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Chapter 6: The Mass Media |
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Most political news is based on what public officials say. This fact has important consequences for how well the media serve democracy.
Beats and Routines A newspaper or television reporter's work is usually organized around a particular beat, which he or she checks every day for news stories. Most political beats center on some official government institution that regularly produces news, such as a local police station or city council, the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, an American embassy abroad, or a country's foreign ministry.
In fact, many news reports are created or originated by officials, not by reporters. Investigative reporting of the sort that Carl Bernstein and Robert Woodward did to uncover the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s is rare because it is so time consuming and expensive. Most reporters get most of their stories quickly and efficiently from press conferences and the press releases that officials write, along with comments solicited from other officials. One pioneering study by Leon Sigal found that government officials, domestic or foreign, were the sources of nearly three-quarters of all news in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Moreover, the vast majority, 70 to 90 percent of all news stories, were drawn from situations over which the newsmakers had substantial control: press conferences (24.5 percent), interviews (24.7 percent), press releases (17.5 percent), and official proceedings (13 percent).1 Recent research suggests that the situation described by Sigal remains relatively unchanged.2
Beats and news-gathering routines encourage a situation of mutual dependence by reporters (and their news organizations) and government officials. Reporters want stories; they have to cultivate access to people who can provide stories with quotes or anonymous leaks. Officials want favorable publicity and want to avoid or counteract unfavorable publicity. Thus, a comfortable relationship tends to develop. Even when reporters put on a show of aggressive questioning at White House press conferences, they usually work hard to stay on good terms with officials and to avoid fundamental challenges of the officials' positions.
Leaking is in the news, of course, because of the perjury indictment in 2005 of "Scooter" Libby, a close advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, by a federal grand jury investigating who had leaked Valerie Plame's identify as a CIA agent to friendly journalists. It is widely assumed that the leak was meant to put pressure on her husband, a prominent and credible critic of President Bush's weapons-of-mass-destruction rationale for going to war in Iraq in 2003. Leaking is common in Washington, part of the normal currency of journalist-official working relationships. Indeed, Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate story got its start with leaks from the anonymous "deep throat," revealed in 2005 to be Mark Felt, deputy director of the FBI during the Nixon administration. What is unusual about the Plame case is that the leak itself was illegal because revealing the name of a CIA agent is against the law. More commonly, leaking is a way for officials to float policy ideas, get themselves noticed and credited with good deeds, undercut rivals in other government agencies, or report real or imagined wrong-doing. It is not yet clear whether the jailing of New York Times report Judith Miller for refusing to tell a federal prosecutor the name of her informant in the Plame leak investigation-she was released after revealing that it was "Scooter" Libby-will undermine journalists' ability to protect confidential sources. There is no federal "shield" law granting journalists a legal right to protect their sources, though roughly one-half of the states do have such laws.3
The media's heavy reliance on official sources means that government officials are sometimes able to control what journalists report and how they report it. The Reagan administration was particularly successful at picking a "story of the day" and having many officials feed that story to reporters, with a unified interpretation.4 The Clinton administration tried to do the same, but was not disciplined enough to make it work. President George W. Bush's administration pushed the news management envelope the farthest, acknowledging that it had paid three journalists to write favorable stories, encouraged executive agencies to create news videos for media outlets without revealing the source of the videos, and allowed a political operative to be planted among the accredited White House press corps to ask questions at presidential news conferences.5
Military Actions Dependence on official sources is especially evident in military actions abroad. Because it is wary of the release of information that might help an adversary or undermine public support for U.S. actions-as happened during the Vietnam conflict-the Defense Department tries to restrict access of reporters to military personnel and the battlefield and provide carefully screened information for use by the news media. Information management was especially evident during the 1991 Gulf War to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait with its carefully stage-managed news briefings at U.S. military headquarters in Saudi Arabia featuring video of "smart" weapons, Defense Department organization of press pools to cover parts of the war, and tight restrictions on reporters' access to the battlefields in Kuwait and Iraq. Press management was even more highly developed during the post-9/11 conflict with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, when reporters found it almost impossible to develop independent information. During phases of the Afghan operation, reporters had little access to military personnel, many of whom were located in scattered and inaccessible locations-often in countries where officials wanted to keep the nature of U.S. involvement out of the public limelight-and involved in special operations that required strict secrecy.
During the rapid advance to Baghdad to topple Hussein's regime in 2003, the Defense Department encouraged coverage of combat by journalists embedded in combat units, though administration officials continued to exercise control over information about the big picture during the initial stages of the war. In the end, however, the administration was unable to control news about military and civilian casualties during the long occupation, the difficulties of helping to create a new constitution and government for that country, and the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other prisons. There were simply too many journalists and news organizations from around the world reporting on events there and too many American soldiers and Iraqi civilians posting what they were seeing and experiencing to web logs, for the administration and military officials to be able to control the news from there.
1Leon V. Sigal, Reporters and Officials: The Organization and Politics of News Reporting (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1973), p. 124.
2Bennett, News, pp. 116-118; and Steven Livingston and W. Lance Bennett, "Gatekeeping, Indexing, and Live Event News," Political Communication (October-December, 2003), vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 363-80.
3Graber, Mass Media and American Democracy, pp. 76-77.
4Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988), p. 5.
5Anne E. Kornblut, "Administration is Warned About It's News Videos," The New York Times (January 19, 2005), p. A9; Anne E. Kornblut, "Third Journalist Was Paid to Promote Bush Policies," The New York Times (January 29, 2005), p. A13; Charlie Savage and Alan Wirzbicki, "White House-friendly reporter under scrutiny," The Boston Globe (February 2, 2005), p.A1; and "Source Watch," Center for Media and Democracy (www.prwatch.org/cmd/index.html), February, 2005.
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