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Forty-five percent of Americans polled by Gallup between 8 - 10 September believe the news media are too liberal; only 14% believe the news media to be too conservative. These numbers, according to the professional pollsters, remain unchanged over the past three years. Perhaps most disturbing of all was the poll’s findings that more than half of the respondents “have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the news media when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly,”—a number which hasn’t changed significantly in the past six years.
The Gallup Poll results are especially troubling in light of the results of a study from the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), an affiliate of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Affairs. PIPA released the Report of Findings for its “Misperceptions, The Media and The Iraq War” study earlier this week. The PIPA study found that “heavy viewers of the Fox News Channel are nearly four times as likely to hold demonstrably untrue positions about the war in Iraq as media consumers who rely on National Public Radio or the Public Broadcasting System….” The study, surveying 3,334 Americans who “receive their news from a single media source,” were questioned about holding three beliefs characterized as “egregious misperceptions:”
Fully 60% of all survey respondents held at least one of the statements to be true. But the breakout of news sources proved most interesting:
“Twenty-three percent of those who get their news from NPR or PBS believed in at least one of the mistaken claims. In contrast, 80 percent of Fox News viewers held at least one of the three incorrect beliefs.”
Is the explanation for this that we’re a collection of inattentive dim bulbs or that we succumb to the agendas of corporate media?
Now the piling on starts. In about a week or so the Republicans will realize they’re going to need an actual presidential candidate. Because unlike Reagan, who was a Teflon professional, Shrub’s a rank amateur. Nothing stuck to Reagan, but Dubya will never be able to scrape the crap he’s about to walk through off his boots. No way will the latest misstep by Bush’s thugs get past more than a handful of additional news cycles before the current administration begins to disintegrate.
In early July, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV disclosed in a New York Times article that he had been asked by the CIA to visit Niger to investigate allegations that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from the country. Wilson concluded that the allegations were “highly doubtful.” This was a crippling and embarrassing blow to Bush who was still steadfastly denying that he mislead the country into war. Crippling because it was yet more evidence that Bush knew his State of the Union claim about Iraq trying to buy uranium in Africa was fabricated from whole cloth. Embarrassing because former Ambassador Wilson ain’t no piker; he had been a State Department officer in Niger in the 1970s and was the last U.S. ambassador to Iraq before the first Gulf War.
Two days after Wilson’s disclosure, Robert Novak sealed Shrub’s unelectable fate when he wrote a widely syndicated piece in which he claimed that “two senior administration officials” told him that the wife of the former ambassador was employed by the CIA as an “Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.” Novak outed the agent by name and his single paragraph will be remembered historically for unintentionally bringing down the Bush II presidency:
“Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, XXX, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. ‘I will not answer any question about my wife,’ Wilson told me.”
I’ve been saying for months that Bush would be unelectable by Labor Day. That’s painfully obvious and it’s clear Vice President Cheney isn’t helping matters any. It’s like he’s playing with an entirely different deck of cards. Shrub is reluctantly saying one thing and Cheney goes on national television and flat lies through his teeth. If those are his teeth.
Cheney crawled out of his undisclosed location last Sunday morning for a “Meet the Press” interview with Tim Russert on NBC. You can bet the Bush administration and the Republican strategists are wishing he hadn’t. Democracy Now! deconstructed Cheney’s performance and it’s horrendous but not surprising. Seeing the light of day for the first time in six months and the rat bastard just had to be blinking like a mole. Four—count ‘em four—major whoppers in the brief segment:
All of these assertions have been proven to be false over the past two years. I guess the Cheney bunker doesn’t get very good reception.
NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has started a weblog called PressThink: Ghost of Democracy in the Media Machine. It’s one of the best new reads to come out of the ether in quite a while.
This morning, Rosen published an interview with media critic Todd Gitlin that succinctly and correctly assesses John Ashcroft’s disingenuous refusal to talk to anyone other than local broadcast television entertainers. A Justice Department spokeswoman explained to Howard Kurtz that the scheme is merely a way of “explaining key facts directly to the American people and not having as much of a filter from people who are already invested in having a different view of it.”
Gitlin’s take: “Ashcroft is practicing sheer demagoguery. He knows that, with nifty chosen sound bites, he can dominate local television, which harbors few practitioners of anything that can be called journalism. Since most local TV journalists are little more than stenographers, he can safely stay ‘on message,’ rally his partisans, and keep annoying critics at bay. This is the politics of no-politics, the politics of l’etat-c’est-moi.”
Rosen goes on to neatly deconstruct the multiple rationales behind Ashcroft’s scheme in “Ashcroft: National Explainer.” The logic behind Ashcroft’s media performances reads sort of like an Al Franken book title.
Very highly recommended.
