MEDIA BLOG - THE LACK OF OBJECTIVITY IN THE NEWS

Media Blog has moved

I have finally moved this blog to my domain name, where it is powered by Movable Type. This will allow me to post updates more frequently.

The new address is:

http://www.markcarey.com/media-blog/

There will be no more posts at this address, please update your links and bookmarks.

U.S. admits that Iraq war was about oil

In this article from the Guardian, a UK news organization, US Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz is quoted as saying "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil." As you can see, this admission is HUGE news. So the first thing I did was to check to see how the major news organization were covering the story. First I checked MSNBC - nothing -- an hour later, still nothing. Then I checked CNN - nothing -- an hour later, still nothing. The USA Today - guess what? Nothing there either. I know that the story fairly fresh, only a few hours old is my guess. But this is major news, why haven't these news organizations jumped on this? WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? Is this problem with lack of objectivity is the media even worse than I feared? Google News listed only the Guardian article and some smaller news sources, many, if not all, are not U.S. sources. Technorati shows that - at this moment - 48 bloggers are talking about the Guardian article, making it the number one "breaking news" source on the site. I just checked again, because I just can't believe it - still no sign of this story on major U.S. news sources. We are not talking about China here - where the government sensors and controls the media - we are talking about the United States of America, a country where there is [supposed to be] freedom of speech and expression!! I repeat, WHAT IS GOING ON?!?

"No evidence has surfaced"

As a follow up to a recent post about the search for weapons in Iraq, I found this quote from the Washington Post:
Behind that story was an interesting arrangement. Under the terms of her accreditation, Miller wrote, "this reporter was not permitted to interview the scientist or visit his home. Nor was she permitted to write about the discovery of the scientist for three days, and the copy was then submitted for a check by military officials. Those officials asked that details of what chemicals were uncovered be deleted."
Since then, no evidence has surfaced to support these claims and the Alpha team is preparing to leave Iraq without having found weapons of mass destruction.
Yes, this was the story that CNN reported as fact, with a headline of "Report: Iraq destroyed chemical weapons just before war".

Why did the news media cover the Oreo cookie lawsuit?

In another example of poor judgement and lack of objectivity in deciding what stories to cover, most of the major news organizations decided to cover a 'story' about a lawyer who is suing to ban Oreo cookies. Why was this ridiculous lawsuit deemed newsworthy? I mean, ridiculous lawsuits are filed everyday. The funnier ones get covered (as punchlines) on radio morning shows and Saturday Night Live. Perhaps the news media deems Oreo cookies to be extremely important to general public, a story that deserves to be covered in headlines and on the front pages! I wonder if these news editor can keep a straight face when they give the directive, "go with the Oreo story"... Here are a few examples of what others are saying about this.

A poorly researched article on IM in the workplace

In the Newsweek article, "You 'pinging' me?", Jennifer Tanaka discusses the use of instant messaging in the workplace. The article talks about the fact all most IM usage at work is done without the knowledge (or approval) of the IT department. Unfortunately, it appears that little research was done for the article. In one instance, Tanaka cites a consultant as an example of someone who has downloaded and uses all 4 of the major IM programs: "But because these networks don’t talk to each other, he needs to maintain all four programs." While the first part of that sentence is correct, the latter part is incorrect. There are a number of IM programs available that can communicate with others on all 4 networks. An example is the Trillian IM client, which I begun using recently -- you still need accounts on all 4 IM networks, but you can use this single program to send and receive instant messages with people on all 4 networks. Another example of the lack or research is the fact that Jabber was not mentioned at all in the article. The article talks about about how AOL and MSN are launching products to address the enterprise IM market, but no mention of Jabber, one of the leading software makers in that space. Jabber is not a tiny startup that the author could have easily overlooked. Jabber's customers include large companies such as BellSouth, HP, and Walt Disney. Furthermore, when you do a Google search for "instant messaging", guess who is currently in the number 7 spot? Not only that, Trillian falls into the number 15 spot. The point is, it would have been really easy to do some proper research for this article. By the way, as an experiment, I have sent a shortened version of the above comments to Newsweek. I have never tried this before -- we'll see if I get a response...

Reporting on the search for weapons in Iraq

Recently, I have begun to pay closer attention to news articles from the Washington Post. In my opinion, it seems like the Washington Post is being more objective than other news organizations in its reporting of the war in Iraq. An example can be found in today's article entitled Hunt for Iraqi Arms Erodes Assumptions. The article discusses recent attempts at finding banned weapons in Iraq. The article quotes anonymous miltary sources that suggest that they are becoming more and more doubtful about the likelihood of finding anything. The articles describes a "five-tiered list" that the military is using in its search, and that all of the top tier sites searched so far have turned up negative. The article even quotes an unnamed military official as saying "the clues we have right now are not leading us anywhere". The article does a good job of bring the weapons search into context, reminding readers of how it began: "Bush launched and justified the war with a flat declaration of knowledge that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction." You may be asking yourself, where is the lack of objectivity that I am supposed to be talking about? For the answer, visit CNN.com. Scan the headlines, go to the World News section -- even visit the Middle East News section. You won't find an article remotely similar. Not even one that mentions the "five-tier" approach that the military is using in its search efforts. No references to the same or similar quotes from the U.S. Military. Why isn't CNN covering this story? The only recent article that pertains to the results of the ongoing weapons search relates to the recent interview of an Iraqi scientist. The military says that the scientist claims that the Iraqis destroyed weapons on the eve of the U.S. invasion. However, the military did not allow a New York Times reporter to interview the scientist. Even so, CNN reports the claims as fact, using the headline "Report: Iraq destroyed chemical weapons just before war". Of course, the counter-argument here is that the use of the prefix "Report:" indicates that CNN is merely relating what someone else has said. Bullshit! If some guy walks up to me on the street and tells me that an asteroid is headed for earth, is it okay for me to publish a headline "Report: Asteroid Headed for Earth"? Of course not. The headline is clearly misleading, and many people will actually take it as fact. Perhaps that was the intent....

Over the weekend, I went to see the movie Bowling for Columbine, the Oscar-winning documentary by Michael Moore. I knew that the film discussed gun violence in the United States, but I was not expecting the analysis of the effect that the Media has on the issue. Moore highlights the fact that although gun crimes have gone down in recent years, media coverage of such crimes has gone up almost exponentially. The result: people are scared - really scared. And scared people go out and buy more guns, for protection. I could go on and on for pages about this cultivation of a "culture of fear" in America, but instead I will comment only on the implications for media coverage. In my previous post, I talked about objective reporting as it relates to telling both (or all) sides of the story, in an unbiased manner. After watching the film, it really made me think about media objectivity from a different angle: the objectivity of deciding which stories to tell, and which not to tell. For that matter, what stories go on the front page, and what stories go on page 15? Who in the media decides what is most important for people, and how do they make that determination? That is a lot of power, as the media has a huge impact on how the public perceives their community, the nation, and the world. In communist or dictatorship regimes, this is well understood -- in order to maintain control, it is very important to control the media. But in a democratic society, that power passes to the media organizations. How do they decide what is important? How do they decide what stories not to cover? What happens when the media becomes biased in some way, individually, or collectively? How different is that from the dictator who is at the helm? Are the people still free? Freedom is a matter of perspective.