http://www.zmag.org/schechtermediam.htm
Warning: Media Management Now In Effect
By Danny Schechter
I am not sure when the Bush administration realized it had a media
problem. The White House was humming along with a well-oiled media
management machine. The president was riding high in the polls. He
clearly had the country behind him. And yet, something wasn't working
on the world stage, even after savvy handlers turned a politician
denigrated as a bumbler into a more self-assured and even inspiring
leader. Their media makeover was as meticulous as the makeup applied
to movie stars playing monsters.
The turning point had come early on, with W.'s well-crafted speech to
the U.S. Congress, which plainly had been designed with applause lines
in mind and stirring but measured phrases. He had mastered the
TelePrompTer and was well-practiced in his delivery. It worked: One
day he was laughed at as a global village idiot, the next he was
hailed by the same pundits, on the strength of one performance piece,
as a statesman par excellence.
Hungry for a leader, the American people rallied behind his call for
unity, alertness and patriotic patience. There were some murmurs
about the mixed message that on the one hand counseled vigilance and,
on the other, shopping as usual. Overseas, some eyebrows went down
when phrases like "crusade" and "smoking out the evil ones" were
dropped from his rhetorical lexicon.
But a serious communications problem remained, because of a more
objective problem: Many realists, especially in other countries,
weren't clear that bombing and bombast could bring terrorists to heel.
Those issues began to be raised by skeptics and even comics.
Three Steps
In response, the White House seems to have taken three steps.
First, keep critics off the air. (And not just videos of bin Laden or
Al-Jazeera, which "coincidentally" had its Kabul office bombed). It
soon became clear that the media were allocating little space for
domestic critics, much less harder-line opponents, of the policy.
While administration officials condemned the ideological
fundamentalism of the Taliban, a certain ideological intolerance began
to be practiced in the homeland media. Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting (FAIR), noted on November 2 that 44 columns in the
Washington Post and New York Times stressed a military response, with
only two that suggested diplomatic and international law approaches.
Second, bring the press on board. The American media empires soon
seemed to be marching in lockstep with the government. Despite a
tightening of information policies and the total exclusion of
reporters from most battlefields, nary a critical word heard from many
of those who have been loudest in defense of freedom of the press.
Even a champion of freedom of the press like Walter Cronkite said he
was willing to countenance a censorship board of some kind, if camera
crews were allowed in. (They weren't and his proposal went nowhere.)
The media is going along to get along. Will government media managers
soon boast about what a great job they did as they did 10 years ago in
the aftermath of Desert Storm? Then, Michael Deaver, President
Reagan's PR honcho, was ecstatic, contending, "If you were to hire a
public relations firm to do the media relations for an international
event, it couldn't be done any better than this is being done."
Hodding Carter, President Jimmy Carter's former chief flack, seconded
the emotion: "If I were the government, I'd be paying the press for
the coverage it's getting."
Yet the press - and this was a television story above all else
- did not have to be paid. Pete Williams, the man who "handled" media
for the Pentagon during the Gulf War and was rewarded with a job on
NBC News, put his finger on it: "The reporting," he boasted to his
superiors, "has been largely a recitation of what administration
people have said, or an extension of it." Is this true today? Not
totally. Happily, there are still some exceptions, like Seymour Hersh,
who catch the Pentagon in blatant lies, as happened recently in
conflicting stories about casualties U.S. troops suffered on the
ground.
Third, get the West Coast studios to jump in. On the day this column
was written, media moguls and movie studio heads strategized with
White House aide Karl Rove on how they can do even more than they
already have to boost the war effort. Tom Cruise, star of Mission:
Impossible, and a sequel in the works, is just one star who has met
with the CIA and according to MSNBC.com, "He was emphatic about
presenting the CIA in as positive a light as possible."
The military is quietly infiltrating Hollywood as well. The
little-known Institute for Creative Studies at the University of
Southern California brings top Hollywood talent into secret contact
with top military officials. The think tank received funding of $45
million from the U.S. Army in 1999. According to The Sunday Herald,
"One of the few members named publicly, by the Hollywood newspaper
Daily Variety, is Steven de Souza, co-writer of the hit 1988 action
movie Die Hard." Michael Macedonia - of the Army's Simulation,
Training and Instrumentation Command - said: "You're talking about
screenwriters and producers. These are very brilliant, creative
people. They can come up with fascinating insights very quickly."
While movieland is key because of its global reach, the cooperation of
the TV networks is vital for the engineering of consent on the
domestic front. The networks have their own reasons to cooperate.
Remember that while war unleashes devastation and death on people, it
delivers ratings and brings life to television. War is often the "big
story" (when sex isn't) and a defining moment for many journalists.
It's the story that permits news departments to mobilize their
"troops" - that's what ABC called employees when I worked there - and
show off their high-tech deployments. Many reporters who make it to
the top do so because of war reporting. Ask Peter Arnett, Cristianne
Amanpour or even Peter Jennings - no disrespect intended - if being
under fire helped or hurt their careers. The answer is obvious. Less
obvious is the relationship between our bloated defense budget and war
coverage. The Pentagon uses and manipulates TV's military boosterism
to hype adventures, secure appropriations and sell weaponry.
World Views
The problem in an age of globalization is that harnessing domestic
media is no longer enough. The fact is that coverage outside the
United States seeps back in, and despite the government's media
strategists, is growing more critical and less cheerleading by the
day. Growing skepticism in influential media outlets overseas is
worrying to policy-makers here. On November 11, the front page of The
New York Times carried a long piece on "the battle to shape opinion,"
reporting on the Bush administration's new strategies. The article
acknowledges that the administration has enforced "policies ensuring
that journalists have little or no access to independent information
about military strategies, successes and failures."
But it also notes that public opinion worldwide, led in part by the
press, increasingly opposes U.S. policies. The Arab press is hostile.
The Asian media, unconvinced. Over 60 percent of the people in Tony
Blair's Britain, the only real partner the U.S. has in its leaky
coalition, say they want a bombing pause. Half of Italy agrees. The
German press is critical. I know because I
have been interviewed by many media outlets in that country. Reports
the Times, with understated candor way at the bottom of a story that
consumed an acre of print, "European journalists have also become
suspicious that the American news media have been co-opted by the
government or at least swept up by patriotism." One German calls this
a "Post Vietnam Patriotic Syndrome." To massage this problem, the Bush
administration has hired PR firms and created a task force for
coordinating U.S. and UK communications directors with daily
conference calls between the White House, London and Islamabad.
So far, there is no evidence that this PR offensive is working
internationally. In fact, a growing number of Americans are looking
for news and information elsewhere, from the very sources that alarm
Bush media strategists. NPR reports that American are flocking to
foreign web sites while England's BBC and Canada's CBC report a big
spike in viewing by Americans. Our own Globalvision News Network is
generating considerable traffic by offering articles and analysis from
other countries. Clearly, other viewpoints are there for those
willing to look for them. I was delighted to find Vanity Fair this
month quoting me on this very issue (p.182). (Sadly, Brad Pitt, not
your News Dissector, made the cover, probably because of his more
impressive abs.)
In the Soviet Union, most of its citizens didn't trust the
state-managed press, fully aware of its propaganda function. In the
U.S., most people tend to trust the press, unaware of its role in what
Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman call "manufacturing consent." I heard Max
Robins of TV Guide report that news viewing is way up. True enough,
but skepticism is rising on both the right and the left and is likely
to erupt in the mainstream sooner rather than later.
I hope that it is not too late for the U.S. media establishment to get
the message, distance themselves from "official sources" and "coded"
propaganda and seek out more diverse sources of information.
- Danny Schechter is the executive editor of MediaChannel.org. His
latest book is "News Dissector: Passions, Pieces and Polemics,
1960-2000," from Akashic Books.
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