Are journalists and editors: a) stupid; b) utterly lacking in analytical ability; c) overly sensitive to the baseless charge of "liberal media bias" deliberately flung about by conservatively-biased political pundits; d) consciously colluding with the conservative -- especially neo-con -- gaggle who rules the airwaves today; or e) infected by some combination of the previous four flaws?
Okay, I need to unload on you all. Here's the rather lengthy -- but well-documented -- tirade I sent Sunday night to NPR, after hearing two of their journalists laugh about police deliberately redirecting potential protesters away from a Bush rally in Broadview, Ohio yesterday. Does anyone think that it would be worth my reworking it to send to the New York Times or something like that? (If not, as I suspect will be the case, at least I got this off my chest. <g>)
Here's the letter, which I e-mailed to both "All Things Considered" and the NPR ombudsman (and originally posted on a thread -- thanks to DaVinci for suggesting I put it in a diary):
Dear Editor:
The inability of journalists, even on NPR, to give proper coverage, and particularly proper analysis, to issues of political concern has long passed the time when I could attribute it to a lack of intelligence and analytical ability on the part of both journalists and editors. At this point it has become virtually impossible not to ascribe the inaccurate and skewed political reporting as collusion with the current administration and ruling political party.
The most recent example was the interview of Jennifer Ludden with Don Gonyea on today's (Sunday's) "All Things Considered." Gonyea described an incident -- only the latest of a multitude across the country -- where the police actively colluded with the Bush campaign to redirect potential protesters away from the site of a so-called "public" campaign rally. The police officer in question mistook the press buses for protest buses and waved them to follow him -- as it turned out, to follow him away from the rally to an empty church parking lot. The policeman readily admitted to the Secret Service agent on the bus that he had thought they were protesters and so deliberately took them away from the rally.
As disturbing as the story itself was the nonchalant attitude of Ludden and Gonyea: both of them laughed. Any journalist with an ounce of concern and intelligence would have recognized this as the improper use of the police authority of the state in order to further the partisan ambitions of a political candidate. That this is one of only a number of such instances -- and their ready acknowledgement of this fact -- makes their dismissive attitude that much worse. Not only have similar events occurred at a number of locations across the country over the past month or so, but the FBI has attempted to intimidate elderly black voters in Florida by visiting them in their homes and informing them that, should they vote by absentee ballot, they may become part of an official FBI investigation. Incredibly, this systematic partisan abuse of governmental authority at local, state, and national levels has received very little news coverage in the mainstream press (including NPR).
This is simply another straw in what will soon break the back of the American public's trust in the mainstream press -- at least, it will break the public's trust should it ever become aware of just how deeply it is being misinformed. Two interrelated sets of nonpartisan survey statistics make the irresponsibility and actively negative impact of the media clear. The first set: 1) a recent U. of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA)/Knowledge Networks survey, which shows that fully half of the American public still believes that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks (down from 57%) and that 54% of the public still believes that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and/or active WMD programs (down from 60%). Moreover, the National Annenberg Election Survey shows that 24% of Americans believe (as a direct result of extensive media coverage of the anti-Kerry swift boat veterans) that John Kerry did not earn his Vietnam War medals (down from 30%). (Note that, although these statistics show a slight decline recently, they are still alarmingly high in the face of the obvious facts to the contrary.)
The second set of statistics comes from the July survey by the Project for Excellence in journalism in collaboration with the University of Missouri School of Journalism, combined with a survey of public attitudes by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The two surveys showed that the American public is far more influenced by news coverage of political events and issues than it is by political ads and campaigns. Specifically, the surveyers concluded that 1) "the more people pay attention to press coverage, the more likely they are to match the character traits with the candidates the same way the press has"; 2) [j]ournalists were almost as likely as the campaigns to be the source asserting these character traits about the candidates; and 3) "[m]ore than four in ten character assertions were made with no evidence cited to back them up." (The survey results are available at Journalism.org.)
Anyone who is able to put two and two together can see from the above data that the media has done a much better job of misinforming the public through uncritical repetition -- and "buy-in" -- of political rhetoric than it has done of informing the public by thoughtful and critical analysis of political claims with an equally balanced degree of journalistic skepticism (note that it is the skepticism that should be equitable, not necessarily the comparative conclusions). Yet I see no change in NPR's political coverage that would show some cognizance of this damning evidence, much less any sense of responsibility to correct the active damage perpetrated by its political coverage.
The public is misled every time that an NPR journalist mentions the "allegations" or "charges" of the anti-Kerry swift boat veterans without accurately describing those charges as disproved (not simply "unprovable" or "disputed") and without describing the veterans themselves as "discredited" (because of their own knowledge of the facts, their previous acknowledgement of Kerry's heroism, and their conscious refusal to report on the most credible eyewitness accounts, i.e., those of the men actually serving on Kerry's boats). Likewise, the public is misled every time that NPR plays, e.g.: 1) a clip of Bob Dole stating that Kerry "never bled" from his wounds (a physical impossibility given that he still carries shrapnel in his body); 2) a clip of Zell Miller accusing Kerry of voting against numerous weapons programs without pointing out that Dick Cheney, as Secretary of Defense, proposed eliminating these same weapons programs; and 3) a clip of Bush or Cheney condemning Kerry for voting for tax hikes 98 times, a spurious charge which has long been debunked by the Annenberg Center's FactCheck.org. The sardonic, condescending analysis provided by pundits such as Cokie Roberts only furthers NPR's disservice to its listeners.
The news media, especially NPR, has a responsibility to provide the American public with three salient sets of information relative to political issues and events: 1) facts (in place of the current uncritical repetition of rhetoric and unsupported opinions); 2) relevant context in which to understand those facts so that their import is not distorted; and 3) appropriate comparisons with similar data in other contexts.
NPR's continued willingness to serve as a pawn to the manipulation of the American public by Karl Rove and his associates is unforgivable and beyond any reasonable justification. You should by now be well aware of the negative impact your coverage is having on public perceptions and, hence, on the probable election results. It is incomprehensible to me why this is not a matter of greater concern to you. Perhaps a history of journalism course focusing on political news coverage in the late 1960's and early to mid-1970's would remind NPR's journalists and editors of how they should do their job.
Physician, heal thyself.