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.