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    The Death of Meaningful Live Coverage in US Media

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    In an important article in Foreign Affairs cited yesterday in this column, Charles King mentions a particular initiative of media manipulation that an increasingly panicked President Lyndon Johnson undertook to defuse criticism of the war he had engaged in Vietnam. King describes a game of political chess that took place between William Fulbright, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1959 to 1974, intent on exposing the bad faith of the government, and Johnson, who was desperately seeking to manufacture consent for his war.

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    The chessboard was the media and specifically, television. “If there was a moment when the White House began to lose middle America,” King writes, “the Fulbright hearings marked it. From the outset, Johnson was so worried about their impact that he pressed one television network to air I Love Lucy reruns instead of live coverage.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Live coverage:

    The last increasingly feeble attempt by the media to acknowledge the abiding importance of reality in a culture that expresses a clear preference for hyperreality

    Contextual Note 

    Live coverage has always been a risky endeavor for the media, except in sports, where people understand the rules of engagement. Live coverage of a popular sporting event happens to be the most profitable form of entertainment. “Broadcasters pay heavily for sport because it is the best live, unscripted drama they can get,” according to one media commentator.

    War in some ways resembles sports because it pits two very serious adversaries against each other. US television networks in the 1960s sensed that live coverage of an emerging war could be profitable. But, in contrast with a sporting event, it entailed four serious problems beyond the physical risk to journalists themselves.

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    First, broadcasting unadulterated violence might violate the reigning standards of “decency.” But that could be solved with good editing.

    A second drawback lay in the fact that programming and planning became far more complex to manage since there was no official pre-announced schedule.

    The third was even thornier. It concerned the question of truthful reporting. Being too honest about what is happening on the ground risked alienating indispensable sources inside a government that desperately wants people to applaud “our side” and perceive the noble and even glorious side of combat.

    That consideration of honesty defines the fourth problem related to live coverage: Viewers keep expecting more reality at the very moment when the people promoting war decide they should see less of it. That leaves two options for news services: either scale back their reporting or begin misrepresenting or airbrushing the truth. But in the consumer society, the problem with scaling back (for example, offering sitcom reruns instead of Senate hearings) is that consumers always want more. In the end, misrepresentation — fake news — becomes the only viable solution. The key to manufacturing consent, as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman made clear in their book with that title, is giving consumers not only what they want to hear, but what you (the media and the government) want them to want to hear.

    The Vietnam War brought home to both the government and the media the difficulty of managing live reality. The Nixon administration that followed both intensified the war and worked on molding the public’s mindset rather than either debating critics or seeking to hide from public scrutiny. Richard Nixon introduced the notion of “the silent majority” to neutralize the voices of protest and shame the refractory media by accusing them of failing to respond to the will of the people, “real Americans.” Nixon’s war on the media eventually backfired with the Watergate scandal, leading to his resignation in 1974. But it effectively drew attention away from his policies and onto his person, something Johnson was never able to do.

    From that point on, and thanks in part to the Watergate scandal itself, the media acquired the habit of focusing on the personality of presidents and neglecting critical discussion of their policies. Suddenly, there was plenty of live coverage of the Watergate affair itself and less and less of Vietnam, Indonesia and Chile, where the kind of foreign policy Fulbright denounced was being carried out with greater and greater impunity.

    Perhaps CBS and other audio-visual media had learned that live broadcasting of the reality produced by a president’s policies was too problematic to manage safely. In contrast, live broadcasting the dramas of the president himself excited their audiences. The public lapped up the scandals the media featured about Richard Nixon, the crook, Bill Clinton, the seducer, and George W. Bush, the bumbler and gaffer who, while launching disastrous wars, so charmingly failed even to put a coherent sentence together. Ronald Reagan, the incarnation of the wisdom attributed to Nixon’s silent majority, stood as an icon of Hollywood hyperreality, where scripted fiction distracted attention from the spontaneous and often duplicitous truth hiding behind it. Barack Obama, as the first black president, was protected by his own iconic status while, at the same time, silently polarizing the fears of the silent white majority. For them, his very presence in the White House was a scandal.

    As a living and breathing fountain of permanent scandal, Donald Trump was the godsend enabling all news outlets — for and against him — to thrive during a golden age of media. For four years, the kind of rational, critical discourse aiming at achieving some perspective on reality that Fulbright was known to promote disappeared from the airwave. The very idea of letting it be heard became anathema to media producers. This was as true of Fox (Republican, conservative) as of MSNBC (Democrat, liberal). The media relished every speech and tweet that emerged from Donald Trump’s creative impulses.

    Historical Note

    One problem with the American war in Vietnam was that, despite its superficial resemblance to a contest between “our team” and “their team,” it fundamentally failed to conform to the binary model. Americans never quite understood why the South Vietnamese government should be called our team. Lyndon Johnson’s massive deployment of troops was designed partly to convince Americans that it was a war not between two Vietnamese rival organizations with a claim to governing, but between American democracy and an illegitimate enemy that had no clear defining characteristics other than an apparent belief in Marxist theory. Those who delved into the people’s history understood that the North Vietnamese were nationalists whose goal was to finally break free of French colonial rule.

    The next serious problem with the conflict was the fact that once an American war starts, unless it is quickly won, it will go on forever. No excuse ever exists for stopping it. When, in his Senate hearings, William Fulbright called to the witness stand George Kennan — a highly respected presidential foreign policy adviser, considered by many to have written the ground rules of the Cold War — Johnson reacted. Knowing that Kennan judged the intervention in Vietnam to be a mistake, Johnson put pressure on CBS to replace its programmed live coverage of the hearings by stale reruns of popular sitcoms. This immediately provoked the resignation of Fred Friendly, the head of CBS’ news division. 

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    Friendly’s reaction tells us something about how the standards for truth that once existed even in corporate news media have evolved over time. Those who take the job now are only too aware of what’s expected of them. Like an Amazon or Uber driver, they obligingly deliver. They would never consider resigning simply because of orders from the White House. In any case, presidents no longer bother to put pressure on news editors to kill a story or live coverage. They prefer to send their message straight to the corporate executives who hire the news editors.

    Fulbright lived in a world that hadn’t yet fully realized that news could be entertainment and that politics and corporate interest could be seamlessly merged into a politico-media complex. In the 1960s, the idea persisted that political decisions could and should derive from rational analysis of historical context. But as President Dwight Eisenhower warned at the beginning of the decade, the military-industrial complex now occupied the government’s existential core. Its decision-making was based on cynical, irrational, profit-driven and power-hungry reasoning. William Fulbright, Walter Cronkite and Fred Friendly confronted that emerging world. They themselves belonged to a universe that no longer exists today.

    *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Extinct Race of “Reasonable Viewers” in the US

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      Reporting on a defamation trial brought against Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Business Insider notes a rare but significant crack in the facade of contemporary media that could, if we were to pay attention, help to deconstruct the reigning hyperreality that has in recent decades overwhelmed public discourse in the US.

      To maintain its control not just of our lives but of our perception of the environment and culture in which we live, the political class as a whole, in connivance with the media, has created the illusion that when people speak in public — and especially on TV or radio — they are essentially engaged in delivering their sincere opinion and sharing their understanding of the world. They may be mistaken or even wrong about what they claim, but the public has been taught to give any articulate American credit for standing up for what they believe.

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      We have been told that this respect for public personalities’ freedom of expression serves a democratic purpose. It allows for productive debate to develop, as different interpretations vie and eventually converge to establish a truth that legitimately supports variable faces and facets. Though they generally try to avoid it, when Americans happen to hear the opinion or the analysis of a person they don’t agree with, they may simply oppose that point of view rather than listen to it, but they also tend to feel sorry for that person’s inability to construe reality correctly.

      In other words, the default position concerning freedom of speech has traditionally maintained that a person’s discourse may be wrong, biased or misinformed, but only in exceptional cases should the sincerity of the speaker be called into question. For this very reason, US President Donald Trump’s supporters may think that many of the things he says could be erroneous, but they assume that their hero is at least being sincere. They even consider that when his ravings contradict the science or reasoning of other informed voices, his insistence is proof of his sincerity. They admire him for it.

      In contrast, Trump’s enemies want us to believe he is unique and the opposite of the truthtellers on their side. But Trump is far from alone. He just pushes the trend of exaggerating the truth and developing unfounded arguments further than his opponents or even his friends. And because he shakes off all challenges, his fans see him as that much more authentic and sincere than everyone else.

      And so the hyperreal system maintains itself without the need of resorting to objective reality. That may explain why the ruling of the judge in favor of Carlson seems to jar with the rules of the hyperreal game. A former Playboy model accused Carlson of defamation. Here is how Business Insider framed the case: “A federal judge on Wednesday [September 23] dismissed a lawsuit against Fox News after lawyers for the network argued that no ‘reasonable viewer’ takes the primetime host Tucker Carlson seriously.” In the judge’s words, “given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statements he makes.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Reasonable viewer:

      An imaginary human being considered to be capable of critical thinking when sitting in front of an American news broadcast on television, contradicting all empirical evidence that shows no such person has ever existed

      Contextual Note

      The idea of a “reasonable viewer” is similar to the equally nonexistent “homo economicus,” a concept dear to economists who want the public to believe that markets represent the ultimate expression of human rationality. They imagine a world in which all people do nothing other than pursue their enlightened and informed self-interest.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The judge in the Carlson case is one of those rare Americans who understand that all the news — and Fox News par excellence — is entertainment. But what he fails to acknowledge is that broadcast “news” has become a consciously tendentious form of entertainment that privileges emotion over reason and has an insidious impact on people’s civic behavior. 

      Whether it’s Fox News, MSNBC or CNN, no complex story exists that cannot be reduced to the kind of binary conflict its viewers expect to hear about and resonate to. That means nothing could be more unreasonable than to believe there is such a thing as a “reasonable viewer,” especially one who refuses to take Carlson “seriously.”

      In other words, the judge is right to highlight the fundamental triviality — or, worse, the hyperreal character of most TV news and Carlson in particular — but wrong to think it appeals to “reasonable” viewers or that reasonable viewers, if they exist at all, are even aware of it.

      Historical Note

      Throughout the history of the US in the 20th century, media fluctuated between a sense of vocation in reporting fundamentally factual stories and one of serving the needs of propaganda either of the government or of political parties. There has long been a distinction between “liberal” and “conservative” newspapers, though throughout the 20th century, the distinction applied more to the editorial pages in which columnists had the liberty to express their particular bias than to reporting of the news itself.

      Quentin Fottrell, in an article for Market Watch published in 2019, described the process by which, in his words, “U.S. news has shifted to opinion-based content that appeals to emotion.” He sums up the findings of a study by the Rand Corporation in these terms: “Journalism in the U.S. has become more subjective and consists less of the detailed event- or context-based reporting that used to characterize news coverage.”

      Significantly, the Rand study found that the very language used in reporting had evolved: “Before 2000, broadcast news segments were more likely to include relatively complex academic and precise language, as well as complex reasoning.” This points to the core issue in the shift that has taken place. Over the past 20 years, “broadcast news became more focused on-air personalities and talking heads debating the news.” This indicates a deliberate intention of news media to appeal to emotion rather than reason, even to the exclusion of any form of critical thinking.

      Fottrell notes the significance of the year 2000, a moment at which “ratings of all three major cable networks in the U.S. began to increase dramatically.” When the focus turns to ratings — the unique key to corporate income — the traditional vocation of informing the public takes a back seat. He quotes a patent attorney who studied media bias and found that the “extreme sources play on people’s worst instincts, like fear and tribalism, and take advantage of people’s confirmation biases.”

      The “worst instincts” are also known as the lowest common denominator. According to the logic of monopoly that guides all big corporations in the US, the standard strategy for a news outlet is to identify a broad target audience and then seek to develop a message that stretches from the high-profile minority who have an economic or professional interest in the political agenda to the dimmest and least discerning of a consumer public who are moved by “fear and tribalism.”

      It’s a winning formula because the elite segment of the target audience, a tiny minority of interested parties who are capable of understanding the issues and the stakes, willingly participate in the dumbing down of the news with the goal of using emotion to attract the least discerning to the causes they identify with and profit from economically and politically. 

      Just as the average Fox News viewer has no objective interest in Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the rich or his permanent campaign to gut health care but will be easily incited to see the president as the champion of their lifestyle, the average MSNBC viewer will endorse the Wall Street bias of establishment Democrats always intent on eschewing serious reforms, citing the fact that they are too expensive. They do so only because MSNBC has excited their emotions against the arch-villain Trump.

      It isn’t as if reasonable viewers didn’t exist. The news networks have banished them to pursue their interests on the internet or simply replaced anything that resembles reason by pure emotion.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      The Mad Complicity of Trump, Pompeo and the Media

      by

      In an article published by Al Jazeera with the title, “What is behind the hype about the new Iran-China partnership?” Pakistan-based journalist Tom Hussain weighs in on how media in the US have become dedicated to magnifying real events not to further our understanding of them, but to create a climate of conflict, if not war in the Middle East. 

      Hussain cites two stories that US media have been running with in recent weeks to generate emotional heat while depriving them of the light of intelligible analysis. The first is the strategic partnership agreement between Iran and China. The second is the normalization of diplomatic and trade relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel.

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      Hussain notes that both stories have been interpreted in the US as “escalations in the geopolitical conflict between the US and Iran.” Seeking some needed perspective, he points out that “the first development was a media creation. The New York Times (NYT) ran a front-page story citing a ‘leaked’ draft of the 25-year strategic partnership agreement under negotiation between China and Iran since 2016.” The Times story summed up its case in its misleading headline: “Defying U.S., China and Iran Near Trade and Military Partnership.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Media creation:

      1) Fabricated melodrama masquerading as news provided by respectable media outlets to prove that they can be just as disrespectful of the truth as social media 
      2) The state of hyperreality induced by society’s obsessive addiction to professional media and the entertainment industry, effectively canceling the public’s relationship with reality 

      Contextual Note

      The methodology of media creation has achieved something close to perfection in the Donald Trump era. It reflects a complex team effort shared by an infinitely creative political superstructure and the complicit media.

      Before Trump, this novel dynamic that now regulates the news cycle had never existed in the political world. Trump didn’t invent “alternate facts,” even though a member of his team made the term a permanent item of US political vocabulary. Politicians have always lied and exaggerated, but it was always about specific issues. With Trump, it has now become a way of life. Without hyperreality, the news would be too boring to pay attention to. The public now expects it. For their profitability, the media now depend on it.

      Building the hyperreal system required two critical components. At its core is a democratically elected clown show whose members are skilled at turning every utterance into a deliberate distortion and often inversion of reality. President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have perfected that role. For a while, they were accompanied by John Bolton, the former national security adviser. But when that began to look too much like the Three Stooges, the production team pared it back to make it look more like Abbot and Costello.

      Embed from Getty Images

      One member of the show’s technical crew, Senior Adviser Jared Kushner, has compared the Trump administration’s show to Alice in Wonderland. Once the hyperreal wonderland sets were in place, the media could play their role of amplifying every absurdity in the actors’ actions and discourse and presenting it as the essential news of the day. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and many others then had an open field for manufacturing scoops designed to reveal how artificial and distorted the starring team had become.

      In the example Hussain examines, the lead player was Pompeo, a man whose commitment to hyperreality includes a personal belief in a marvelous work of American evangelical fiction that claims to be inspired by the Bible: “the rapture.” Hussain recounts that when interviewed by Fox News in early August, “Pompeo claimed that the prospective China-Iran deal would put Communist cash in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s hands.” Hussain then mentions Pompeo’s warnings: “China’s entry into Iran will destabilize the Middle East. It’ll put Israel at risk. It’ll put the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates at risk as well.”

      No patriotic American is allowed to doubt that Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are the good guys on the world stage. It doesn’t matter that any of these good guys may from time to time slaughter civilian populations (in Gaza or Yemen), seize land that is not theirs in violation of UN resolutions, ambush, assassinate and dismember the occasional dissident journalist or blockade an allied nation (Qatar) that doesn’t toe their line. Washington long ago elected those three nations to the good guys club. If any of the three detects or even invents a threat from elsewhere, the US will be by their side.

      In the interview with Fox News, Pompeo amplified his warning: “Iran remains the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, and to have access to weapons systems and commerce and money flowing from the Chinese Communist Party only compounds that risk for that region.” It doesn’t matter how much truth or falsehood there may be in Pompeo’s claim. What matters is that the evil force he has identified combines the two permanent objects of US paranoia in a single historical event: terrorism and communism.

      Breaking free from the envelope of hyperreality his reporting has focused on, Hussain offers this extraordinary moment of sincerity so rare in today’s media: “At the risk of spotlighting my own inadequacies as a journalist, I [cannot] help wondering why editors and writers seem so willing to fan the flames of war.” 

      To answer his own question, he might have simply reviewed the past 75 years of US history to realize that the Cold War has always been a Hollywood production, courtesy of the military-industrial complex and its pervasive economic logic. But unlike Hollywood action films, US foreign policy as modeled by the media has real world consequences. Hussain makes this clear: “The long-suffering peoples of the Middle East could do without journalists once again playing cheerleader for American politicians who perpetuate their domestic power by igniting conflict in others’ backyards.”

      Russiagate is one obvious manifestation of the hyperreal campaign. It’s the one chosen by the Democrats. Pompeo and the Republicans prefer demonizing China. The New Yorker has just published an article debunking in glorious detail the entire Russiagate ideology so assiduously pursued by the most respectable media in the US, starting with The New York Times. But the principle goes beyond Russia and President Vladimir Putin. “Foreign interference is now a trope in American politics, at risk of becoming as cheap and meaningless as the term ‘fake news’ became once it was co-opted by Trump,” The New Yorker reports.

      Historical Note

      Future historians centuries from today will wonder why the US empire of the late 20th and early 21st centuries required the non-stop fabrication of an imaginary all-powerful enemy to maintain its identity as an empire. The Roman Empire did quite well for centuries without requiring a cold war ideology. Neither did the British Empire, Genghis Khan or the ancient Persian Empire. Once they had the military might to move and conquer, they focused on the supposed pragmatic rationality of their ability to control and exploit resources to occupy an ever-expanding geographical zone of influence.

      Analyzing the US empire from the perspective of Pakistan, Tom Hussain reminds those Americans who happen to read his column of this simple truth: “There is no grand alliance or ‘evil axis’ – just tentative diplomacy and proxy warfare amid shifts in the balance of power in the Middle East, necessitated in part by the withdrawal of US combat forces from the region, as well as the seepage of power to Beijing from Washington.”

      Only a small minority of Americans today are willing to accept the idea of “shifts in the balance of power,” knowing that the “greatest nation in the history of the world” has monopolistically exercised power over the globe for decades. Nor are they about to countenance the idea of “seepage of power” because that would call into question America’s divine mission to spread its enlightened but fundamentally elitist democratic-capitalist ideology across the globe.

      In the age of Trump, it appears useless to point out that enlightened leaders — and even benevolent despots — have throughout history consistently recognized and dealt with the historical reality of shifts in the balance of power. Power is never absolute and never stable, but when it does approach becoming absolute — as happens, at least in people’s minds, when hyperreality takes over — Lord Acton’s wisdom dating from 1887 ends up prevailing: it “corrupts absolutely.”

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More