Stardate 20040531.1216

(Captain's log): Frank writes:

I scanned your media bias piece. Interesting. However, I think at the end you may have made a mistake: I don't know about Murrow -- he was before my time -- but history is increasingly less kind to Walter Cronkite regarding the Vietnam War, and rightfully so, in my opinion. We know now that we won Tet decisively, but Cronkite portrayed it as a failure and ignited popular angst against the war to the critical level that eventually led to withdraw and defeat. Moreover, plenty of Vietnamese blood was spilled during and after the draw-down of forces, and I lay no small portion of that blood at Conkrite's feet. And then there is the matter of the entire Vietnamese population today living under the jack boot of communist thugs. How much responsibility for this should be assigned to Walter Cronkite? Plenty, in my view -- although I reserve some for John Kerry as well.

What we many never know (has Cronkite ever publicly discussed it in detail?) is whether Cronkite's expressions were rooted in a personal anti-war agenda, or in a deep-seated conviction -- however wrong -- that the war was lost. I'll give Cronkite the benefit of the doubt that he may have been convinced that the war was lost, but he was still *wrong* nonetheless. I also wonder if he cares about the unintended consequences of being the original "anti-war" agenda journalist, and about the lasting effects that his diatribe has had on the journalism profession. My suspicion is that, like most effete liberal elitist snobs, he thinks he elevated the profession and it's just fine with him if most of the current reporting on the war is shaped to serve the anti-war agenda, regardless of how morally bankrupt such positions might be.

Walter Cronkite may have, at one time, been "the most trusted man in America." But that was then, and this is now. Today, I don't think Cronkite could ratings on any of the big three television networks. He may still be loved by liberal intellectuals. But that's a tiny (and shrinking) segment of the population. Flyover country is just glad that he's not showing his face too much. Let him spend his time trying to chase energy-producing windmills from his vistas overlooking Martha's Vineyard. The rest of the country will move forward, ever skeptical of the reporting of mainstream media outlets -- on the war and most other matters -- all thanks to Walter Conkrite.

He was responding to the final paragraph of that piece:

I don't think there's any easy answer. All of us just have to get used to it, and to remember that much of what we're being told is either false or is distorted. The days of Murrow and Cronkite are gone. We citizens have to start thinking of news reporting as being about as reliable as advertising.

What I meant by that was that the days when we deeply respected top news reporters are over. The people of this nation used to hold certain top reporters in very high esteem, and to see them as men of integrity, men motivated by noble purpose. That doesn't mean they were invariably right; no man ever is. But they were trusted and respected. No media personality today has anything like the kind of reputation those two had.

I am aware of Cronkite's role in the overall result of the Tet Offensive, though I think some now are giving it too much credence. There's something of a tendency in humans to try to finger one person, or one event, or one specific thing as being "the cause" of important results. Sometimes this is an unconscious mistake, and sometimes it is deliberate. Sometimes it is deliberately misused. It shows up in many ways, such as in those who now claim that Iraqi WMDs were somehow the reason for the invasion of Iraq, and our failure to locate them somehow proves that the reason was invalid.

Reality is rarely that straightforward. Indeed, sometimes the factors which contribute to a tragic sequence of events are extremely varied and complicated. It is, for example, very difficult to explain and understand all the factors and events which combined together to bring about the tragedy we now refer to as "World War I" in Europe. Among them are the advent of the industrial revolution and especially the industrialization of Germany, the actual political formation of "Germany" by Bismarck, and the French humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War. But that is far from a complete list of contributing factors, and the combination of contributing factors had emergent qualities which are not obvious without close study.

I definitely agree that the Tet Offensive was the turning point in the Viet Nam War. I also agree that there was an astounding disparity between the military reality and the political effect it had in the US. (I wrote about it here.)

I also understand that Cronkite's performance was one of the more important factors in the overall political result, in part because of his unique position of having a very tall podium from which to speak, and being widely respected. But I don't think it's correct to lay substantially all of the responsibility for the political turn-around at his feet.

Regardless, Cronkite's performance relating to the Tet Offensive doesn't really affect the point I was trying to make. There was a time when we believed that top media personalities were men of integrity. Now we must view them as being as trustworthy as used car salesmen, and polls show that most of us actually do rate them that way.

What I think is rather strange is that polls within the industry also tend to show that journalists have much different opinions about themselves than the general public has about them. Journalists think they are centrist; the public sees them as slanting heavily to the left. (Understand that these are all generalizations.) Journalists think they are in touch with the public zeitgeist and that they tend to pursue issues the public cares about; the public doesn't tend to agree with that.

Even more interesting is that journalists not only have a higher opinion of themselves than the public has, but journalists seem to think the public holds them in higher esteem than the public actually does.

There's quite a difference in how certain professions are broadly viewed. Generally speaking, polls have shown that the clergy are respected the most. Scientists and doctors tend to come in next, and my own profession of engineering is slightly behind that. (Engineers are not generally viewed as being evil, but I think we are viewed as being careless and narrow. We're not seen as being motivated by higher principles or attempts to work for the greater good. The general public is dimly aware of just how much their lives have been improved by the fruits of engineering, but doesn't generally understand just how pervasive it is. They're also aware that the fruits of engineering have caused problems, and some are afraid of just how little they really understand about what we engineers are doing. Engineers are creating their future, and they don't understand what we're making and don't contribute to the decisions we make which will affect their future. So engineers are held in respect in part because so much of what we make actually works so well, or is so nifty and cool, but we're also feared and resented because we give our loyalty to our employers rather than to the public at large.)

Lawyers traditionally have rated much worse, and politicians have always rated very poorly. These ratings tend to be very stable over time, though some events can shake them. (I would not be surprised, for instance, to learn that the reputation of the clergy has been seriously shaken by the revelations about widespread pedophilia among Catholic priests, and about the way the church worked to cover it up.) In the last few decade, the one profession whose reputation has changed the most has been journalism, whose overall reputation has declined radically. Indeed, in some polls, journalists rated lower than politicians.

It's interesting that journalists overall have not really come to grasp just how badly their reputation has decayed. But that kind of disconnect can't last, and we're beginning to see a certain amount of soul-searching within the profession about it.

This is actually a classic example of "spoiling the commons". Over a long period of time, the acts of individual reporters, taken with the intent of promoting their own reputations, have had the cumulative effect of seriously degrading the reputation of their profession and their industry.

In many ways, Watergate has to be seen as a turning point. In some ways it was the greatest triumph in the history of modern journalism. An activist media, seeking the truth, helped reveal and then helped keep pressure on to continue to reveal, crimes committed by the top officials of the government of one of the most powerful nations in the world, and through that eventually brought about the downfall of that leadership. Journalists rightly credit their profession as being critically important in the sequence of events which eventually led to Nixon's resignation as President of the United States.

But if it was a triumph for the journalistic profession, it also sowed the seeds of its decline. It inspired a generation of new journalists all of whom had the ambition of becoming the next Woodward or Bernstein. They wanted to do it again. Ric wrote to me:

Woodward and Bernstein got a Pulitzer for the Watergate stories. More importantly, the Press learned that if they were persistent enough they could destroy, or at minimum contribute greatly to destroying, a President. This is real power, albeit that of the bully: "I can destroy this, therefore I control it." That they would not attempt to exercise that power may be too much to expect, given human psychology.

I don't know that it was really motivated by the same thing as motivates bullies. I think it was more about to a man with a hammer... This was really the only way the Press had of influencing events, and for individual journalists to make names for themselves.

It's generally accepted now that Cronkite was wrong in his evaluation of the Tet Offensive. It's not as easy to say whether the overall evaluation of the Viet Nam war was correct. However, I think that whether he was right or wrong, Cronkite actually was trying to do the right thing. If he came to oppose the Viet Nam war, it was because he actually thought the US was wrong to be fighting it. I don't think Cronkite was primarily motivated by ambition to make a name for himself, or any goal of "making a difference" by bringing down an administration and otherwise gumming up the gears.

However, since Watergate, it seems that more and more individual members of the press are primarily motivated by personal ambition. And that's why this is a case of "spoiling the commons": in their quest to gain fame and respect personally, they collectively acted in ways which seriously damaged the reputation of their profession and industry.

Woodward and Bernstein were not the first journalists to help bring down an influential politician, by any stretch. One of the reasons that Murrow holds an honored place in the history of the profession was because of his negative coverage of the McCarthy witch-hunts. (This, like so many other historical events, has come down to us in our popular wisdom in rather abstract and distorted terms. There's no question that McCarthy took things too far, and no question that he was ambitious and unscrupulous. There's no question that anti-Communist hysteria in the early 1950's was an overreaction, and no question that it unjustly ruined the lives of many people. On the other hand, there actually was a problem, and a better man than McCarthy in his position would have gone down in history as a hero.)

Murrow was already famous and respected; he had the same kind of "big podium" that Cronkite had in the 1960's. Murrow used his unique position to expose McCarthy's abuses, and was a critical factor in bringing about McCarthy's political destruction.

There were two critical differences between Murrow and Woodward/Bernstein. For one thing, the latter helped bring down a President. But even more critically, Woodward and Bernstein were unknowns at the time. They became famous because of their Watergate reporting. And because of that, they inspired a generation of ambitious journalists who wanted to do the same thing.

Only problem was that the kind of big story and deep and important perfidy which was present in the Nixon administration was actually not all that common. Woodward and Bernstein deserve most of the credit they've been given, but in part their achievement was based on luck. They were lucky enough to face a hugely important story, and they saw it and reported it.

The other journalists inspired by them needed/wanted equivalently big stories – but were not as lucky. So as my reader SJ put it, journalists became anxiety pimps. We saw a seeming endless progression of mountains-out-of-molehills presented by a breathless and near-hysterical press which were immediately dubbed this-gate, that-gate, something-else-gate, another-thing-scam, and so on. It was never totally clear whether creation of a xxxx-gate name for some new scandal was serious or ironic, in fact, and it became something of a joke after a while. But it still goes on.

Challeron wrote:

I was also glad to see you mention Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite at the end of the essay, since you had early on mentioned "the mission of the press"; but I was kinda hoping that you'd note that it was William Paley, the founder of CBS, who allowed his News Division to run at an operating loss for many years, and who felt that news should *never* be a for-profit enterprise. Fred Friendly's "Due To Circumstances Beyond Our Control" is an excellent read about "the corrosive effect of money on the news business, the sensationalization of news reporting, and the viewing public's appetite for quality broadcasting" (from the Amazon.com book description).

That, too, has been a factor. If reporters are more and more motivated by ambition, in television they are also being encouraged to be sensationalist by networks which crave ratings and the big advertising revenues they bring. That has led to abuse, such as the "exploding pickup truck" scandal. (NBC's 60-minutes-alike showed film of a pickup truck exploding after a test crash, as part of a feature which reported that they were misdesigned and excessively dangerous. It was later revealed that the reporters which set up and filmed that demonstration had concealed an explosive charge in the truck which they set off after the collision to make sure the resulting film was spectacular.)

Part of the problem is that in their endless pursuit of the next "big story", reporters tend to dive into areas they don't really understand, and don't do their homework. Barry wrote:

Many journalists write articles about issues, and they haven't the foggiest idea about the subject. They pretend to know instead. Now this leads to the various biases you described, but frankly many journalists aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer.

This has certainly been a problem, and is something of an emergent result of the combination of reporter ambition and network finances. Journalists used to be assigned to "beats", to particular areas which they worked on for years. There was even something of an apprentice system involved, with junior reporters working for senior reporters on that "beat", and then being promoted when the senior reporter retired. That gave them time to learn about the "beat" and become knowledgeable about it.

But it also meant they spent a lot of time covering that "beat" even when nothing important was happening, and they did not have the opportunity to write stories which hit the front page. Ambitious reporters want more flexibility than that to try to cover whatever seems "hot" at any given moment, and the financial reality inside networks is that they don't want to carry and pay for the kind of staff that would require.

This has been a particular problem in coverage of military affairs and especially in coverage of wars. A year ago, the news organizations had to come up with a lot of reporters to send to the Middle East to cover the impending invasion of Iraq. Most of them were completely ignorant about military affairs.

Many of them ended up "embedded", and were assigned to their units long before combat began. That gave them time to acclimate, and to get to know the men in their units and to learn more about the day-to-day activities and procedures of the military, which was all to the good. But it didn't give them knowledge of what combat was actually like, or deep understanding of weapons and other aspects of military affairs. It did tend to make their reporting somewhat more sympathetic to the units they were attached to. (And later some who opposed the war criticized that reporting as being too sympathetic.) But it didn't keep them from making a lot of mistakes.

In particular, reporters tended to massively exaggerate the significance of Fedayeen activities in the rear of the advancing 3rd Infantry Division and 1st MEF. If you've never seen combat before, actually being under fire is terrifying and some of these reporters were in units which actually did get shot at. A short engagement between your infantry platoon and 20 or 30 hostiles using automatic weapons, RPGs and mortars can seem like a pretty big thing, especially if one of the soldiers you have gotten to know gets killed or seriously wounded. Psychologically speaking, a 60 mm mortar round which detonates near enough to you to cause incontinence is bigger than a daisy-cutter you've only read about.

There were also major technical errors. An Iraqi attack made with Frog surface-to-surface missiles was initially reported to have used SCUD missiles instead. That was a pretty important mistake on the political level, because Frog missiles did not have the range to violate Iraq's 1990 ceasefire agreement, whereas SCUDs did.

Since reporters no longer spend the time learning about the "beat" they're covering, this makes it harder for them to find stories. They don't really know where to look, and they have a harder time understanding what they see. There's a greater chance that they will misjudge the significance of events they try to cover (with a general tendency to assign too great a significance).

This often tends to encourage development of symbiotic relationships between reporters and advocate groups. The reporter seeks a sensational story to tell, and extremist activists have a sensational story they want told, even if it isn't really true. Reporters often come to rely on such people for technical advice and tips, because they had proved themselves valuable in the past.

That's because they had given the reporter information which made for a sensational story. It mattered much less whether the story was actually true or was badly overblown. (And those advocates were more than willing to provide advice and tips to the reporters for free, an added benefit.)

What we the public see resulting from this is activist-group propaganda reported as straight news. That's gotten more and more common as time has gone on. And since it has primarily been leftist activists who have been successful at this, especially in areas such as environmentalism and international politics, this has contributed to the general perception by the public of a strong and increasing leftward slant by the press. It is not always the case that such reporters are actually biased (or as much biased as they seem) so much as that they have come to rely on "sources" which are biased and which have an agenda.

When reporters are careless about this, it can become apparent. One example of that was "9/11 families opposing the war", when outside observers (i.e. bloggers) noticed that a small number of specific people kept appearing in news reports. It turned out they were all associated with one particular anti-war advocacy group, which some reporters had come to rely on as a reliable source of sensational quotes.

Yet another factor is related to a problem which afflicted industries for a long time. It has a formal name (I remember reading about it) but I'm not sure what it is. [Update: it is the "principal-agent problem", and in this manifestation it refers to the fact that the managers make their decisions for their own benefit, not for the benefit of their employer.] It had to do with the fact that ambitious executives tended to move around pretty rapidly from position to position within a corporation, often holding a position for less than two years (and sometimes only for a couple of quarters), and the "best" ones tended to rise rapidly. If a manager was given responsibility for a division, then if that division seemed to do very well, that manager would be promoted and given larger responsibilities.

It is possible to make any division seem to look better than it really is, and to cause it to seem to perform particularly well for a while, if one is not interested in the long term. In particular, the "bottom line" of a division can be improved by decreasing long term investment. In the short run that increases gross profit, but it can't be maintained.

However, by the time the division begins to suffer because of inadequate investment, the manager who made those decisions will have moved on, and will have stuck someone else with the problem. (In fact, it can look like it was the later manager's fault. When Allen was manager, gross profits were high; later, under Bob's management it began to get worse. That doesn't make Bob look very good, even though it was actually Allen's decision to underinvest which is responsible. It still can make Allen look better, since performance under him seemed so much better.)

This was a pretty serious endemic problem in American industry in the 1960's and 1970's. One way to reduce that is for managers to not be shifted around as much; if a manager knows he'll be responsible for the division for five to ten years, he is much less likely to neglect essential investments or to manage for short-term performance. Another way to reduce that is to use a more enlightened evaluation of manager performance, taking into account not just how much gross profit they managed to wring out of the division but also the fundamental shape the division is in to keep producing gross profit.

Reporters flitting from story to story are subject to something of the same kind of temptation. Even if they're exaggerating and distorting the story, they are likely to have moved on (and upwards) before the story implodes. And since their news organizations are increasingly interested more in ratings than in accuracy, exaggerated and sensationalist reporting which is later punctured isn't really viewed as being a problem. As long as there is a continuing flow of new sensationalist reporting to keep ratings up, the networks are happy.

When managers in industry succumbed to this temptation, the overall result was ramping off of productivity increases in the US in some industries, and other related economic effects. Some companies were so debilitated that they ended up bankrupt or were sold off. (For the workers, that often was the same thing, since the new owner often ended up shutting down much of what they had acquired.)

I think that as reporters do the same thing, the overall consequences are at least as bad for us, and in some ways may be worse. But there isn't the same dynamic in place in journalism which will cause the industry to fix it, the way there as in industry.

It is one of the major factors which has led to a serious decline in the reputation of the press. And because press credibility has been deeply eroded, and because they scream so loudly even about little things, they have deeply damaged their ability to deal with the next Watergate, a really big story where reporters really would make a critical and valuable difference.

If there's a really big story which is being suppressed, and if the press discovers it and reveals it, they do us a great service. But if they try incessantly to turn every small story that comes along into a big one, they do us no favors. And as this kept happening, the press gained the reputation of being the boy who cried "wolf!" too often.

Frankly, this is not in anyone's best interest in the long run (except perhaps for the next Nixon). A well-respected crusading press, which practices restraint and judgment, which shines its light on big issues without overblowing small ones, is a major asset in helping to maintain a free society and in preventing the gradual development of government tyranny. Even with the best of intentions it wouldn't always be right, just as Cronkite probably was not right in his interpretation of the Tet Offensive.

But I'll forgive honest mistakes, even when they're big ones. (And even if Cronkite was wrong in interpreting the significance of the Tet Offensive, he was surely not wrong in recognizing that it was an important event, a "big" story.)

Unfortunately, what we have now is a press which in my opinion routinely makes mistakes, and whose mistakes can't really be considered "honest". It's not that they routinely deliberately lie, though there is some of that; it's more that they routinely exhibit what the SCOTUS referred to as a "reckless disregard as to truth or falsity".

Increasingly stories are evaluated primarily on the basis of sensationalism rather than on verity or significance. "Will this produce a great headline?" has become more important than "Is this true and accurate and complete?" or "Is this important?"

Unfortunately, I don't believe there is a structural solution to this. Barry wrote:

Something that is always uppermost in my mind when I read about the "newspapers" is that I pay to read a paper that claims to present the news. Why are my rights infringed in that, the majority of reports I am "forced" to read, the news comes interwoven with the reporter's nuance, omission of some of the facts, bias/agenda, his quotes and whatever? This is especially serious when it comes to making an educated choice for my representative in the political process. I do not have the freedom to choose as I am not presented with the naked facts. I am in fact led by the nose according to the agenda at play.

Maybe it would be in the interests of everybody if the media were forced to follow the British legal system and structure their paper, or news hour (getting rid of the sound bites might be in the best interests of the country), in which the facts are presented on the first pages and thereafter the opinions of the "opposition" and "defence". Just watching the BBC reporter Peter Hounam talking about Vanunu one is given the impression that the Israeli govt., unfairly hounded Vanunu. What does not get stated is that Vanunu on accepting the job offered signed a legal document pledging not to disclose information that fell under the secrets act. This kind of omission is typical of the great majority and certainly does not permit us to "fairly" judge a situation.

The solution Barry suggests is not really a solution. (He himself complains about BBC coverage of a specific case in Israel.)

This is a cure which is potentially far worse than the disease. The problem is that there's no real objective way to decide what is a "fact", or to decide what is "relevant". No matter who makes that decision, many of those choices will be controversial. Ultimately someone will have to decide what is a "fact" and what is not, and what is "relevant" and what is not, and no matter who it is, sometimes they'll make mistakes and much of the time others will disagree with their judgment. And no matter who it is, their decisions will be colored by their opinions and their ideology and their self interest.

Is it really in our best interests to take that decision out of the hands of people in the media, to give it to someone else? Does that solve the problem, or just shift it?

And who do we rely on to make those decisions? In particular, do we want it to be the government?

We in the US sure as hell don't; that's why free press is one of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.

At best, Barry's proposal moves the problem without actually solving it. At worst, it eliminates all the benefits we could get from a free press by subjecting it to direct government control.

When I said that I didn't think there was any easy answer to this problem, I really was serious. I said, We citizens have to start thinking of news reporting as being about as reliable as advertising. As someone else said (in a reference I can't locate right now) it's worse than that, because there are legal penalties for false advertising.

Other commentary from: Jonathan Gewirtz, Demosophia, Sarah, Amritas, Jeff Darcy, Laurence Simon, Ken

Update 20040601: Bill Quick comments.

Update: Hyspeed points out a stunningly brilliant parody of current media reactions to the war in the form of a fictional opinion piece from a London newspaper from May 31, 1941. This was before the German invasion of the USSR began, at a time when the UK had been fighting alone for a year.

Update 20040602: More here.

Update 20040607: Via Lopsided Poopdeck, I found this article about press bias written by Orson Scott Card. Lopsided Poopdeck also points to a series of posts which "cover" events in WWII in the way Iraq is being covered now.