Once we started tracking it, it became very clear that a large number of the Biz stories were coming from PR pushes, not from ‘journalism’. A lot of the political stories were coming from PR by NGOs. It is not that all the stories were cut and pasted from PR releases, many were not. But you would see a PR push by say cruise companies and sure enough on Sunday would be a big life style story people taking cruises for vacations. There were real news stories, reports on actual events that occurred, the school board meetings and crime kind of stories, but most non-event stories were driven by PR.

I subscribe to 3 daily and 1 weekly papers. The quality of journalism as declined markedly in the last 20 years. There is very little real information although I can’t tell if that is because the stories are bogus or if it’s the bad writing (the only thing reporters today seem to be good at is burying the lead, if you can even find the lead).

Newspaper are dying because the quality of the journalism is so poor. The internet and Craigslist are just excuses, the how, not the why.

The most insightful lines of Manufacturing Consent come in the preface (p. xv of my edition):

“That a careful reader looking for a fact can sometimes find it with diligence and a sceptical eye tells us nothing,” wrote Chomsky and Herman, “about whether that fact received the attention and context it deserved, whether it was intelligible to the reader or effectively distorted or suppressed.”

Constructive critique would seek to disinter these facts from the memory hole and disseminate them more widely by making them the basis for framing stories more accurately.

Of course, everyone’s free to carp, and even to devote their days to “proving” the media’s not only not anti-establishment but even part of its architecture. But where do “radicals” get their news (i.e. the facts they use to make their arguments)? The “awful” corporate media, even if reposted elsewhere.

Sure, they could do a better job of remembering what they’ve reported, instead of contradicting it with spin in subsequent stories. But they do actually dig it up in the first place, which is a whole lot more than “media activists” tend to get round to doing.

I’ve outlined my criticisms of Media Lens at length here, as I think you’re already aware: http://danielsimpson.wordpress.com/2006/04/21/news-as-if-people-mattered/

This is probably the most relevant section:

The problem, then, is essentially one of context. Media Lens and its subscribers berate journalists for pushing facts through an interpretive framework that obscures their significance; for sacrificing analysis on the altar of novelty; for accumulating information without joining up the dots. Editors tend to favour news stories that recycle the idées fixes of conventional wisdom in their presentation of background material. These are regarded as unbiased, while those structured on alternative interpretations arouse suspicion. Newspapers consequently devote forests of column inches to supposed scepticism, which takes as its starting point the premises of those it purports to challenge. This “feigned dissent”, according to Edwards and Cromwell, is the stock-in-trade of liberal commentators, whose heft and vigour belie their conformity to established opinion. More outspoken dissidents, whether opinionated reporters like the Independent’s Robert Fisk, or investigative columnists like George Monbiot at the Guardian, survive in pockets, but they don’t get to take editorial decisions. As such, the Media Lens editors argue, they may do more harm than good. “Dissident appearances in the mainstream act as a kind of liberal vaccine,” they assert, “inoculating against the idea that the media is subject to tight restrictions and control.”

This is an absurd claim, predicated on the assumption that there could, even in theory, be any such thing as a truly free press. The repeated references to this holy grail suggest, however, that it is necessarily elusive, serving as a kind of Trotskyist transitional demand with a Situationist twist. “Be realistic, demand the impossible,” as the sloganeers of 1968 would have it. Or, more bluntly: “No replastering, the structure is rotten”, as if it might somehow crumble of its own accord once enough people noticed. Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model identified five filters distorting media coverage: the interests of parent companies, pressure from advertisers, dependence on official sources, flak from the government and other powerful lobbies and an ideological belief in free-market capitalism. Media Lens seeks to raise awareness of these issues by demonstrating that there are limits to what many journalists are prepared to discuss. More honest reporting is impossible, Edwards and Cromwell argue, unless the filters blurring their vision are removed. “We cannot change the mass media,” they write, “until we change the culture, which cannot change until we change the mass media.” Their objective is to lobby for a revolutionary restructuring of society by highlighting flaws in journalism, which they ascribe to an all-encompassing theory passed off as axiomatic fact. In effect, then, they are manufacturing dissent.

None of which means that official spin doesn’t get recycled more often than refuted (at least in the framing of background).

But you don’t need a “model” to tell you that. And the one you’re talking up not only fails to explain why specific reports take the form they do, it’s consequently useless as a guide to potential solutions (as a quick scan of “non-corporate” media reveals - see above).

Essentially, it’s just a device, used for rhetorical purposes, presumably in pursuit of progress of some kind. Frankly, I find myself agreeing (to my horror) with Andrew Marr - the model’s proponents argue perniciously and their animus is anti-journalistic.

To quote another line from my lengthy screed:

Edwards and Cromwell not only have no answer, they argue it’s unreasonable to expect one. “The highlighting of important issues for discussion is in itself an important and legitimate activity,” they write. This is true, but the discussion has to take place some time. In the meantime, they suggest, Media Lens is an embryonic solution per se, but it is difficult to see how if it only reports on reporting, and does so with dogmatic insistence that the corporate media are irredeemably corrupt. If so, surely action would speak louder than critique, since the only pressure that editors can’t ignore is competition.

Enough already. It’s so much easier to point the finger than get it out…

Best wishes.

And if you don’t agree, nobody’s stopping you from writing your own book to demolish their arguments. Good luck. Nobody’s managed it so far.

Poor Felix, if he thinks invoking Herman (a model of propaganda recycling, Serbian stylee) somehow enhances the five “elementary truisms” he sets such store by.

Perhaps, Felix, you’d like to define, with supporting evidence, how each of these filters determines daily journalistic output, accounting of course for the myriad occasions when they don’t. (Hint: you don’t need a “model” to say most media are more like tame mouthpieces for the authorities than agents of revolutionary change.)

In other words, can you spell out what “can’t be said”, and when, where and why?

If so, I wish you luck weaning ardent propaganda modelists off their devotion to amorphous dogmatism - the likes of Media Lens are only really interested in manufacturing dissent.

Brgds,
Daniel

“If it’s not Chomskyan filters (too amorphously dogmatic), or the nefarious influence of recycling (too many counterexamples, as Adrian stresses), what is it? Commercial considerations (and the overworked, underresourced hacks assigned to underreported turnaround jobs)?”

“Chomskyan”? Poor Ed Herman - for he is the originator of the propaganda model, not Noam Chomsky (as he freely and frequently points out).

So there are five news filters in the model. And, yes, “commercial considerations” are accounted for (pace Daniel) in at least the first two (ownership, advertising). And in the third (sources). Arguably even the fourth (flak).

Airily waving away Herman’s news filters as “too amorphously dogmatic” sounds impressive but cuts no mustard.

I think there’s some truth in what both Adrian and Nick say, and even in the “elementary truisms” (to quote a Chomskyism) of the propaganda model that sustains many of the conspiracy theories Nick derides - and rightly so, in my opinion, since proponents of this sort of analysis can’t define what “can’t be said”, not least because that’s not how it works, even if there is a tendency to foghorn received wisdom from officialdom and big business (and all sorts of other influences, depending on the newsroom).

I think Nick’s also right to say that something has to account for this. If it’s not Chomskyan filters (too amorphously dogmatic), or the nefarious influence of recycling (too many counterexamples, as Adrian stresses), what is it? Commercial considerations (and the overworked, underresourced hacks assigned to underreported turnaround jobs)?

Probably a bit of all of the above, which (as I understand it, not yet having read the book), is what Nick is effectively arguing.

In my view, the biggest problem this generates is a question of how news becomes contextualised:

“The result is that the government and big business set the news agenda, and shape how stories are framed.”

http://danielsimpson.wordpress.com/2007/11/21/a-cure-for-the-cancer-in-journalism/

I was astounded the first time I entered a national newsroom (in 1997) to see how much of a daily newspaper consisted of rewritten wire copy and press releases. People who’d worked there for years said it didn’t use to be like that. I wasn’t around to know - perhaps more who were might be inclined to say.

Maybe Nick would like to interview some of them and spin out the responses (and much more besides) into a magazine-length investigative feature of the sort Adrian laments we don’t see in newspapers (at least not this side of the Atlantic)?

In other news, you might both be interested in this response:

The unfortunate punchline is that non-career (“independent”) journalists, bloggers, etc, are affected by the same economics of time – unless they’re financially independent (eg well-off). This probably explains, in part, the complete lack of originality in most “independent” media, despite its freedom from corporate ownership. Copy-n-pasted “news” and recycled ideas (predominantly sub-Chomskyan) seem to be the rule – and I say this as someone who still sees the utopian promise of the internet.

http://www.mediahell.org/community/08020603.htm

I’d be more convinced by a long-term analysis of the percentage of agency material appearing in newspapers. Has it gone up considerably as pages have increased? Then you have your point.

There is point on attribution in British journalism (less so in the US). Material should be much better attributed (easy online with links), and fact-checking would be helpful too (altho’ then they had fact-checkers on the New Republic when Stephen Glass wrote for them).

On another level the increased use of PR material could be due to proliferating outlets and the increasingly professional presentation of public information by agencies like govt depts and public bodies. That doesn’t always come with “spin” (e.g. medal citations like the one quoted above).

Equally a lot of the information that is provided is contextualised and altered in the re-packaging process (e.g. the Prince Andrew story today, which is sourced to one interview in the IHT).

Why does so little of the journalism that we as journalists admire appear in newspapers? My answer would be that it’s more related to the economics of product differentiation (Hotelling’s law) than because of pressures on journalists. In other words the answer lies in the marketplace, and less with the producers.

Perhaps we need to learn how to reward discriminating news consumers!

Thanks for the commentary. It’s just about the first intelligent, well-informed challenge I’ve encountered. I think the Cardiff research is well-founded and important; and I think the picture which I’m painting of journalists being deprived of the time and resources which they need to do their work effectively, is accurate. But, just for the moment, assume that I’m wrong; pull back and look at the big picture of news media putting out global misinformation on WMD, the millennium bug, non-existent terrorist threats, key facts on which government policy is founded (all the stuff in the opening chapter of Flat Earth News). People outside the media look at that as well as the daily dribble of smaller false stories and often try to explain it by falling back on conspiracy theories, about proprietors or advertisers pressurising us to push out misinformation. For me, that doesn’t cover the ground at all. So my explanation is that this is all about the numerous insidious and destructive ways in which the logic of commercialism has invaded our newsrooms (including the recycling of unchecked second-hand material from PR and wire agencies). But, if that’s wrong, what is the explanation?

Good luck,

Nick

He’s got a point in general (if what he’s saying is “couldn’t journalism be better without all this rubbish”) but how do you get there from here?