Stardate 20030417.1516

(Captain's log): With the end of the war in Iraq and with Saddam now AWOL and the Baathist regime in Iraq shattered and gone, a CNN producer wrote an article which admitted that for the last 12 years CNN had been acting as a conduit for uncritical delivery of Iraqi propaganda. He attempted to explain that as being a policy which was necessary in order to protect CNN's local employees, but few are crediting that explanation and most assume it was a sordid deal made by CNN to make sure it was permitted to keep its reporters in Baghdad.

Many seem to have been totally shocked by this revelation. I guess maybe I'm more cynical; it struck me as reprehensible but not particularly surprising. I think maybe the reason why is that most of those getting most irate about this saw this as puncturing their image of the press as some sort of international force to try to seek out and expose truth all over the world.

Me, I see 'em as businesses. More important, they're entertainment businesses. They're not interested in telling the truth; they're interested in telling whatever they need to tell in order to attract an audience.

There was a time in the 1950's and 1960's when the big three American networks saw their news divisions as being loss-leaders. They were not required to be profitable (and all of them lost money), and were maintained for prestige value. This was the era of Edward R. Murrow, and later of Walter Cronkite (who was once known as "the most trusted man in America"). CBS set this standard, and the other networks felt as if they were forced to live up to it.

That was a temporary and ultimately unsustainable situation. It was costing the networks a lot to support their news divisions, and I believe it was ABC (and Roone Arledge) who finally decreed that their news division would be no different than any other and would be expected to be profitable just like any other. It doesn't really matter who it was; it happened, and it changed everything. Once one network did that, all the others did too.

Before that, dedication to truth and integrity were the hallmarks of network news, or at least so they tried to portray themselves. After that, dedication to ratings and happy advertisers dominated, and truth/integrity became things that they gave lipservice to but discarded if need be to get ratings.

CNN was part of the cable revolution; it was one of Ted Turner's great experiments. Certainly CNN had to be profitable in reporting news because it had nothing else. Like all new businesses, it ran at a loss for a long time but Turner fully expected it to eventually become profitable; he didn't create CNN out of any kind of noble altruism or dedication to truth and justice. I guess a lot of people don't really remember just how important the first Gulf war was to CNN as an organization and as a business. It was the turning point for them. It's the most important single event in their history.

CNN was the only major news organization which did not pull its reporters out of Baghdad. And because of that, it became the news-source-of-choice for viewers hungry for reporting about the war. During the six week preparatory bombing campaign, there wasn't really a lot else to talk about. All the important stuff going on in Saudi Arabia was under news blackout, and night after night CNN had all those memorable live video broadcasts of anti-aircraft fire over Baghdad as American planes flew in, or were thought to be flying in, by the defenders there. CNN also was the network which carried the majority of Saddam's responses and announcements. And part of the reason was that CNN sold its soul to Saddam where the other networks refused to do so.

Until that point, CNN wasn't really thought of as being a serious contender in TV news. Most people don't remember that. The first Gulf war really put CNN on the map. Its ratings went through the roof at the time, and though they sank somewhat afterwards a lot of that audience stayed. If I recall correctly, the first Gulf war actually made CNN become consistently profitable for the very first time.

From the point of view of CNN's management, that's pretty damned important. And it was also important to all its competitors, who spent most of that war grinding their teeth in frustration because all they could really do was to second-report what CNN was saying, and acknowledge CNN each time they did. While Peter Arnett was showing all those cool videos of streams of tracer fire over Baghdad, all that Dan Rather could do was to give stand-up reports in Saudi Arabia grousing about how he wasn't permitted to talk about the things he knew.

What you got was six weeks in which ABC and CBS and NBC tacitly admitted, nearly every day, that CNN was doing a better job of covering the war than they themselves were. They showed the same video of tracer fire, with a graphic saying "Courtesy of CNN" in the corner. You can't buy advertising like that. The viewing audience seems to have decided collectively that they may as well watch CNN itself to get that stuff, since the other networks didn't have anything worthwhile to show except what they got from CNN.

Eventually ground action began and everyone had things to report, for a hundred hours or so. But that six weeks was living hell for the other networks.

What lesson did everyone learn out of this? To make sure that no matter what, they'd never sit on the sidelines again in any situation like this.

So they all were willing to do whatever it took to make sure that next time, whenever something like the Gulf War took place, they'd have their own people in there. It might be Iraq or somewhere else, but no matter where it was, the most important goal of all for each network was to make sure they had feet-on-the-ground where the action was.

Think of it as the news version of roulette. A bureau in any given place is a bet that this is where the ball will land. If you have enough chips out there, on enough numbers, you will win wherever the ball lands. Of course, in real roulette the payoffs are set so that if you cover every number you'll lose more than you win, and indeed it might be that this is true in the real world, too. But I don't think it was perceived that way. You had a map of the world, and a very strong incentive to make sure you had reporter-chips on all the places where Big Stories might eventually happen. There's no way of knowing which one might be it ahead of time, so you have to place your bets before it happens. But some places were more likely than others.

During the 1990's, what with the tension and the inspections, it was obvious that there was a good chance of another war or some equally newsworthy cataclysmic event in Iraq eventually. But in general what this meant was that all the major news organizations, especially the TV networks, had to make sure to not burn any bridges with any major government whose nation might eventually be the site of a really major news event at some time in the future.

And the perverse logic of the situation was that the more odious and belligerent the regime, the greater the likelihood of it becoming the site of such an event, and thus the greater the incentive for the networks to play nice with them to make sure to not miss it when the time finally came.

This became a creeping erosion of their ethics, I think. CNN had already sold their soul to Iraq to get what they did in 1991, and the other networks soon followed them. Small concessions became larger ones. But as Heinlein said, "Man is a rationalizing creature, not a rational creature." I suspect a lot of those involved in this felt they were making a deal with the devil on behalf of a later triumph of the angels.

What I suspect they were thinking, deep down, was that permitting themselves to be used to deliver propaganda for various odious regimes was a small price to pay in order to retain "access" so as to tell some bigger and more important story later. A small lie now might enable them to tell a big truth later. Indeed, it's the same argument many of us who favored this war have made: war is evil, but the alternative in this case was worse, and we had to commit the evil of war to prevent a worse evil and bring about a good (or better) outcome than a failure to fight would have yielded. Perhaps these news organizations thought the same thing: acting as a tool of vile dictators is evil, but not having access would be worse in the long run.

And again, the more odious the regime, the greater the apparent likelihood that such a Big Truth might loom in the future. And thus the greater the rationalized willingness to cooperate with little lies in the mean time. And everyone else was doing it.

Each individual propaganda story we carry isn't actually doing much harm, is it? After all, they're so blatantly untrue that even if we carry them straight no one will really believe them, and besides which each such is a small thing. Right? But if we lose access entirely, we won't be in position to report and reveal some major story in future, which would actually be a much greater loss. Right? Besides which, everyone else is doing it. If we don't broadcast the propaganda and lies, someone else will, and our refusal won't actually make any difference.

Certainly it was true for any given network that not having access was worse, but the real reason was rather sordid. No one wanted to replay the experience of 1991, sitting on the sidelines watching some other organization get all the glory and attention. (And ratings. And advertising money.)

There may have been something of a frog-in-the-boiling-water level of slow acclimatization to the idea of suppressing bad news and reporting lies on behalf of their hosts, as a series of small steps and small concessions.

There's also something of the psychology of "protection racket" going on here. In any given month, what a given network had to pay (in money and in other ways) to retain access was judged as being small compared to what it would lose if it didn't. Over the long run, of course, the cumulative price paid was immense – but a lot of people don't really take the long view. And there's the ever-present worry about missing the big payoff.

And once you had a situation where essentially all the networks were making these kinds of concessions, then the perverse logic was that any network who had suddenly decided to act virtuous would lose. They'd be the only ones who no longer had access; they'd be the ones who would miss the big story once it happened. Their reward for doing the right thing morally would be to get the lowest ratings during the big event, whatever and whenever it was.

Worse, I wouldn't be surprised if you started getting something of a bidding war. When there were several networks in any given corrupt capitol, the government then was in a position to shake-down any given one by threatening to expel only it, to get it to give more and cooperate better. Once it did, that would then set the new expected level of performance for all the others. The cost to stay would rise higher and higher. And yet again, that would happen the most in precisely the most odious regimes, where the news organizations were most loath to lose access. Getting your reporters kicked out of Ulaanbaatar wasn't likely to be a big deal, if you even bothered having reporters there. But losing access to Baghdad was a big deal; it was worth a lot to stay.

Add to that the journalistic cult of the "disinterested observer". To many in the field, it is a reporter's duty to be on-the-spot but also their duty to be detached, uninterested, non-partisan. Present but uninvolved.

This manifests in several ways; some see themselves as sort of like floating cameras which all participants in the course of events are supposed to ignore, and which are supposed to be physically immune to what takes place. Some reporters seemed to think that they were immune to bullets and to complain in some cases when they actually came under fire, and to assume that all participants in a given struggle would also see them as uninvolved and immune. This seems to have been part of why a group of reporters in Afghanistan fell for a trap and were ambushed and killed by bandits. They thought everyone would treat them as inviolable; the bandits only saw stupid rich westerners who could be robbed.

Add an (un)healthy dose of tranzi/MGM belief in the inherent nobility of the poor and downtrodden to this belief in reporter detachment, and you get a situation where it would actually be seen as virtuous to not react to apparent inhumanity in nations like Iraq. Indeed, to see these things and not let them prevent you from doing what was necessary to be on the spot to report the story when it happened would prove your dedication to detachment. And in any case, it isn't truly evil if it happens in a third world brutocracy. They're all really just victims of the West, the root cause of all that is truly evil.

One last ingredient to toss in the mix: the journalistic quest for El Dorado. The Big One. The Jackpot. The Story Of The Century. After Watergate, there was generation of reporters who saw what had happened to Woodward and Bernstein and wanted the same thing. Fame! Fortune! Prestige! Babes! In the 1970's and 1980's and even into the 1990's you saw an almost frantic effort by reporters to try to turn story after story into something equally huge.

I mean, just think! Two reporters, working for the Washington Post, actually set in motion a train of events which toppled the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Woodward and Bernstein were the reporters who "broke the bank at Monte Carlo". Think of the intoxication that must have caused. Reporters had always fancied themselves as being the fourth branch of government, coequal with the legislative and executive and judicial branches, and with Watergate they had arrived; they'd actually become a significant force politically and historically. They had actually fulfilled that dream! They wanted to do it again.

When you're gambling, and addicted to gambling, there's always the problem of when to stop. The reason such gamblers don't is that even when things are going well, they want to keep going in hopes of hitting a really big one, to get that rush.

So when reporters in Iraq, and in other places like Cuba, saw important things going on, they had to make a decision: do I cash in my chips? If I report what I'm seeing now, I'll get a story. But I'll also get kicked out of this place, and may cause my news organization overall to lose access here, and in that case when the really big story happens here we won't get it. Maybe it would be better just to sit on this one, and wait for that home-run-ball to come across the plate. It's got to happen, eventually.

There was a story in Iraq. There were lots of stories, but the government brutality there was a story and in fact a very important one. But to actually report it would have caused CNN, or NBC, or Reuters, or whomever, to get kicked out and then they would have sat on the sidelines when the war finally came, with no access to the story, grumbling in frustration while others who were less virtuous than they hit the jackpot.

Every one of these factors worked to encourage various news organizations to make these kinds of compromises. Every one of these factors punishes them for virtue and rewards them for progressively increasing degrees of vice. Why, exactly, is anyone actually surprised by the fact that they sold out?

I was disgusted by what I read in the CNN producer's mea culpa, but I can't say I was very surprised by it.

One of the things that political bloggers have been doing over the last couple of years has been to criticize the way that various news reports have been clearly slanted. We oft-times do that with editorial pieces, and with "famous reporter on the spot gives his impression" pieces, but also with the more anonymous nominally-"straight" reporting that's been going on. There's always been bias; it's always been there and right out in the open. Did people think that was accidental? Some news organizations have become famous now for the way that they systematically and consistently distort their coverage of certain issues, such as how Reuters never refers to any Arab as a "terrorist" under any circumstances. Commenting on this kind of thing has been a staple of political blogs all along.

In some cases (e.g. the NYTimes) this kind of bias results from political ideology. But in the case of the networks and the wire services, it's not really too hard to believe that a lot of that distortion and suppression was due to the fear of being left out of the Big One when it came, or for other reasons described above.

So when this was revealed, I think I wasn't as shocked by it as other people. I also wasn't as worried about it, but that's because I'm patient, and because I have more faith in our system and the good sense of the majority of my fellow citizens than many do.

Many were outraged by this admission from CNN for pure moral reasons. But many were also deeply concerned that this actually was dangerous, and I think that this represents a good negative indicator of their belief in, and confidence in, populism. (Many of them don't claim to be populists, of course, but it's still a good test.)

If the news agencies are systematically distorting the news, then if you are not truly a populist, and if you share the leftist contempt for the masses, you'll be worried that they'll be misled by the distortion. If you are confidently populist, on the other hand, you'll realize that a truly well-informed citizenry will see through the bullshit and not be fooled by it.

Collectively, anyway. Some will be fooled. It will lead to arguments and unrest. When we collectively are faced with contradictory data, we talk about it and then express our collective opinions in our voting, and indirectly in the results of polls.

And 12 years of CNN (and other agency) propaganda coming out of Iraq never caused the American people to waver. During that entire interval we remained steadfast in our opposition to Saddam and our belief that eventually he'd have to be removed from power. 12 years of attempts, now known to be blatant canards, to say that the sanctions were directly and unqualifiedly responsible for the deaths and misery of tens of thousands of Iraq's women and children bounced off us like BB's hitting the armor of a tank. CNN sold its soul, but it didn't sell ours.

What should we (citizens) do about this? I think that it's arguable that we should make it a criminal offense for news organizations to formally bribe the nations they work in, just as we hold it to be a criminal offense for any other corporation to use bribes to gain contracts. (In fact, many of these news organizations may well already be in violation of existing laws on that.) Aside from that, probably we don't need to do anything in terms of passing laws.

There are really two things we need to make sure this doesn't become a significant threat. First, the best defense against this kind of thing is public skepticism and a general understanding that reporters are not virtuous purveyors of truth and wisdom. And that happened a long time ago.

Every once in a while someone does a general poll trying to check on the level of prestige various professions have as groups. Up top you'll find firemen, and below that you'll generally find doctors and scientists and engineers (ahem). Well down the scale lawyers appear. And you usually find politicians down near used car salesmen (which are the icon of untrustworthiness). Reporters have been dropping on that scale for decades. Back in the day, when Walter Cronkite was the face of news, they were up there with scientists. Now they're down in the range of politicians, and I believe that overall they now rank even lower than politicians.

You also need a finely-tuned bullshit detector. One of the reasons I never really took most of the reports coming out of Iraq very seriously is that they clearly didn't match what I knew to be true, and because I think that on some level or another I assumed that what they were reporting was distorted. I didn't know if it was distorted because the information that the reporters were being permitted to see was distorted or because the reporters were actually cooperating in the distortion, and it really didn't matter.

For instance, for the last decade we've seen a virtually unbroken string of reports out of Iraq about how much the people there loved Saddam and supported him. I never took those reports seriously. And did anyone actually give any credit to the Iraqi election last fall where Saddam actually won unanimously?

Some did. Many actually seem to have expected that the people of Iraq, even if they hadn't been quite frank about how they felt about Saddam, would nonetheless rise to defend Iraq against our invasion.

Some did think that. But our American electoral system differs from the systems in Europe in that it has a much greater capacity for what communications engineers refer to as "noise rejection". And despite it all, our nation got the right answer, as events proved.

In a sense, these revelations by this CNN producer will help the situation a lot in future, and it's important that this get a lot of publicity so that it finish the job of killing off the myth of the noble reporter. Not that there's any chance that it won't; all of CNN's competitors will make sure to bring it up when they can so as to try to hurt CNN, and in so doing they'll to a lesser extent discredit all news organizations collectively. (And, of course, no one now wants to be discovered as also being as much of an amoral sellout as CNN is suddenly perceived to be.)

We need a good general skepticism by the public of what the news organizations report; that's one of the factors which will solve this. The other thing we need is a lot of news organizations in intense competition with one another. Cable television significantly helped that process; where there used to be just the three networks able to deliver TV news in the US, and one or two newspapers in each city, plus maybe three or four general-circulation news magazines, there are now several dedicated cable news networks in competition with one another.

The internet will help much more. Cable TV made broad distribution of TV much easier and cheaper and led to an explosion of channels. The internet explosively expands the access people have to news reporting of all kinds, especially to newspapers. When I was 25, there was only one newspaper in the city in which I lived, but now I have direct access to thousands of them, who may relay Reuters and AP feeds but also do a lot of reporting themselves.

People will tend to listen to news sources they are more likely to trust, and that will work to give the news organizations an incentive to not lie. No one likes being lied to, and between cable TV and the internet, no one has to let themselves be lied to. And the news organizations, acutely sensitive to their ratings, will notice this. (They certainly seem to have noticed the way that Fox hammered the other major TV news sources in the ratings.)

You can't legally enforce ethics, and I fear any attempt by government to try to supervise news organizations to make sure they "don't lie"; that's not a capability I want my government to have. But we consumers have the ability to punish and reward through who we tune into. As long as we remember that the news organizations don't care about right and wrong but do care about ratings and advertising revenue, then if there's intense competition we can reward good reporter citizens and punish bad ones. This problem doesn't ultimately require a legal solution because a market solution is much better.

I'm a patient man; I don't need solutions which are fast and perfect and eternal. What I think is that this kind of selling out by the news agencies is just as temporary as the earlier period in which loss-leading network news actually held truth and honor above all things.

With cable television and the rise of the internet, and the continuing drop in prestige of reporters, this is a problem which will ultimately solve itself. And until it does, it will represent sand in the gears of the democratic machine, but not a monkey-wrench. It will make the system work less well than it otherwise might, but it won't actually cause it to fail.