Media books show reality behind myths

The five media books that have crossed my desk in recent months will not be reviewed in the haughty New York Times. But they are worth reading because they show media reality behind the First Amendment façade.

• “Cable News Confidential” by Jeff Cohen. Cohen, founder of the important newsletter Fairness and Accuracy in the Media, went into cable news expecting to find “timidity, censorship, tabloid lust and corporate skulduggery.” He was not disappointed.
Cohen also learned that he could not tell the truth on MSNBC, a cable channel owned by General Electric. He was fired. So was Phil Donahue. Both were too liberal for a right-wing media empire run by the “suits.”
“It’s no accident that corporate news is so often empty and denatured,” Cohen writes. “News is rendered nutritionless when it’s a processed product brought to market by distant and soulless corporations.”
Corporate radio is just as bad. Lowry Mays, CEO of radio colossus Clear Channel, is clear: “We’re not in the business of providing news and information…We’re simply in the business of selling our customers products.”
Another truth: you cannot sell many products with liberal broadcasters and leftist pundits.

• “Static” by the sister-brother team of Amy and David Goodman denounces government control of the media with lies, manipulation, fabrication, deception and spin. But the media, instead of seeing through the charade, serve as megaphones for government.
“The media can’t seem to shake their instinct to defer to power,” the Goodmans write. For example, in December 2005 the New York Times revealed that the Bush administration broke the law by ordering wiretaps without a warrant. But: the Times held the story until after the presidential election of 2004 at the request of the White House.
A story dealing with an unconstitutional undermining of American liberties should never be suppressed. A truly adversarial media wouldn’t think of it. It was another blatant case of press betrayal of the glorious First Amendment.
Other unassailable points made by the Goodmans: 1) journalists trade truth for access. 2) “The United States is an outlaw nation.” 3) The problem is not just that governments lie but that the “embedded” press abets the deception.

• “Digital Destiny” by Jeff Chester rightly deplores the ever-increasing consolidation and commercialization of the media.
Chester, head of the Center for Digital Democracy, is optimistic that the explosive growth of the Internet and telecommunications provides the potential for a truly democratic media, a media of the many rather than the few, a media offering a wide variety of independent news, information and culture.
But reality again intrudes. The purpose of TV news, Chester writes, is primarily “to keep viewers engaged so they will watch the next commercial.” Ratings-driven decisions create news programmings “light on information, analysis and criticism.” Contrarian views are verboten.
True. But, as with all apostles of New Media, Chester is far too optimistic. All the Internet blogs and podcasts will not make this conservative nation the progressive one it should be.

• “The Sound Bite Society” by Jeffrey Scheuer points out that TV, rewarding simplistic and emotional messages, does not serve democracy.
Scheuer rightly deplores “mindless and manipulative political advertising, shallow political dialogue and equally shallow TV news programs…Our popular and political cultures are dominated by money and profit, imagery and spin, hype and personality.”
Scheuer notes two other facts: 1) “It has long been a commonplace for local news departments to focus on violence and sensationalism” (“if it bleeds it leads”) while ignoring white-collar crime. 2) The shouting heads of TV punditry.

• “Kill the Messenger” by Nick Schou tells the sad tale of a courageous investigative reporter driven to suicide because of betrayal by his own editors and destruction by leading newspapers.
The reporter, Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News, wrote a three-part series, “Dark Alliance,” in 1996 detailing the link among the CIA, the crack cocaine explosion and black communities.
“Webb spent more than a year uncovering the shady connection between the CIA and drug trafficking through the agency’s relationship with the Nicaraguan contras, a right-wing army that aimed to overthrow the leftist Sandinistas governments during the l980s,” Schou writes.
The CIA knew that the contras were dealing cocaine but did nothing to stop them. “He (Webb) was right,” Schou concludes. The CIA admitted later that it had lied about the scandal.
Despite the powerful indictments in these books, too many American cretins insist the media are liberal, that the earth is flat, that evolution is a myth and that Saddam had WMD.