The New Dark Age

Media Lens – Flat Earth News: The Inside View – Part 2

MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

March 6, 2008

MEDIA ALERT: FLAT EARTH NEWS – THE INSIDE VIEW – PART 2

Churnalism And The Propaganda Model

To be clear, there +is+ much of merit in Flat Earth News – the book is well worth reading. Davies describes, for example, how all was not well in the Observer newsroom in the autumn of 2002. The newspaper’s correspondent, Ed Vulliamy, had been talking with Mel Goodman, a former senior CIA analyst. Despite leaving the agency, Goodman retained his high security clearance and remained in communication with senior former colleagues. Goodman told Vulliamy that, in contradiction to everything the British and American governments were claiming, the CIA were reporting that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, Goodman was willing to go on the record as a named source. It was an incredibly important scoop but the Observer refused to publish it.

Over the next four months, Vulliamy submitted seven versions of the story for publication – his editors rejected every one of them. (pp.329-331) In January 2003, the Observer’s then editor, Roger Alton, told his staff: “We’ve got to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Americans.” (p.350)

In support of this stance, the Observer’s David Rose echoed government propaganda on Iraq’s alleged connections with al-Qaeda – a performance that ended with a humbling apology from Rose in 2004. He described how his trust in official sources had been “misplaced and naïve… I look back with shame and disbelief”. (p.334)

Other people paid the price. Eleven days after Vulliamy’s story was rejected for the seventh time in March 2003, the first bombs fell on Baghdad.

In September 2006, the Evening Standard reported that Alton had been on “something of a lads’ holiday” in the Alps. Alton’s companions included Jonathan Powell, “Tony Blair’s most trusted aide”, and staunch Blairite MP and propagandist Denis MacShane. (Gideon Spanier, ‘In the air,’ Evening Standard, September 6, 2006)

Most recently, we learned that Alton “is understood to be in talks to replace Simon Kelner as editor of the Independent”. (Stephen Brook, ’Alton in talks about Independent role,’ The Guardian, March 4, 2008

It should come as no surprise: “Kelner and Alton are known to be friends; in December Kelner gave a speech at Alton’s birthday party, attended by many Fleet Street editors, a few weeks before he left the Observer.”

One wonders how even the compliant souls of the liberal press can bear it. We know, indeed, that some of them cannot.

But occasional nuggets should be set apart from Davies’s analysis of the media system as a whole. What, then, +is+ his “no-holds-barred” critique of the press?

In the Guardian, he described how he commissioned research which surveyed more than 2,000 UK news stories from the four quality dailies (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent) and the Daily Mail. They found that only 12% of the stories were wholly composed of material researched by reporters. 80% of the stories were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. They also found that facts had been thoroughly checked in only 12% of the stories. Davies commented:

“The implication of those two findings is truly alarming. Where once journalists were active gatherers of news, now they have generally become mere passive processors of unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve some political or commercial interest. Not journalists, but churnalists. An industry whose primary task is to filter out falsehood has become so vulnerable to manipulation that it is now involved in the mass production of falsehood, distortion and propaganda.” (Davies, ‘Our media have become mass producers of distortion,’ The Guardian, February 4, 2008)

The researchers found that the average Fleet Street journalist is now filling three times as much space as he or she was in 1985: “Generally, they don’t find their own stories, or check their content, because they simply don’t have the time.”

In his book, Davies emphasises that journalists “are no longer out gathering news but… are reduced instead to passive processors of whatever material comes their way, churning out stories, whether real event or PR artifice, important or trivial, true or false”. (p.59)

This is what Davies calls “churnalism” – this is his central focus. Writing in the Guardian, Peter Wilby indicated the basic sound bite used to summarise the Flat Earth News thesis:

“The main reason why you read so little decent journalism, he argues, is simple: hacks don’t have time to do it.” (Wilby, op., cit)

Tim Luckhurst wrote in the Independent:

“At the root of the problem lies commercial pressure, but not the ideological pressure blamed by Marxist academics anxious to portray the press as an establishment conspiracy. Davies blames the more insidious influence of media conglomerates that prefer profit to political influence and pare editorial staff to the bone to achieve it.” (Luckhurst, ‘Hard truths for the trade in “Flat Earth News”,’ The Independent, February 10, 2008)

By contrast, Edward Herman – an “outsider” and surely one of Luckhurst’s “Marxist academics” – here reflects on the origins of the propaganda model, which is primarily his work:

“We had long been impressed with the regularity with which the media operate within restricted assumptions, depend heavily and uncritically on elite information sources, and participate in propaganda campaigns helpful to elite interests. In trying to explain why they do this we looked for structural factors as the only possible root of systematic behaviour and performance patterns.” (Herman, ‘The propaganda model revisited,’ Monthly Review, July 1996)

It is in this analysis of “structural factors” that Herman and Chomsky depart from Davies’s analysis. Herman explains:

“The crucial structural factors derive from the fact that the dominant media are firmly imbedded in the market system. They are profit-seeking businesses, owned by very wealthy people (or other companies); they are funded largely by advertisers who are also profit-seeking entities, and who want their ads to appear in a supportive selling environment. The media are also dependent on government and major business firms as information sources, and both efficiency and political considerations, and frequently overlapping interests, cause a certain degree of solidarity to prevail among the government, major media, and other corporate businesses.

“Government and large non-media business firms are also best positioned (and sufficiently wealthy) to be able to pressure the media with threats of withdrawal of advertising or TV licenses, libel suits, and other direct and indirect modes of attack. The media are also constrained by the dominant ideology, which heavily featured anticommunism before and during the Cold War era, and was mobilized often to prevent the media from criticizing attacks on small states labelled communist.

“These factors are linked together, reflecting the multi-levelled capability of powerful business and government entities and collectives (e.g., the Business Roundtable; U.S. Chamber of Commerce; industry lobbies and front groups) to exert power over the flow of information.” (Herman, Ibid)

There is much more in Herman and Chomsky’s book, as there is in Davies’s, but we are here in a different world of insight and rationality. And yet, unlike Flat Earth News, Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent does not exist for the mainstream media. Lexis-Nexis records a single review of the book over the last 20 years – a two-paragraph review totalling 147 words that appeared in the Guardian in December 1989, a year after publication.

The Rules Of Production – 1-5

In Chapter 4, The Rules of Production, Davies provides a list of ten “rules” that superficially appear to resemble the list of five filters offered by Herman and Chomsky. Davies’s rules are divided under two sections: 1-5 “Cutting the costs” and 6-10 “Increasing the Revenue”.

The emphasis is on the selection of low cost, “safe” facts and ideas that avoid “electric fences”, and yet literally no mention is made of the advertisers who provide 75% of a ‘quality’ newspaper’s revenue. As we have seen, earlier in the book Davies discusses the influence of advertising in the context of an implausible conspiracy theory. Davies also comments on interference from owners and advertisers:

“Journalists with whom I have discussed this agree that if you could quantify it, you could attribute only 5% or 10% of the problem to the total impact of these two forms of interference.” (p.22)

Advertiser responsibility for Flat Earth News, he claims, is “not only negligible but a distraction from what is really going wrong”. (p.15)

Davies explains the basis for his low figure, apparently plucked from the air: “there certainly are examples of corporations pulling their advertising in order to try to have an impact on the political or general editorial line of a media outlet – but there is a real shortage of examples of their succeeding”. (p.14)

Again, this is a red herring. It is clear that newspapers are not primarily in the business of selling a product to readers – they are in the business of selling wealthy audiences to advertisers. It is not just “that stories should increase readership or audience” – they should sell the right readership to the right advertisers. This is not an apolitical stance. This marketplace naturally favours facts, ideas, values and aspirations that are popular with elite audiences, elite advertisers and elite journalists. What Davies describes as “safe” stories are stories which interest wealthy audiences without alienating advertisers.

The problem is not just that advertisers might directly pressure a newspaper – for example, by pulling its advertising – but that newspapers have no choice but to provide a supportive environment in order to attract these sponsors. In 2004, we wrote to Nick Taylor, editor of the Guardian’s Spark magazine. We asked: “was not Spark itself originally conceived as a vehicle for major advertising? Surely the needs and preferences of advertisers were central considerations in deciding the format and focus of the magazine”. Taylor replied:

“Your point is valid. But certainly not unique to my product.

“Ever worked on a magazine launch? The first and only real questions are: who will advertise with in product / Will it be read by people whom advertisers want to reach?

“Readers/viewers/listeners are the most important thing to any publisher or broadcaster. But, from an economic point of view, primarily because high numbers of readers means high ad revenue. And media survive only through ads.” (Taylor, email to Media Lens, April 6, 2004)

These pressures have shaped, not just the layout and structure of individual titles, but the whole structure of the British press. Media analysts James Curran and Jean Seaton describe how the industrialisation of the press brought “a progressive transfer of power from the working class to wealthy businessmen, while dependence on advertising encouraged the absorption or elimination of the early radical press and stunted its subsequent development before the First World War”. (Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility – The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, Routledge, 1991, p.47)

The effect on national radical papers that “failed to meet the requirements of advertisers” was dramatic:

“They either closed down; accommodated to advertising pressure by moving up-market; stayed in a small audience ghetto with manageable losses; or accepted an alternative source of institutional patronage.” (Ibid, p.43)

Davies also downplays the significance of owner interference, which he describes, curiously, as “the other widespread conspiracy theory” (p.15):

“Almost all of the old patriarchs who personally owned and abused newspapers have sold out to corporations, whose primary purpose is not propaganda. Their primary purpose simply and uncontroversially is to make money.” (p.16)

This last comment is breathtaking. Anyone who knows anything about the political history of the last century in Britain and the United States knows that the primary purpose of much propaganda is precisely “to make money”. Davies does discuss the cynical relationship between the public relations industry and the media, but this is only one small component of state-corporate manipulation of society.

Historian Elizabeth Fones-Wolf notes that the growth in workers’ power during the 1940s and 1950s was a major factor in shaping elite US policy, leading to a fierce business backlash intended to contain US public opinion. The campaign was immense in scale, involving all the leading business organisations, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Committee for Economic Development, the National Association of Manufacturers and many industry-specific bodies. Fones-Wolf commented:

“Manufacturers orchestrated multimillion dollar public relations campaigns that relied on newspapers, magazines, radio, and later television, to re-educate the public in the principles and benefits of the American economic system… employers sought to undermine unionism and address shop-floor conflict by building a separate company identity or company consciousness among their employees. This involved convincing workers to identify their social, economic, and political well-being with that of their specific employer and more broadly with the free enterprise system.” (Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise – The Business Assault on Labour and Liberalism, 1945-60, University of Illinois Press, 1994, p.6)

The press has never been an ideologically neutral, solely profit-oriented system in this “everlasting battle for the minds of men” – it has always been a key propaganda weapon for corporate power. And we should not imagine that this struggle is at an end. Elite interests remain determined to shape public opinion, to limit the perceived range of conceivable options in their interests, and the media system is still a prime means for achieving these goals.

In other words, the result of hundreds of years of political struggle for corporate control against popular interference has resulted in a situation where it is simply understood that certain facts, ideas, values and aspirations are acceptable while others are not. Wealthy individual owners and parent corporations have selected senior managers and editors who understand this, and who select journalists – company men like Davies – who perceive the architecture of the media as ideologically neutral rather than the product of political struggle.

Davies’s analysis is so flawed, such a symptom of the problem he has failed to perceive, because he is able to ask in all seriousness:

“Why would a profession lose touch with its primary function? Why would truth-telling disintegrate into the mass production of ignorance?” (p.45)

Truth-telling has +never+ been the primary function of Davies’s profession. Even the idea of “professional journalism” is a fraud. As media analyst Robert McChesney notes it is no coincidence that the notion of professionalism appeared just as corporations achieved an unprecedented stranglehold at the beginning of the 20th century:

“Savvy publishers understood that they needed to have their journalism appear neutral and unbiased, notions entirely foreign to the journalism of the era of the Founding Fathers, or their businesses would be far less profitable.” (McChesney, in Kristina Borjesson, ed., Into The Buzzsaw – Leading Journalists Expose The Myth Of A Free Press, Prometheus Books, 2002, p.367)

Wealthy owners could thereby claim that editors and reporters were freed from external influence by trained, professional judgement. This allowed the corporate media monopoly to be presented as a “neutral” service to democracy. The claim, McChesney notes, was “entirely bogus”.

By contrast, Davies endlessly reiterates his faith in the essential neutrality of his profession:

“If the primary purpose of journalism is to tell the truth, then it follows that the primary function of journalists must be to check and to reject whatever is not true.” (p.51)

We can perhaps imagine a critical military officer observing: “If the primary purpose of an army is national defence, then…” This is the view of a professional divorced from the political reality out of which he and his army has emerged. Imagine, after all, if the military officer were speaking of the German Wehrmacht in 1939, or of the Soviet Red Army. Imagine if Davies were a Soviet journalist.

Davies reassures us that there is more than just “churnalism”: “it is possible that as much as 20% of Fleet Street’s work is still being produced entirely by independent journalists”. (p.95)

But how is a corporate employee in any sense “independent”?

Davies writes: “the evidence I found in researching my new book, Flat Earth News, suggests our tendency to recycle ignorance is far worse than it was”. (Guardian, op., cit)

This naïve idea that the corporate media merely “recycle ignorance” goes to the heart of Davies’s analysis. We sent Noam Chomsky a link to Davies’s Guardian article. Chomsky responded:

“Judging by the article, which is all I’ve seen, his inquiry into the media is complementary to ours. He’s writing about how local stories about children’s squabbles are insufficiently sourced. We are investigating systematic bias in selecting and framing news and opinion, and tracing it to

its institutional source. For the story about the children, insiders’ reports are appropriate. For inquiry into any of the topics that Ed [Herman] and I discussed in MC [Manufacturing Consent], or elsewhere jointly or separately, it’s at most worth some footnotes. On the WMD, there’s no disagreement about what happened, and essentially nothing to unearth. The media uncritically accepted government propaganda, with some scattered exceptions. Furthermore, as we’ve shown, that’s routine. It’s not a matter of a ‘tendency to recycle ignorance,’ transparently. If that were so, we’d expect reliance on the state to be randomly interspersed among cases of reliance on its enemies and independent sources. I don’t think anyone with a gray cell functioning would claim that. And if they did, it would be very quickly refuted.

“So I don’t really see any conflict. Just different topics. And it is not in the least surprising that this is the kind of critique that the media and intellectuals would be happy to discuss, praise, or denounce, because it leaves untouched their systematic behavior and the institutional reasons for it. I’d have expected the same in the old Soviet Union.

Noam” (Email to Media Lens, February 17, 2008)

Give Them What They Want? 6-10

Davies’s focus on the relative innocence of corporate profit-making leads him to even greater extremes in his second five “Rules of production”. We are asked to believe that newspapers are motivated to maximise profits by succeeding in a competition to give readers what they want. Again, there is no mention here of the direct and indirect influence of advertising. Davies’s summary of how his rules “fit neatly into the new structure of corporate news organisations” again presents the media as an ideologically neutral bystander just trying to make a buck:

“Journalists who are denied the time to work effectively can survive by taking the easy, sexy stories which everybody else is running; reducing them to simplified events; framing them with safe ideas and safe facts; neutralising them with balance; and churning them out fast.” (p.147)

Nevertheless, there is hope:

“There are still reporters who have the time to do their work effectively, and it is still possible to break the rules of production.” (p.149)

But it is almost impossible to break the rules of production because the entire system is the result of an ongoing struggle to organise society in a way that favours powerful interests. It is not enough for reporters to have the time. These are reporters like Davies who have succeeded precisely +because+ they do not fundamentally challenge the system.

And this is why Davies’s book has been so eagerly embraced by the corporate media it claims to expose. He is willing to expose failings in the media system – including the rotten apples at the Observer – but he is not willing to expose the fundamental corruption of a corporate media system operating within corporate capitalist society.

As an answer to the question of “What is to be done?” Davies has nothing serious to offer: an “imaginary world” in which a parallel news organisation would monitor global press honesty; Annual Flat Earth News awards; and an initiative to “force media owners to provide decent levels of staffing; resurrect the network of front-line reporters which once covered the country and indeed the globe…”. (p.393)

Davies notes that, according to a recently retired officer, MI6 runs an intelligence section which has particularly close links to the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph and the Financial Times. (p.231) The former UN arms inspector, Scott Ritter, reports MI6 propaganda specialists declaring that they could spread their material through “editors and writers who work with us from time to time”. (p.231)

If the media, and Davies, were serious about putting an end to Flat Earth News, they would surely begin with suggestions for identifying and stamping out this kind of crude corruption.

Conclusion

Davies’s underlying message is an old one and it all but guarantees a sense of hopelessness. It is, to borrow the words of PR guru Walter Lippmmann, that the important work of media analysis and reform is the domain of the “responsible men,” who must “live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd”. This is the general public, the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” whose “function” is to be “spectators,” not “participants”. (www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16522)

Flat Earth News invites us to focus on staffing levels, on a lack of journalistic time and resources. It invites us to tinker at the edges of a system which in fact is rotten to the core. Or rather it invites “insiders” to address these issues. But authentic reform of hierarchical, exploitative social systems – of which the corporate mass media is a classic example – has only ever been achieved by democratic pressure from outside.

Perhaps in years to come, Flat Earth News will be seen as part of the corporate media’s response to the growing clamour from internet-based “meddlesome outsiders”. With increasing effectiveness, these are demanding that anyone with compassion for suffering, anyone required to witness the appalling impact of corporate media bias, +is+, in fact, an “insider”.

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Write to: Nick Davies
Email: mail@nickdavies.net

Write to: Tim Luckhurst
Email: T.Luckhurst@kent.ac.uk

Writ to Mary Riddell
Email: mary.riddell@observer.co.uk

Please send a copy of your emails to us
Email: editor@medialens.org
This media alert will shortly be archived here:
www.medialens.org/alerts/08/080305_flat_earth_news.php

The Media Lens book ‘Guardians of Power: The Myth Of The Liberal Media’ by David Edwards and David Cromwell (Pluto Books, London) was published in 2006. See here: www.medialens.org/bookshop/guardians_of_power.php

Please consider donating to Media Lens: www.medialens.org/donate

Please visit the Media Lens website: www.medialens.org

We have a lively and informative message board:
www.medialens.org/board