On Iraq and the media… again
Writing by abuhatem on Monday, 2 of June , 2008 at 3:57 am
Blogger Western Confucian responding to my Iraq and the media posts writes a very good comment:
Our friends on the left would likely blame the “corporate media” for failing to inform the public. They are right about the influence of big business in big media, but this critique misses something. In most cases, journalists reported fear of going against the grain as their motivation for failing to question the administration’s line. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 - 1859) would likely blame what he identified as the Tyranny of the Majority. In Democracy in America, he wrote, “I know no country, in which, generally speaking, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America.”
My response to him:
Yes, I am very glad you write that we should not necessarily blame the “corporate” media.
A corporation is simply a form of commerce (which is formed primarily for protection from unlimited and separate legal liability). When people blame the “corporate” media they are implicitly and latently blaming commerce and thus private property and enterprise itself.
It is not commerce which is inherently disliked! Instead we as traditional conservatives understand that commerce is the basis of a free, prosperous and cooperative society and civilization. Instead what we on the Right go after is dishonest commerce which is in bed with government.
The Military-Industrial complex is one example of this, as well as what Dr. Ron Paul called the “media-industrial complex” wherein big media and big government are in bed and hence a big problem.
I am all for for-profit media. Just because media is for-profit does not mean it is dishonest, propaganda, or unethical. This is what our friends on the left don’t understand. Its that the media, like all groups in a democracy (as Bastiat makes clear in “the law”) attempts to use government to achieve special advantages and privileges.
And it is certainly not all “media.” William Safire (yes, the crazy neocon William Safire) recently said that when people say “the” before “media” it implicitly affirms some sort of conspiracy theory which simply does not exist. There are multiple medium, some are more corrupt than others, but thankfully in the United States many more objective outlets do exist (McClatchy newspapers for instance dug up things against the war, the Christian Science Monitor did as well, there were websites on the internet who did as well, and foreign media on our shores available through Dish such as BBC America did too, I remember I watched the news often during the time and still do).
When the left uses conspiracy theories it simply discredits the partial truth that they do have.
And I found a very interesting exchange between journalist Michael Massing who has written a book on the failures of the pre-Iraq war media and other journalists at the extremely left-wing NY Review of Books. One interesting part of the exchange which affirms the media’s complacency but does not step into conspiracy theory about a controlled media, hidden anti-Islam agendas, or an anti-corporation rant (as many unfortunately go through) (brackets added by me):
Ken Auletta did manage to speak to [the Washington Post’s left-leaning journalist Dana] Milbank for his January 19, 2004, article in The New Yorker about the White House press corps (”Fortress Bush”). According to Auletta, Milbank’s article had in fact “enraged” the White House, and several top Bush officials had complained to Post national editor Maralee Schwartz about Milbank, suggesting that he “might be the wrong person for the job.” Milbank himself told Auletta that the White House tried to freeze him out and for a while stopped returning his calls. Auletta goes on to note that in subsequent months, as the administration pressed its claims about the Iraqi threat, there were “increasing complaints that the press was not being rigorous in its examination of such claims.” Auletta’s description of a White House exercising tight control over the flow of information, and of White House reporters making strenuous efforts to cultivate sources, dovetails with my own analysis of why the press became so docile in the months from late October until the start of the war.
Kaiser skips over virtually this entire period. Instead, he mentions a “package” of articles the Post ran on March 16, 2003, a few days before the start of the war. These articles did offer a sharp look at the potential consequences of the impending conflict. It’s almost as if the Post, waking from a long slumber, was finally grappling with the enormity of the events about to unfold. Significantly, none of these articles (aside from Pincus’s) sought to evaluate the administration’s case for going to war—the point on which I argued the coverage was most lacking.
Category: The media
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