Kudos to Paul for treating “media” as the plural that it is (and it is most assuredly more plural than ever) but what we need more is to say “news media” when that’s what we mean. Too many people fail to appreciate the difference between social media and news media, and the special nature of the latter. Here’s my elevator speech: The news business pays for journalism, which practices a discipline of verification: We tell you how we know something, or we attribute it. And we’re mainly about facts, not opinion. Social media are mainly about opinion, not fact, and have little if any discipline or verification. Please remember the difference. Democracy might depend on it.
Two examples: The entire movie "Shock and Awe", with an A-list cast (Tommy Lee Jones, Jessica Biel, Woody Harrelson...) was about how Knight-Ridder did have the truth on Iraqi nuclear and WMD programs in 2002, so you can say "American Media" reported the truth - but the NYT/WaPo axis just promoted the Bush view heavily, others lightly. It sold a war.
2) Just google this exact phrase "Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq", to find the June 23, 1991 story by Barton Gellman in the WaPo. But, had you heard that bombing Iraq's power plants shut down all their water treatment and the Pentagon doesn't dispute that 170,000 children died in the ensuing typhoid/cholera epidemics? I just somehow got to 2017 without ever knowing that, because it was reported *ONCE* as far as I can tell, and never mentioned again. That's just "Germ warfare by proxy", as a friend called it; a clear-cut war crime, because (read the story) the Pentagon *admitted* that the bombings had no military value, that they were done to immiserate the post-war civilian population to make them more pliable.
"What everybody knows" from the news, is about emphasis and priorities.
It's not a popular subject. "Shock and Awe" lost about 99% of the money invested. The last scene is real life, the real Jon Landay (who does not look like Woody) interviewed by Amanpour 10 years later, asked if anybody had interviewed them about being right when the rest of the news establishment had been wrong, and Landay said "this is the first". Ten years later.
Bill Moyers interviewed Landay and Strobel and a few other journalists for his show “Buying the War”. Landay and Strobel told Moyers they had gotten the story right because they had made a point of talking to the WMD experts at the CIA instead of just listening to the political appointees at the agency.
When Moyers asked Tim Russert how he had not known the CIA had had doubts about Saddam having WMDs Russert replied that he wished someone had called to tell him! The show is still available on YouTube and well worth watching.
Back then I thought I was nuts every time I heard the claim that everyone believed Iraq had WMD because I could have sworn I had read several times about the serious doubts the WMD experts at the CIA had. It made sense after I discovered that Knight-Ridder’s Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel had reported on those doubts. My city’s newspaper was part of the Knight Ridder chain.
Oh, the NY Times will fully admit that it has power, in fact more than one insider has told me that nothing matters more to the publisher and sr. editors than that power. What they will not admit is that they use that power in a way that is destructive to democracy. Endless stories about "her emails" or "Biden's Age" while ignoring Trump's obvious dementia (as they did with Reagan) and his authoritarian plans do not educate their readers about the stakes of the coming election. They simply make the NYC elites who they see as "their people" feel smug and superior to all of us who will be the first to suffer the consequences.
Is it smugness and superiority alone? I've no doubt you're right about that, it's a trap editors fall into frequently, but it doesn't explain why they're harder on the Dems than MAGA. After all, you could flip that and they'd still be smug. No, they're under pressure too. From their peers obviously, but also from the public: specifically the anonymous and vile online threats so many journalists and editors receive. It works. I know many highly professional journalists who crumbled under this intimidation. They tone down their stories or just don't write them. After all, they didn't sign up to receive death threats.
Absolutely critical points about agenda-setting and power. And unfortunately, a critical analysis of power is what a lot of media lacks now, not just of its own power. I'd guess that this is tied to the corporatization and consolidation of media over the past several decades. Misunderstanding power and its use is key to maintaining the status quo.
Kudos to Paul for treating “media” as the plural that it is (and it is most assuredly more plural than ever) but what we need more is to say “news media” when that’s what we mean. Too many people fail to appreciate the difference between social media and news media, and the special nature of the latter. Here’s my elevator speech: The news business pays for journalism, which practices a discipline of verification: We tell you how we know something, or we attribute it. And we’re mainly about facts, not opinion. Social media are mainly about opinion, not fact, and have little if any discipline or verification. Please remember the difference. Democracy might depend on it.
Many thanks, this needs to be better seen.
Two examples: The entire movie "Shock and Awe", with an A-list cast (Tommy Lee Jones, Jessica Biel, Woody Harrelson...) was about how Knight-Ridder did have the truth on Iraqi nuclear and WMD programs in 2002, so you can say "American Media" reported the truth - but the NYT/WaPo axis just promoted the Bush view heavily, others lightly. It sold a war.
2) Just google this exact phrase "Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq", to find the June 23, 1991 story by Barton Gellman in the WaPo. But, had you heard that bombing Iraq's power plants shut down all their water treatment and the Pentagon doesn't dispute that 170,000 children died in the ensuing typhoid/cholera epidemics? I just somehow got to 2017 without ever knowing that, because it was reported *ONCE* as far as I can tell, and never mentioned again. That's just "Germ warfare by proxy", as a friend called it; a clear-cut war crime, because (read the story) the Pentagon *admitted* that the bombings had no military value, that they were done to immiserate the post-war civilian population to make them more pliable.
"What everybody knows" from the news, is about emphasis and priorities.
It's not a popular subject. "Shock and Awe" lost about 99% of the money invested. The last scene is real life, the real Jon Landay (who does not look like Woody) interviewed by Amanpour 10 years later, asked if anybody had interviewed them about being right when the rest of the news establishment had been wrong, and Landay said "this is the first". Ten years later.
Bill Moyers interviewed Landay and Strobel and a few other journalists for his show “Buying the War”. Landay and Strobel told Moyers they had gotten the story right because they had made a point of talking to the WMD experts at the CIA instead of just listening to the political appointees at the agency.
When Moyers asked Tim Russert how he had not known the CIA had had doubts about Saddam having WMDs Russert replied that he wished someone had called to tell him! The show is still available on YouTube and well worth watching.
Back then I thought I was nuts every time I heard the claim that everyone believed Iraq had WMD because I could have sworn I had read several times about the serious doubts the WMD experts at the CIA had. It made sense after I discovered that Knight-Ridder’s Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel had reported on those doubts. My city’s newspaper was part of the Knight Ridder chain.
Oh, the NY Times will fully admit that it has power, in fact more than one insider has told me that nothing matters more to the publisher and sr. editors than that power. What they will not admit is that they use that power in a way that is destructive to democracy. Endless stories about "her emails" or "Biden's Age" while ignoring Trump's obvious dementia (as they did with Reagan) and his authoritarian plans do not educate their readers about the stakes of the coming election. They simply make the NYC elites who they see as "their people" feel smug and superior to all of us who will be the first to suffer the consequences.
Is it smugness and superiority alone? I've no doubt you're right about that, it's a trap editors fall into frequently, but it doesn't explain why they're harder on the Dems than MAGA. After all, you could flip that and they'd still be smug. No, they're under pressure too. From their peers obviously, but also from the public: specifically the anonymous and vile online threats so many journalists and editors receive. It works. I know many highly professional journalists who crumbled under this intimidation. They tone down their stories or just don't write them. After all, they didn't sign up to receive death threats.
This is by far the best explainer I have seen about the failings of the New York Times. Form media critic Jeff Jarvis : https://buzzmachine.com/2024/04/26/the-times-is-broken/
Brilliant. Just brilliant. Thanks so much for the effort.
Absolutely critical points about agenda-setting and power. And unfortunately, a critical analysis of power is what a lot of media lacks now, not just of its own power. I'd guess that this is tied to the corporatization and consolidation of media over the past several decades. Misunderstanding power and its use is key to maintaining the status quo.
Thank you for taking a look at the Kahn interview and doing something Semafor failed to do—look deeper at what Kahn was saying.