecoterrorism_a_critical_analys.html#_edn225)Moreover, Proctor & Gamble instructs its advertising agency that "[t]here will be no material on any of our programs which could in any way further the concept of business as cold, ruthless, and lacking in all sentiment or spiritual motivation."[[226]](http://www.elawreview.org/elaw/382/ecoterrorism_a_critical_analys.html#_edn226)
http://www.elawreview.org/elaw/382/ecoterrorism_a_critical_analys.html
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/01/09/400795/network-news-coverage-of-climate-change-collapsed-in-2011/
chomsky critique:
LF: Talk about media. We often discern bias in the telling of a particular story, but I want you to talk more broadly about the way our money media portray power, democracy, the role of the individual in society and the way that change happens. …
NC: Well they don’t want change to happen….They’re right in the center of the system of power and domination. First of all the media are corporations, parts of bigger corporations, they’re very closely linked to other systems of power both in personnel and interests and social background and everything else. Naturally they tend to be reactionary.
LF: But they sort of give us a clock. If change hasn’t happened in ten minutes, it’s not going to happen.
NC: Well that’s a technique of indoctrination. That’s something I learned from my own experience. There was once an interview with Jeff Greenfield in which he was asked why I was never asked ontoNightline. He gave a good answer. He said the main reason was that I lacked concision. I had never heard that word before. You have to have concision. You have to say something brief between two commercials.
What can you say that’s brief between two commercials? I can say Iran is a terrible state. I don’t need any evidence. I can say Ghaddaffi carries out terror. Suppose I try to say the US carries out terror, in fact it’s one of the leading terrorist states in the world. You can’t say that between commercials. People rightly want to know what do you mean. They’ve never heard that before. Then you have to explain. You have to give background. That’s exactly what’s cut out. Concision is a technique of propaganda. It ensures you cannot do anything except repeat clichés, the standard doctrine, or sound like a lunatic.
LF: What about media’s conception of power? Who has it, who doesn’t have it and what’s our role if we’re not say, president or CEO.
NC: Well, not just the media but pretty much true of academic world, the picture is we the leading democracy in the world, the beacon of freedom and rights and democracy. The fact that democratic participation here is extremely marginal, doesn’t enter [the media story.] The media will condemn the elections in Iran, rightly, because the candidates have to be vetted by the clerics. But they won’t point out that in the United States [candidates] have to be vetted by high concentrations of private capital. You can’t run in an election unless you can collect millions of dollars.
One interesting case is right now. This happens to be the 50thanniversary of the US invasion of South Vietnam – the worst atrocity in the post war period. Killed millions of people, destroyed four countries, total horror story. Not a word. It didn’t happen because “we” did it. So it didn’t happen.
Take 9-11. That means something in the United States. The “world changed” after 9-11. Well, do a slight thought experiment. Suppose that on 9-11 the planes had bombed the White House… suppose they’d killed the president , established a military dictatorship, quickly killed thousands, tortured tens of thousands more, set up a major international terror center that was carrying out assassinations , overthrowing governments all over the place, installing other dictatorships, and drove the country into one of the worst depressions in its history and had to call on the state to bail them out Suppose that had happened? It did happen. On the first 9-11 in 1973. Except we were responsible for it, so it didn’t happen. That’s Allende’s Chile. You can’t imagine the media talking about this.
And you can generalize it broadly. The same is pretty much true of scholarship – except for on the fringes – it’s certainly true of the mainstream of the academic world. In some respects critique of the media is a bit misleading [because they’re not alone among institutions of influence] and of course, they closely interact.
http://www.alternet.org/story/155281/noam_chomsky_on_america%27s_economic_suicide?page=entire
Media coverage of climate change
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 | This article's factual accuracy may be compromised due to out-of-date information. Please help improve the article by updating it. There may be additional information on the talk page. (August 2011) |
Media coverage of climate change has significant effects on public opinion on climate change,[1] as it mediates the scientific opinion on climate change that the global instrumental temperature record shows increase in recent decades and that the trend is caused mainly by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases. Almost all scientific bodies of national or international standing agree with this view,[2][3] although a few organisations hold non-committal positions.)
Media coverage of climate change in the English-speaking media, especially in the United States, has been widely studied, while studies of coverage elsewhere lag behind.[4] A number of studies have shown that particularly in the United States and in the UK tabloid press, the media significantly understated the strength of scientific consensus on climate change established in IPCC Assessment Reports in 1995 and in 2001.
A peak in media coverage occurred in early 2007, driven by the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth.[5] A subsequent peak in late 2009, which was 50% higher,[6] may have been driven by a combination of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit email controversy and December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference.[5]
Some researchers and journalists believe that media coverage of political issues is adequate and fair, while a few feel that it is biased (see, for example, Bozel & Baker, 1990; Lichter & Rothman, 1984).[7][8] However, most media studies are neither recent nor concerned with coverage of environmental issues. Moreover, studies on media coverage of climate issues are only rarely concerned with the question of bias (cf.,Bell,1994;Trumbo,1996;Wilkins, 1993).[9][10]
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[edit] Factual distortions
The public understands comparatively little about global warming. The United States public has a flawed understanding of global warming, seeing it as linked to general "pollution" and causally connected in some way to atmospheric ozone depletion.[11] Reporters are not much better informed about climate change.[12] Scientists and media scholars who express frustrations with inadequate science reporting[13][14][15][16][17][18] argue that it can lead to at least three basic distortions. First, journalists distort reality by making scientific errors. Second, they distort by keying on human-interest stories rather than scientific content. And third, journalists distort by rigid adherence to the construct of balanced coverage.
On the face of it, it seems very reasonable to demand that journalists get it right. If journalists knew more science, then their reports would be more accurate and then, perhaps, the public might understand more about issues like climate change. It may be impossible to craft good public policy about nuclear power and global warming without a better-informed public. Bord, O’Connor, & Fisher (2000)[19] argue that responsible citizenry necessitates a concrete knowledge of causes and that until, for example, the public understands what causes climate change it cannot be expected to take voluntary action to mitigate its effects. This is a highly laudable sentiment that in principle is achievable simply with better training of journalists.But even for a scientifically literate journalist, sorting out the true cause and effect mechanisms of climate change may be far from easy. Scientists often underestimate the complexity involved in popularizing science. Here’s a sketch of the basic concepts an informed citizen needs to understand climate change.
- Climate is not the same as weather
- The climate system is complex, working via a series of “forcings” and “feedbacks.”
- There are delays or inertias in the system, notably the oceans that can absorb large amounts of heat for a time.
- So far scientists cannot predict with any certainty the regional effects of anthropogenic global warming—from sea level rise, to intense storms, to regional cooling. Effects might well be counter intuitive with global warming producing severe cooling in certain regions.
[edit] Narrative distortions
Journalists are attracted to risk controversies, what interests them are not the intellectual arguments so much as the underlying human-interest drama.[20] When a group of parents believes their children are dying from some “agent” in the environment, those parents become scared and angry. Their predicament, as journalists know, grabs the audience’s attention. As readers and viewers are drawn into a conflict, and come to feel as though they know the protagonists, they are motivated to learn more and more about the issues that are so important to the main characters and their families.
Human-interest controversies that pit “innocent victim” against “alleged perpetrator” are a popular story type. According to Shoemaker and Reese,[21] controversy is one of the main variables affecting story choice among news editors,along with human interest, prominence, timeliness, celebrity, and proximity. But controversy raises editorial issues, such as, what is the fairest way to report such hotly disputed versions of reality to an audience? The culture of political journalism has long used the notion of balanced coverage. In this construct, it is permissible to air a highly partisan opinion, provided this view is accompanied by a competing opinion. But recently scientists and scholars have challenged the legitimacy of this journalistic core value.
One example is Michael Coffman's address about the global climate change was more of a political scare tactic than scientific.
C-SPAN Address: Michael Coffman
[edit] Distortions of balance
The notion of balanced coverage may make perfect sense when covering a political convention, but in the culture of science, balancing opposing views may be neither fair nor truthful. To quote climate scientist Stephen Schneider (Schneider, 2005): “In science, it’s different.” Extreme examples bring this point home. Does a flat-Earth proponent deserve equal time to a modern astrophysicist? Surely not Should an advocate for intelligent design be taken as seriously as an evolutionary biologist? Again no. Following this logic, some experts argue that it is misleading to give scientific mavericks or advocates equal time with established mainstream scientists.
Yet there is evidence that this is exactly what the media is doing. In a survey of 636 articles from four top United States newspapers between 1988 and 2002, two scholars[22] (M.T. Boykoff & J.M. Boykoff, 2004) found that most articles gave as much time to the small group of climate change doubters as to the scientific consensus view. Given the real consensus among climatologists over global warming, many scientists find the media’s desire to portray the topic as a scientific controversy to be a gross distortion. As Stephen Schneider put it[16]: “a mainstream, well-established consensus may be ‘balanced’ against the opposing views of a few extremists, and to the uninformed, each position seems equally credible.”
Seeking the truth clearly involves more than simply balancing opinions, it concerns gathering and evaluating various types of relevant evidence and rigorously checking sources and facts. The subgenre of science journalism puts this search for evidence at the center of its reporting. As Boyce Rensberger,[23] the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Knight Center for Science Journalism, put it “balanced coverage of science does not mean giving equal weight to both sides of an argument. It means apportioning weight according to the balance of evidence.”
The claims of scientists also get distorted by the media by a tendency to seek out extreme views, which can result in portrayal of risks well beyond the claims actually being made by scientists.[24] Journalists tend to overemphasize the most extreme outcomes from a range of possibilities reported in scientific articles. A study that tracked press reports about a climate change article in the journal *Nature* found that "results and conclusions of the study were widely misrepresented, especially in the news media, to make the consequences seem more catastrophic and the timescale shorter."[25]
[edit] Powers of perception
 | This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2011) |
If risk perceptions have as much to do with feelings as facts, then we might predict that changes in the social, environmental,and cultural circumstances might radically shift human risk perceptions, making scary things less scary and vice versa.
For example, while global warming lacks traction today, theory predicts that a serious global warming catastrophe—such as a succession of years with super storms or a large sea level rise that drowned a United States city—would change perceptions, alter media traction, and influence public opinion.12 Just as the disaster at Chernobyl offered everyone salient and enduring exemplar of how bad a reactor accident can be, a global warming catastrophe might offer a striking image of the dangers of tampering with the climate.
Unlike advocates, journalists are not supposed to persuade but to report. It would be inappropriate for them to use these insights to manipulate their audience to, say, fear global warming more and nuclear power less. But, it can be argued that journalists should expand their narrative horizons: to include not just the facts about the risk in question but also how people feel about the risk and why. In essence, they should report two dimensions of the risk story—the physical narrative of nuclear power or global warming, and the psychological subtext that discusses how the public thinks about those risks. Journalists, of course, should strive to be accurate and avoid distorting the science, but getting to the heart of risk tales involves something more: in sum it requires not only understanding the objective facts of the danger, but also navigating the way their audience feels about the risk issue, while telling a gripping, scientifically accurate story.
[edit] Claims of alarmism
Alarmism is described as the use of a linguistic repertoire which communicates climate change using inflated language, an urgent tone and imagery of doom. In a report produced for the Institute for Public Policy Research Gill Ereaut and Nat Segnit reported that alarmist language is frequently employed by newspapers, popular magazine and in campaign literature put out by government and environment groups.[26] It is considered[by whom?] difficult for the public to see climate change as urgent unless it is posed to them as a catastrophe, but using alarmist language is an unreliable tool for communicating the issue to the public. Instead of motivating people to action, these techniques often evoke "denial, paralysis [or] apathy"[27] and do not motivate people to become engaged with the issue of climate change.[28] In the United Kingdom, alarmist messages are often subject to "subtle critique[s]" in the left-leaning press, while the right-leaning media often "embrace" the message, but undermine it using a "climate skeptic" frame[26] In the context of climate refugees — the potential for climate change to displace people—it has been reported that "alarmist hyperbole" is frequently employed by private military contractors and think tanks.[29]
The term alarmist is also commonly used as a pejorative by critics of mainstream climate science to describe those that endorse it. MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel wrote that labeling someone as an "alarmist" is "a particularly infantile smear considering what is at stake." He continued that using this "inflammatory terminology has a distinctly Orwellian flavor."[30]
One way media reports attack global warming is to compare it with a purported episode of alarmism related to global cooling. In the 1970s, global cooling, a claim with limited scientific support (even during the height of the media frenzy over global cooling, "the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature"[31]) was widely reported in the press. Several media pieces have claimed that, since the even-at-the-time-poorly-supported theory of global cooling was shown to be false, that the well-supported theory of global warming can also be dismissed. For example, an article in The Hindu by Kapista and Bashkirtsev wrote: "Who remembers today, they query, that in the 1970s, when global temperatures began to dip, many warned that we faced a new ice age? An editorial in The Time magazine on June 24, 1974, quoted concerned scientists as voicing alarm over the atmosphere 'growing gradually cooler for the past three decades', 'the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland,' and other harbingers of an ice age that could prove 'catastrophic.' Man was blamed for global cooling as he is blamed today for global warming".,[32] and Irish Independent published an article claiming that "The widespread alarm over global warming is only the latest scare about the environment to come our way since the 1960s. Let's go through some of them. Almost exactly 30 years ago the world was in another panic about climate change. However, it wasn't the thought of global warming that concerned us. It was the fear of its opposite, global cooling. The doom-sayers were wrong in the past and it's entirely possible they're wrong this time as well."[33] Numerous other examples exist.[34][35][36]
[edit] Coverage by country
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_climate_change#United_States
Resources for studying concentration of media ownership:
Who Owns the Media? [149], Take Back the Media
MEDIA CONCENTRATION [150], a report by MoveOn.org, November 6, 2002
ISSUE GUIDES | Media Concentration [151], mediachannel.org
Media Reform Information Center [152]
Domhoff:
jrnlists agree w/ left on green; rt tries to narrow gap w/ incubators 140; newsmakers have more infl than reporter 141 eg pol plan network in 70's on defense $.
aud for TV (esp serious TV declines, so ppl go elsewhere , and co's try to make tv news more entertaining.
reformers can use media effectively if skillful and good timing 143
decay of journalism and end-run by blogs etc
talk radio
TV weathermen
Beck
networks:
A fascinating new study commissioned by Oxfam and produced by digital mapping agency Profero has shed new insights into the way climate sceptics’ networks operate. The study’s conclusions, as yet unpublished but seen by Left Foot Forward, were presented to a closed meeting of campaigners on Wednesday night.
Profero’s study analysed online coverage of the “Climategate” debacle that broke last November, tracking its progress from fringe blogs to mainstream media outlets over the ensuing weeks and months.
http://www.leftfootforward.org/2010/03/combating-the-growing-influence-of-climate-sceptics/
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/a-map-of-organized-climate-change-denial/
GOP pioneered and dominated?
Whitaker and B?
Center for Study of Popular Culture: $2.8 million 36 annual budget
Media Research Center: $6 million annual budget
Accuracy in the Media: $1.3 million annual budget
Center for Media and Public Affairs: $1 million annual budget
rfk2
ch 10 what lib media
63 gaylord nelson made xcross cttry trip w/jfk on enviro, but pres asked about defense and power politics; inspired Earth day. crisis predicted now
happeneding: ashtma, fish pooison, agw, end species at same rate as dinos 175
fed radio act 1927 "public interest' kids and community pgm, divrse ownership; in 60;s FCC used Fair Doctr to make cigs co incl surgeon warning in ads; car co
ads hadto be balanced by those promong fuel effec!?) Moyers; clear intent was to keep commerical values from overwhelming demoicratic values" so fiicial
view (corp or gov) would not be the only view of rality 176-7
88 RR 86 FDoct as favor to studio donors. NY station that aired 9 pro nuke ads rfused = time; 3 FCC appts who ran FCC said b/c of cable, FD obsolete. chair
Mark Fowler said tv "just another appliance--it's a toaster with pictures" 177. Congress tried to reinstate, but vetoed.
Clear ChannelSIC 1995 40 radio stations now 1200, 11%. News corp #1 in world, one of 7 in us own or control all 2k tv, 11k radio, 1100 paprrsand mag
[now?]; stations no longer run by city, news no longr by jrnlists 178. few or none reporters at statehouse; none at B if Int.
Ailes says no eco news b/c not fast-breaking
GE owns nbc, world's #1 polluter w/ 86n superfind sites (westinghouse cbs 39 biggest maker of nuke plants and 3rd in weapns 180
fox fla jane akre and steve wilson 9 mos 83 drafts on bgh; fired, sued 425K damges whistleblow overtined b/c rule created by judges not legis/ 182 5
networks amicus briefs, makes it ok to lie; jeb judge will rule? on whether reports must pay 1.7m in legal fees!? 182
cbs pulled RR docudrama . msnbc fired donohue for michael savage
Disney 86's Fahr 9/11 rfk2 got grodin fired too. Bill o interv rfk, but not live; nbc bumped for jackson
last vestige of free media is ownership, but b2 changed. clear ch and cumulus(dixie chicks) Michael Powell gave waivers to overages. corp get up to 45% of
nation viewers and can have paper, tv and radio in same city 187
rules done in secrt w/ only 1 public mtg led to protest (2.4 mil ltrs) . sen voted to halt, house about to but delayand lobbyists blocked vote; fed ct
rejected b/c of lack of "reasoned analysis"
Clinton, Conspiracism, and the Continuing Culture War
The Role of the Media
http://www.publiceye.org/conspire/clinton/Clintonculwar8-02.html
The amount of conspiracist material attacking Clinton before and during the impeachment hearings was staggering. There are few reasons to think the attacks will cease now that the impeachment crisis is over.
The small but vocal minority that originally supported the Starr investigation was nurtured by the conspiracist stories circulating about Clinton. Much of the media coverage of Clinton from 1997 until 1999 focused on scandal and impeachment rather than ideological political issues or electoral politics. This was true not only in alternative right wing media, but also in mainstream corporate media. Reporter Gene Lyons is especially critical of The New York Times (and to a lesser degree the Washington Post) for devoting so much coverage to the alleged "Whitewater Scandal" over a collapsed land deal, for which no evidence implicating the Clintons in criminal acts has ever been substantiated.13 Lyons argues that much of the scandal coverage in the mainstream media "rests on `facts' that are somewhere between highly dubious and demonstrably false," and he calls it "journalistic malpractice" resulting from a coordinated right wing "dirty tricks" campaign.14
In addition to corporate newspaper and magazine coverage attacking Clinton, there were books, newsletters, fax reports, videotapes, audiotapes, direct mail pieces, internet sites, and more that spewed out from tiny-sometimes one-person-operations to international media conglomerates.
The most alarmist attacks on Clinton originated in right-wing alternative media, then spread throughout right-wing information networks, finally appearing in mainstream outlets. This troubling dynamic was described in a 1995 White House memo "Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce."15 15 Memo prepared in 1995 by the White House counsel's office, with attachments, "Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce," obtained from the White House Press Office. First revealed by editorial writer Micah Morrison in Wall Street Journal, 1/6/97. See criticism of the memo in "Who's Shooting the Messenger Now?" Media Watch, March 1997.
The memo was widely derided in the corporate media, but it is essentially accurate. Eric Alterman in The Nationdescribed how reporters dismissed the criticisms of their role in feeding conspiracist rumor to the public:
Listen to Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson giggle like school-kids on ABC's This Week. Cokie: "The White House seems to have a theory of how this happens...and it appears to be a right-wing conspiracy. Who knew...we were such dupes?" Sam: "Not since Rube Goldberg came up with contraptions." McLaughlin compared the report to beliefs that "Elvis is alive, J.F.K. is alive and both are living on an alien mother ship.' Fred Barnes chimed in, "It can now be told-there are full-mooners at the White House."16
Actually, similar contentions about unsubstantiated conspiracy theories fueling anti-Clinton news stories had already appeared in mainstream newspapers and magazines, including the Columbia Journalism Review.
According to Michael Kazin, the dynamic of rightist subcultures feeding ideas into mainstream media is typical of right wing populist movements.17 A 1998 scholarly book edited by Linda Kintz & Julia Lesage, Culture, Media, and the Religious Right, contains several chapters that show how discussions in right wing alternative media help frame issues that are refined for later publication in the mainstream media.18
In early 1995, Mary Ann Mauney of the Center for Democratic Renewal, was quoted in a Scripps Howard syndicated news feature discussing how conservative and militia conspiracy theories seemed to be blending together.19 An example is Michael Reagan, the top-rated nighttime talk radio host, who has an ultraconservative worldview but a reputation for being fair and open-minded. Nonetheless, Reagan used his nationally-syndicated program to promote conspiracy theories emerging from the patriot movement about a global one-world government and attempts to rewrite the US Constitution. He also pushed various theories claiming Clinton aide Vincent Foster did not die due to a self-inflicted gunshot, but was assassinated. These conspiracist allegations are also in Reagan's book, Making Waves, endorsed in back cover blurbs by former US Attorney General Edwin Meese, III, Republican National Committee chair Haley Barbour, and several current and former congressmen.20
There has been a rapid growth of new "horizontal" electronic communications networks that bypass traditional media filters and editing standards.21 Editors and producers have responded by lowering traditional standards on checking sources and facts. In the case of accusations against Clinton, the mainstream corporate news media was willing to peddle rumors for ratings. As corporate owners sought to squeeze more profits out of news media, there was less investment in research and investigative reporting. Increasingly, reporters began to rely on pre-packaged information from think tanks and publicists, which came overwhelmingly from conservative and libertarian sources. Fact-checking was de-emphasized. There was also a blurring of the lines between news, entertainment and advertising.
This transition in the news media was happening at a time that popular acceptance of conspiracy theories was growing on the right, left, and center. In a lengthy article on snowballing conspiracism in The New Yorker, Michael Kelly called this "fusion paranoia."22 With the rise of "info-tainment" news programs and talk shows, hard right conspiracism, especially about alleged government misconduct, jumps into the corporate media with increasing regularity.23 As Kelly observes, "It is not remarkable that accusations of abuse of power should be leveled against Presidents-particularly in light of Vietnam, Watergate, and Iran-Contra. But now, in the age of fusion paranoia, there is no longer any distinction made between credible charges and utterly unfounded slanders."
A tremendous range of right-wing information exchange takes place in traditional and alternative media throughout the US. Mainstream analysts habitually fail to consider this massive information network when calculating the political clout of the right, and also overlook the important relationship between right-wing alternative media and corporate media.24
Secular conservatives have long molded public opinion through major traditional corporate media-especially in large-circulation publications such as Reader's Digest, through conservative commentary on radio and TV, as well as through TV drama programs such as "I Led Three Lives," and "The FBI." But during the 1980s and 1990s, the right refined its use of the media.
Many of its ideas and proposals are first developed at think tanks funded by right-wing foundations and corporations. After these ideas are sharpened through feedback at conferences and other meetings, they are field-tested within right-wing alternative media, such as small-circulation newsletters, journals, and direct mail appeals. As popular themes that resonate with conservative audiences emerge, they are moved into more mainstream corporate media through columns by conservative luminaries, press releases picked up as articles in the print media, conversations on radio talk shows, and discussions on TV news roundtables.
As the increasingly refined arguments reach a broader audience, they help mobilize mass constituencies for rightist ideas. This in turn adds to the impression that all fresh ideas are coming from the right, as there is no comparable left infrastructure for the refinement and distribution of ideas.25 For example, between 1990 and 1993, four influential conservative magazines (National Interest, Public Interest, The New Criterion, and American Spectator) received a total of $2.7 million in grants, while the four major progressive magazines (The Nation, The Progressive, In These Times, and Mother Jones) received less than 10 percent of that amount, under $270,000.26
Christian Right media is extensive and reflects a large subculture in our society. For example, televangelist Jerry Falwell periodically sends material to "162,000 conservative pastors and churches through Pastors' Policy Briefings." In late 1998, he solicited funds to expand in order to "Alert, educate and rally America's 200,000 conservative pastors who collectively speak to 50-60 million persons each week." Moreover, Falwell is just one of many national Christian Right leaders seeking to mobilize evangelicals and fundamentalists to engage in conservative political action.27 In January 1999 Pat Roberson's "700 Club" TV program featured a special weeklong series of reports on "America's Moral Crisis." Evidence of "America's moral decline" included abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, and "America's obsession with sex." Viewers with concerns about the moral crises were urged to call the National Counseling Center, part of the Christian Broadcasting Network Ministry. According to the 700 Club, the Center logged 5,000 calls per day.
Studies show members of some Christian Right activist groups, such as Focus on the Family and Concerned Women for America, share three related attributes; they are much more likely than the general population to:
·Depend on religious television, radio, magazines, and direct mail as important sources of information.
·Vote in primary and general elections.
·Believe that most political issues have "one correct Christian view," that shouldn't be compromised.28
This subculture was the core of the constituency pushing for Clinton's impeachment and removal. It is important not to dismiss the Christian Right as "religious political extremists" or a "lunatic fringe" because it trivializes their significant role in electoral politics and masks their drive to deny basic human rights for people they label as sinful.
13 See generally, Lyons, Fools for Scandal.
14 Ibid., pp. 4-5.
15 Memo prepared in 1995 by the White House counsel's office, with attachments, "Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce," obtained from the White House Press Office. First revealed by editorial writer Micah Morrison in Wall Street Journal, 1/6/97. See criticism of the memo in "Who's Shooting the Messenger Now?" Media Watch, March 1997.
16 Eric Alterman, "A Stupidity Conspiracy," The Nation, 2/10/97, p. 5; online.
17 Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History. (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 172-190. See also Ellen Messer-Davidow "Manufacturing the Attack on Liberalized Higher Education," Social Text, Fall 1993, pp. 40-80, especially p. 41.
18 Linda Kintz & Julia Lesage, eds., Culture, Media, and the Religious Right (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); including a chapter by the author of this article, "Who's Mediating the Storm? Right-wing Alternative Information Networks," from which some material in this section is taken.
19 Lisa Hoffman, "Whitewater and Oklahoma City Get Linked as Conspiracy," Scripps Howard News Service, 4/28/95.
20 Michael Reagan, Making Waves, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1996); on one-world government, pp. 135-147; on Constitutional Convention, pp. 121-133; on Vince Foster, pp. 81-118.
21 Some of my research into right wing conspiracism online was to prepare for an interview by Grant Kester that appeared as "Net Profits: Chip Berlet Tracks Computer Networks of the Religious Right," in Afterimage, Feb./March 1995, pp. 8-10.
22 Michael Kelly, "The Road to Paranoia," The New Yorker, June 19, 1995, pp. 60-70.
23 Kelly, in his New Yorker article, writes of this seepage phenomenon from alternative to mainstream in terms of conspiracist anti-government allegations.
24 This section is drawn from Berlet, "Who's Mediating the Storm? in Kintz & Lesage. Detailed articles on the general theme of rightwing media can be found in Afterimage (Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY), special issue on "Fundamentalist Media," Vol. 22, Nos. 7/8, Feb./March 1995; and Extra! (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), special issue on "The Right-Wing Media Machine," March/April 1995. Jim Danky and John Cherney, "Beyond Limbaugh: The Hard Right's Publishing Spectrum," Reference Services Review, Spring 1996, pp. 43-56.
25 David Callahan, "Liberal Policy's Weak Foundations: Fighting the `Bull Curve,'" The Nation, November 13, 1995, pp. 568-572.
26 Beth Schulman, "Foundations for a Movement: How the Right Wing Subsidizes its Press," Extra! (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), special issue on "The Right-Wing Media Machine," March/April 1995, p. 11. Attempts to call The New Republic a left magazine will be met with laughter.
27 12/98 Falwell fundraising letter, on file at PRA.
28 Smidt, et. "The Characteristics of Christian Political Activists," pp. 148-152
RW dismissal of memo:
Anti-Clinton "Conspiracy Commerce"
by Jon Elliston
Dossier Editor
pscpdocs@aol.com
"William Jefferson Nixon" read the title of a Washington Times editorial published on January 10, 1997. The commentary paired Slick Willy and Tricky Dick as leaders who viewed critical media coverage of their administrations through the distorting lens of presidential paranoia. Since the release of a Nixon-esque White House document describing a "media food chain" that amplifies anti-Clinton reporting, "it now seems the two men have far more in common than anyone realized, including an enemies list," the Times' editors wrote.
The 331-page report, titled "Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce," was prepared in the summer of 1995 by Mark Fabiani, a lawyer and political adviser from the White House Counsel's Office, and based on research conducted by the Democratic National Committee. The bulk of the report consists of news-clips from print publications and internet sources, but a three-page cover memo by Fabiani contains the analysis that has evoked the comparisons to Nixon.
The report begins by defining the odd terminology of its title: "The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce refers to the mode of communication employed by the right wing to convey their fringe stories into legitimate subjects of coverage by the mainstream media." And just how does this transition from the fringe to the mainstream take place? Though an elaborate network of anti-Clinton activists, the report asserts:
"First, well funded right wing think tanks and individuals underwrite conservative newsletters and newspapers such as the Western Journalism Center, the American Spectator and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. Next, the stories are reprinted on the internet where they are bounced all over the world. From the internet, the stories are bounced into the mainstream media through one of two ways:
1) The story will be picked up by the British tabloids and covered as a major story, from which the American right-of-center mainstream media (i.e. the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times and New York Post) will then pick the story up; or
2) The story will be bounced directly from the internet to the right-of-center American media, which covers the story; Congressional committees will lock into the story. After Congress looks into the story, the story now has the legitimacy to be covered by the remainder of the American mainstream press as a 'real' story."
Borrowing a term from the intelligence community lexicon, the report describes an alleged "blow-back" strategy, in which anti-Clinton groups in America provide material for British publications, whose stories are then recycled by "conservative American tabloids and mainstream American media." ("Blow-back" describes instances in which propaganda targeted at audiences abroad is unwittingly repeated by the media in the country where the information originated.)
According to the White House Counsel's Office, such "blow-back" has resulted in rash, conjectural coverage of the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster. (Speculation about whether Foster actually committed suicide was the major reason the Clinton administration prepared the "Conspiracy Commerce" report, according to an unnamed White House official quoted by the Washington Times.) "For example," the report says, "recently the Washington Times reprinted Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's [London] Sunday Telegraph response to a Washington Post article on Vince Foster conspiracy theorists. Pritchard, who took offense to being lumped in with conspiracy theorists, has been a leading reporter of various conspiracies -- most recently accusing Vince Foster of secretly being a spy." (ParaScope's coverage of the controversy over Foster's death draws on several of the sources labeled "fringe" in the report.)
Through convoluted routes such as these, the report argues, "sources without credibility" are injecting faulty news into coverage of various Clinton scandals. The Whitewater affair "is one of many issues originating with" such sources, the report claims, backing up the assertion with a chronology purporting to show how 1994 news on Whitewater flowed from conservative activist Floyd Brown to the Wall Street Journal, the London Times, Time and Money magazines, and NBC News.
Online sources get special mention in the report. "The internet has become one of the major and most dynamic modes of communication," the report notes, because it "can link people, groups and organizations together instantly." Aside from allowing ordinary people to share their political ideas and theories, the report cautions that the internet "allows an extraordinary amount of unregulated data and information to be located in one area and available to all." Because the "right wing has seized upon the internet as a means of communicating its ideas to people," the report argues, Clinton has come under unfair attacks in internet messages.
The White House is apparently alarmed by all the "unregulated data and information" about Clinton that appears online, and the report reaches its most hysterical point when it states that "evidence exists that Republican staffers surf the internet, interacting with extremists in order to exchange ideas and information."
Though versions of "Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce" were first prepared in 1995, mainstream media discussion of the report did not erupt until early January, 1997, when the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times ran articles and editorials discussing the White House conspiracy tract.
The report then became the topic of extensive questioning by the White House press corps. Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry told journalists that the report was prepared to "document how this stuff gets out into the news flow, so that we can ... protect you and protect your readers and protect the American people from bad information." Most reporters were amused by the offer, and during the following week newspapers, magazines and online news outlets largely ridiculed the report. (For a sampling of media coverage and commentary on the White House report, see "Food Chain Reactions".)
The reaction of New Republic columnist William Powers was typical. Powers commented sardonically on the report's conclusions: "Americans are trafficking in 'unregulated' information and exchanging ideas. Imagine."
(c) Copyright 1997 ParaScope, Inc. http://dagmar.lunarpages.com/~parasc2/articles/0197/nixclint.htm