Screenwriter and TV producer Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming HBO show The Newsroom apparently follows a cable news host who decides to stop playing it safe; he follows his conscience and starts doing shows about things that actually matter. (It’s fiction, in other words.)
In an interview with USA Today (6/20/12), Sorkin reveals that he’s been thinking about the role of the media:
“I don’t see the liberal bias—and I’m trying to—that I hear about,” he says. “What I do see is a bias toward fairness, a bias toward neutrality, a bias toward false equivalency. That if a Republican has lied, it’s important that we find a Democrat who’s lied and make them equal, whether they are or not.
“Most of us have been raised to believe that there are two sides to every story, and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. And that’s simply not always the case. Sometimes there are five sides to a story, but sometimes there’s just one. Sometimes the truth doesn’t lie in the middle, it lies squarely on one side or the other.” But “you’ll never hear the word ‘lie’ on network news when something is plainly a lie.”
Sounds like someone’s been reading Extra!?
While splitting the difference is one tactic for obscuring the facts, it’s relegated to instances in which to engage in outright propaganda would be too obvious. Thus the “he said, she said” false balance is employed to confuse the issue.
But many other times, such as reportage on the various facets of US policy toward Iran, we witness State Department stenography.
There’s more than one arrow in the corpress quiver.
And they’re all aimed squarely at our ability to separate truth from treachery.
“What I do see is a bias toward fairness, a bias toward neutrality, a bias toward false equivalency.”
He makes some excellent points. But he should note the real obvious and crucial bias (and the sum of the emphasis on alleged “neutrality” and false equivalency that is so common): a bias in favor of corporate power and corporate profits. This includes a bias towards the centers of power in government, the members of which, regardless of party affiliation, rely on corporate money more than ever and help to serve these ends. The question of “liberal bias vs conservative bias” is less interesting to me than the bias of power vs. people, and in this case there can be no doubt where the massive corporations stand. MSNBC, after all, certainly is biased towards Obama and the Democrats. But even if they are sort of liberal, and rightly attack many injustices perpetuated by Republicans, they certainly – as a subsidiary of Comcast now, and GE before that — are not putting the public interest ahead of the interests of corporate power. I don’t recall the last time MSNBC railed against the evils of media consolidation, for instance, which is a major story, especially since the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
In this sense, even if and when the media is “liberal,” they are still amplifying the goals of one major center of power (the Democrats); and, of course, the Democrats are inseparable from corporate power. This was especially obvious during the recent congressional hearing where the likes of Sen. Jon Tester (D-Montana) and others were in charge of holding JP Morgan accountable for their various follies.
Meanwhile, virtually the entire committee on both sides of the aisle, were getting oodles of money from JP.http://tinyurl.com/7pzqqgo Thankfully, FAIR is well aware of this and documents it often and with clarity. It would be great if the Newroom ponders this reality of news coverage, and does not just make another West Wing type show where the Democrats are angels. I do look forward to checking it out. Sorkin is an excellent writer.
From Stephen Colbert’s presentation at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner:
On the press corps: “You should spend more time with your families, write that novel you’ve always wanted to write. You know, the one about the fearless reporter who stands up to the administration. You know — fiction.”
There was a big deal in the NY Times about this either last year or early this year, when one of the editors asked about “he said, she said” reporting in the Times, and there was a furious reaction by Times readers saying that they were sick of that kind of gutless, fault-free reporting, and wanted the Times to stop it. Then the editor’s boss stepped in and basically said ‘you don’t really mean that our “he said, she said” reporting is wrong, do you? You must not have meant quite that.’ and hundreds of Times readers wrote back “Yes, exactly that.”
It was amazing how clueless the editorial management at the Times was, when the issue was framed for them.
Kudos to Aaron Sorkin!
It was amazing how clueless the editorial management at the Times was, when the issue was framed for them. – Jeff
Yup, these boys would be clueless if they went down and bought the game at ToysRUs. It is not really amazing though, when you realize how much of their paycheck is based on them not ‘getting it’ (the unfair balance). Sadly, like the joke about the Texas Oilman who started the rumor that there was oil in hell, and then when everyone started heading there, packed up to follow because “if that many people believe it, it must be true”, they are really beginning to believe their own tall tales.
What I differ with in this story is the notion that people are so fooled by what is in the press, and the spin, that they are left unable to make an educated decision.Nonsense!
You can usually dance across the more liberal commentators and back over to the conservative, and get a good idea where the sides stand. This election will be a referendum on who America believes is telling the truth.Liberals are loosing ground fast,so of course the fault must lie in the fact that people just don’t understand.That they are too stupid.That they have been hoodwinked.That they don’t care about their fellow human beings.No…….actually enough people have a good understanding about the state of things that soon they will vote this lot out.
*****Side note.Very disappointed that FAIR did not write about the president claiming executive priv on the FAST AND FURIOUS scandal.
That’s not FAIR’s mission, you dummy, but it’s revealing that you would think that it is. No doubt FAIR will have something to say about the idiotic reaction in the press (getting that distinction yet?) soon enough, and will also comment on how the Republicon’s propaganda branch, FOX, has been stroking the story since day one, pumping it up to further their brand. A new low, even for the hacks at FOX.
My immediate reaction to this piece was, “My god Sorkin is spot-on!” but then FAIR has been “spot on” regarding this issue for years. (Michael C must be aware of the group “Free Press.org” which is devoted solely to this issue.) Right now, as we come closer to the November election, I’m seeing this “issue neutrality phenomenon” become even more pronounced. Currently the journalists and editors producing this media content are all frightened for their jobs. Their priority right now is not outstanding journalism – it increasing or at least sustaining their current, ratings and subscription numbers. The decision makers in the major news media (excluding those with an “open” bias) believe the country is divided (and if make your decision based on Electoral College votes you’d think that too) and to survive they MUST appeal to ALL readers/viewers. Pathetic.
Oh, and a note to Michael e above: Having worked for years on Madison Avenue, the great propaganda machines of the world, let me tell you: YES you can fool not just some but MANY of the people ALL the time. Americans, when it comes to educating themselves on the issues are LAZY. They allow themselves to be easily manipulated.
Surprise, surprise, the corporate media critics are bashing the show.
Watch a week of Morning Joe and you will know just how bad it is.
You had to have a libertarian–Nick Gillespie–tell Rachel Maddow on Bill Maher that she was in the tank for Obama. “You don’t know me man,” was all she could muster.
in the pilot episode, Jeff Daniels’ character longs for an America that never existed.
I wonder, will Sorkin and the writers cause their viewers to shift uncomfortably in their seats, by confronting them with the Democratic Party’s predictable betrayal of progressives’ aspirations? Will Sorkin take a risk and expose the progressives’ hypocrisy and silence as their Nobel Peace laureate and Constitutional Law scholar has carried out Bush policies, from illegal aggressive wars and expansion of the battlefield, to his authoritarian aggrandizement of power, to his neoliberal policies, to the continued assault on the Constitution–all championed without any significant resistance or public outcry from Democratic Partisans? if not, then the series is a waste of time, intended to redirect disaffected citizens back into the folds of the Democratic Party, to reassure them in their superiority and smugness about how “dumb” the “other team” is. Newsroom will have no democratic value. Democracy isn’t a spectator sport.
second point: it’s less helpful to think of the networks as right or left, or liberal vs conservative. it’s clear that much of the media is pro-establishment, pro-American exceptionalism, pro-ruling class, pro-nationalism, pro-imperialism, pro-militarism, anti-worker, pro-management, pro-capitalism, anti-socialist…
Michael Parenti has written about the orthodoxies that go unchallenged in our political culture and discourse. See his chapter from Democracy for the Few, titled, “Mass Media: For the Many, By The Few” http://kropfpolisci.com/media.parenti.eliteclass.pdf
Third: the great historian and activist Howard Zinn never pretended to neutrality, not in the classroom, nor in his writing.
Zinn wrote:
——-
Zinn went on:
And
Here’s a video of John Pilger talking about illusion and the power of the media, especially in liberal societies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv7a-B15R28
Excerpt:
“Some years ago, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, a group of Russian journalists toured Britain and the United States. They were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching all the television, that all the opinions were the same, on all the vital issues.
“‘In our country,’ they said to their host, ‘to get that result, we have a dictatorship. We imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. How do you do it? What’s the secret?’
“The secret, of course, is that propaganda in liberal democracies, like America and Britain, is much more thorough than in dictatorships and totalitarian states. No imprisonment is required. No loss of fingernails called for. There is another, far more effective way: Unlike totalitarian states, the conformity of information and opinion is insidious–its sameness implicit, ingrained, and even celebrated.
“In the former Soviet empire, the promotion of sameness was an obligation that journalists grew deeply cynical about. Unlike in the West, they knew exactly what they were doing and the public knew too. In 1977 I went to Czechoslovakia, at the time of the birth of Charter 77, the resistance movement inside Czechoslovakia, and I met the banned Czech novelist Zdener Urbanek who told me this: ‘In the East, we have acquired the skill of reading between the lines. In the West, you don’t have this skill, because you believe you don’t need it, but you do need it more than we do, because illusions are more effective than the censor at his desk.’ What he was saying was that the abuse of conceptual thought, and language, and logic that exists in totalitarian states also exists in “free” society, and that only the form and illusions are different.
“Today there’s another dimension to this and it’s called Technology. Technology seems to have made almost anything possible, except Truth. And by Truth, I mean, that which is subversive. But Truth is always subversive. Otherwise why should governments and their bureaucracies fear it so much and go to such lengths to suppress it. And when the great American muckraking reporter I.F. Stone remarked that all governments are liars and nothing they say should be believed, he was exaggerating of course, but not by much. What he was saying was that all unaccountable power is the enemy of truth regardless of its democratic pretensions.