Media Facts We All Know... But Largely Ignore

Forgive me for posting a lengthy quote in Arlo’s bizarrely italicized and pink text, but Michael Miner's article in the Chicago Reader deserves to be read:

“[The press] has allowed itself to be manipulated in ways that are unprecedented."

Asked in what ways, [Geoffrey] Stone replied, "First, some elements of the press have allowed themselves to work secretly as paid agents of the administration. Second, I believe the embedded arrangement allowed the administration to co-opt the media in important ways. Third, I believe most of the media have been intimidated about alienating the administration. As evidence of this, I would point to the almost complete absence in the American media of images of wounded American soldiers and of Iraqi civilians wounded or killed accidentally by American troops. Such images were commonplace during the Vietnam war but are almost invisible in this war, even though they are readily available on the media in other parts of the world. That suggests a conscious decision by the American media not to show them."

Stone told me, "I think the institutional press today has failed to maintain its essential independence from government, from an unduly concentrated ownership, and from commercial and corporate interests. For the most part, the American people are hearing a sanitized version of political and world events. It is very troubling."

[…] He doesn't think of the Supreme Court as lifted by an irresistible tide. "Without a Holmes, Brandeis or Brennan," he wrote me, "First Amendment law would undoubtedly have evolved differently than it has. In an institution with only nine members, one individual can have a powerful effect, and once his ideas win over the court" -- as a dissent by justices Holmes and Brandeis in a 1919 free-speech case eventually did -- "they can begin to win over the nation."

What current breaches of civil liberties, I asked, will most embarrass us tomorrow?

"The government's pervasive and obsessive secrecy," Stone answered, "which is designed in part to prevent the public from understanding and evaluating the government's actions; the treatment of the individuals we have detained at Guantanamo, in Iraq, and elsewhere; and the astonishing claim that the executive has the authority to seize and detain American citizens, on American soil, without ever informing family, friends, or coworkers, with no recourse to a lawyer or to judicial review, and for an indefinite period of time. To me, this is the most extreme and unwarranted assertion of executive authority in American history."

The attacks on the judiciary are to a point. The attacks on media are not secondary to that point, they are integral. It’s time for media to spend some serious time under a microscope [bookmark Media Matters for America and Romenesko]. Like I’ve said before, rhetoric matters.

[Gracias eponymagain.]