Volume 5 number 6, July 2003 Happy Days Are Here Again The most insightful commentary on the modus operandi of the mainstream news media in this post-9/11 world comes in a mere two sentences from Erik Sorenson of MSNBC: "After September 11 the country wants more optimism and benefit of the doubt.... It’s about being positive as opposed to being negative." Sorenson is not entirely correct. Negativity—even hostile, vitriolic fury—still abounds in the media (Fox News anyone?), especially toward anyone with the audacity to form an opinion independent of the Bush administration’s ceaseless war mongering. Yet his comments underlie a troublesome shift in newsrooms throughout America: the willingness to subvert actual news reporting in favor of credulously accepting (and then repeating) the official line. This type of coverage serves not just to marginalize dissenting views, but is also designed to rally the citizenry, not inform it. Real news can be messy, you know, and there’s room only for "optimism" in this new empire—the metaphorical equivalent of which finds TV news reporters struggling to see who can wear the bigger American flag lapel pin. As this mindset filters down from major news organizations to those with fewer resources, an equally worrisome corner is turned. Small news outlets consistently attempt to "localize" national or international news stories. In the all-too-frequent absence of coverage that analyzes and interprets such complex events, the media instead find some hometown angle to exploit. Witness the ubiquitous coverage of local soldiers coming home from the front. Pictures of uniformed soldiers warmly embracing their spouses and small children (often waving a tiny American flag) are a staple of small-town journalism. This localized coverage may make people feel good about their neighbors, even instill pride in the community, but it does next to nothing to inform them about important world events that require careful consideration and public discourse. These human-interest stories have their place, to be sure, but not to the exclusion of in-depth reporting of the events that created them. From April through the end of June, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner featured twenty front-page articles that cheered the local military personnel with patriotic fervor. The vastly more important news story during this period, however, concerned the inability of U.S. troops to find the fabled weapons of mass destruction, and the subsequent criticism that the Bush administration overstated its case for war. How many such stories did the News-Miner print on its front page? One. Remember, it’s about being positive as opposed to being negative. Leonard Downie, Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser, two Washington Post reporters with a combined eighty-one years at the paper, authored a book last year entitled The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril. The authors documented and critiqued the American media coverage of September 11, and in noting the emerging pattern of how some newspapers favored "localized" coverage over comprehensive reporting they wrote: Events of enormous importance cannot convert bad newspapers into good ones, as many of the country’s papers demonstrated in the days after September 11. A newsroom with little or no experience handling stories about an important, complicated national and international event can’t learn how to do so on the fly, when a catastrophe happens. So citizens trying to understand these events…got very little help from their newspaper [that] printed numerous emotional human-interest stories but very little hard reporting about the foreign context or reaction to the events of September 11. For his part, News-Miner editor Kelly Bostian would later boast that the paper’s "localizing" of the September 11 events was "no less than exceptional." The News-Miner made its bellicosity known immediately following the terrorist attacks. A survey of newspapers around the country finds the most common headline on September 12, 2001 reads, "TERROR," a descriptor directly of the attacks. Yet the News-Miner chose the headline, "OUTRAGE," a self-reflective term which bespeaks the paper’s reaction to the attacks, and not of the attacks themselves. A subtle, but telling difference. Even the nominally harmless curmudgeon Sourdough Jack got into the act that day: "It’s time to terrorize the terrorists." So while the rest of the country was wracked with grief on that September day, the News-Miner was already rattling its saber for revenge. Even when the newspaper deigns to the local peace movement with a perfunctory nod, the results defy belief. A recent article on the annual protest of the Fort Greely-based missile defense system (not on the front page, naturally, but inside, below the fold) actually contains the following phrase: "organizer Stacey Fritz of No Nukes North said she isn’t discouraged by the uphill battle or the comparatively few warriors." Only in this topsy-turvy world of post-9/11 journalism would a group of peaceniks be identified as "warriors," their campaign for peace and an end to nuclear weaponry labeled a "battle." | ||
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