Wolf D. Fuhrig

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Media Hyping And Feuding

"Poison Press: How the big media's death throes are heralding a stunning information revolution," that is the theme to which Wistleblower, a magazine of the far right, devotes its entire October 2004 issue. It asserts that what the "establishment media" present is "profoundly at odds with reality" in "thousands of news stories that form the fabric of confusion, cover-up, and deceit that passes for 'political analysis' in the establishment press."

Wistleblower cites a poll of 153 journalists at the Democratic National Convention showing three times as many supporting Kerry for president than Bush, "while the 50 or so Washington-based journalists surveyed favored Kerry over Bush 12 to one."

The White House shares Wistleblower's concern. When the New York Times found no connection between al Qaida and Saddam Hussein, Vice President Cheney charged that the paper was motivated by "malicious reasons." Laura Bush complained to Bill O'Reilly of Fox News that the media "sensationalizes or magnifies things that really shouldn't be."

The left-of-center crowd is just as critical of the media that parrot and hype the Bush administration's assertions. As the critics see Fox News, it is the darling of the Bush backers, aggressively delivering conservative talking points as news and brazenly advertising its journalism as "fair and balanced."

Common Cause, the public interest lobby, and MoveOn.org, the Internet journal, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission challenging Fox's slogan, "fair and balanced," as deceptive advertising. (One wonders if bragging should no longer be permissible free speech.)

In July, MoveOn. org slammed Fox with a film entitled "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism." It quickly became the best-selling DVD on Amazon.com.

To distract from the charges made against Fox News, O'Reilly denounced the New York Times' "radical agenda" and ridiculed the paper for presenting America as a "progressive city on a hill of steep government entitlements."

Defending Fox News, New York's neoconservative Daily News explained: "Every morning, the powerful barons and anchor people who run the network TV news operations read The Times first thing. They often take editorial direction from the paper, sometimes duplicating story selection and even point of view. All-news radio does the same thing, and The Times' wire goes out to thousands of newspapers across the country and around the world. This is one extremely powerful outfit."

In contrast to the other news organizations that dutifully carried whatever facts the Bush White House alleged about Iraq, the New York Times and the Washington Post subsequently apologized to their readers for their failure to scrutinize the misinformation they had carried about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

There is strong evidence that more Americans have become fed up with the media. In 1976, a Gallup Survey found 7 out of 10 Americans satisfied with the media's news coverage. By 2002, a survey by the American Bar Association ranked journalists as a profession second to last, ahead only of lawyers. More recently, a survey by the Pew Research Center discovered that 53 percent of its sample expressed distrust of the media's news reporting.

While the American people are facing a crucial election, the television networks waste their time with baffling inquiries into ultimately irrelevant questions, such as the Kerry's Swift Boat and Bush's National Guard records. In the meantime, the networks rake up a record $1.5 billion in campaign ads.

Instead of clarifying the facts amid the controversies over the truth in the candidates' assertions, dozens of so-called "analysts" bore radio and television audiences with endless "guesstimates," and dozens of so-called "experts" are shooting off the hip, and occasionally off the wall, in commentaries that are as partisan as the networks for which they work.

Wherever there is freedom of the speech, the media have a right to be partisan. Most of America's press has always been unabashedly partisan. Think of William Randolph Hearst's aggressive "yellow journalism."

New today is only the hypocrisy of the electronic media when they represent themselves as "fair and balanced," "no spin zone," or "the most trusted name in news." Maybe we ought to take such slogans for what they really are: jokes on the audience.