Media from Archetype to Cliche
by Ken Bell

A little over a dozen uphill blocks from the offices of the Austin Review, at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas, resides one of the 48 surviving copies of the Gutenberg bible, bound in 1456—more than half a millennium ago. This beautiful historic treasure is the most tangible link we possess to a revolution in human affairs wrought by a singularly remarkable invention.

It has been argued persuasively that few inventions have had such far-reaching social consequences as Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press with moveable type. The printed word transformed the world. The course of the Renaissance and Reformation and all their extraordinary ramifications for the world in which we live were intimately dependent upon the revolution in human communication: print.

Today an equally remarkable and transformational invention, the Internet, is further revolutionizing human communications, with astonishing consequences that will change the world. One need not swallow whole Canadian professor Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that “the medium is the message” to understand that the ultimate implications of the Internet may be no less profound than those of print. The evidence abounds.

Perhaps the most graphic and immediate illustration of the catalytic power of the new medium to induce transformation in social and political affairs is the crucial role of the weblogs—blogs—in humbling the “mainstream” media during this past election year.

Throughout the final quarter century of the last millennium and more, American media had been dominated by a handful of powerful television networks, newspapers and magazines whose perceptions of political affairs both foreign and domestic were decidedly to the left end of the political spectrum.

They were insular if not isolated; arrogant to the point of pomposity; conventional, even retrograde, in their analysis; prone to distortion and even outright falsification in the name of a “higher truth”; willfully self-deceptive, yet certain of their own rectitude and righteousness—conceiving of themselves as hard-boiled skeptics, they were instead omphaloskeptics. In short, they were a delusional but extraordinarily powerful elite, the arbiters of “truth”: the informonopoly.

As early as the 1930s the New York Times’ infamous Walter Duranty had the unbridled power (and consciencelessness) to suppress news of the death by starvation and mass murder of millions of Ukrainian peasants in Stalin’s Russia in pursuit of what he believed to be “greater ends.” three quarters of a century later, the New York Times still arrogantly refuses to renounce Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize.

By the time of the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, “the most trusted man in America”, CBS anchor Walter Cronkite’s Big Lie—that the Tet Offensive had been a huge defeat not for the Viet Cong (who, in fact, never recovered) but for America—effectuated a nearly overnight mutation of American public opinion concerning the war, with grave consequences for Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, for the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian people, for the conduct of US foreign policy for more than a decade, and for the Democratic party to this very day. Less than half a dozen years later a pair of Washington Post reporters brought down another president.

For the next two decades, the “fourth estate” grew ever more powerful, ever more arrogant. As Lord Acton observed long ago, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The corruption and rot have become visible for all who have eyes to see.

The evidence became particularly conclusive amid the sturm und drang of a presidential election year. The informonopoly was to an unprecedented degree willing to campaign blatantly against the incumbent. Issues and events which might be expected to damage the president, or could be reported selectively enough to do harm, received saturation coverage. Abu Ghraib appeared on the front page of the New York Times more than a hundred times. Mass graves and dozens of hours of Saddam Hussein torture and murder videos were conveniently ignored or buried on back pages. Near the end of the campaign, the frenzy was almost expressed openly. In October, the political director of ABC News demanded in a staff memo that news coverage be tilted toward the challenger’s campaign. “We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest [as ABC conceives it],” he wrote, “but that doesn’t mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides equally accountable when the facts don’t warrant that [emphasis added].”

What were these “facts”? “I’m sure many of you have this week felt the stepped up Bush efforts to complain about our coverage. This is all part of their efforts to get away with as much as possible with the stepped-up, renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.” As exit polls made clear, more Americans disagreed with this assessment of “the facts,” believing instead that it was the Kerry campaign and the media who engaged in distortion to achieve destruction. Indeed, a study by Columbia University’s left-wing Pew Charitable Trust-funded Project for Excellence in Journalism found that during a period of two weeks in October, 59 percent of articles focusing on Bush were primarily negative, but only 25 percent of those concerning Kerry. Most voters would probably consider that Pew had sampled one of the more charitable two weeks of the campaign for the president. In fact, as he Center for Media and Public Affairs’ Bob Lichter explained to the Washington Times’ Jennifer Harper on the brink of the vote, “it’s not just that John Kerry has gotten better press than President Bush before this election, he’s gotten better press than anyone else since 1980.” The “mainstream” media was in full campaign mode. The Center found that for the full month of October, Kerry received “record-breaking 77 percent positive press evaluations.” (Not surprisingly, the previous record had been held by Walter Mondale in his 1984 campaign against President Ronald Reagan.)

Indeed, bias is so pervasive among the elite membership of the informonopoly that most of them simply can’t believe that it exists. The evidence, however, overwhelmingly indicates that bias is omnipresent. In the most recent case, a continuing study by professors Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeffrey Milyo of the University of Missouri entitled “A Measure of Media Bias”, the authors have developed an interesting analytical method for measuring such bias. Using ratings for all members of Congress by the far-left wing Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) to generate derivative ratings for 200 prominent “think tanks,” the authors then measure the propensity of 20 major media organizations to cite these think tanks favorably in their news (not commentary or opinion) reports from 1990 through 2003.

As Harvard University’s Robert J. Barro noted in the Weekly Standard for December 13, only two of the twenty media outlets analyzed—the Washington Times and “Fox News Special Report with Brit Hume” were rated as moderately conservative. The other 18 entities rated were all to the left end of the scale, with CBS Evening News, the New York Times and the “news” pages of the Wall Street Journal measuring decidedly liberal in inclination. As Barro summarized “the bottom line of the Groseclose-Milyo study is that the political slant of most of the mainstream media is far to the left of the typical member of Congress. Thus, if the political opinions of viewers, listeners and readers are similar to those of their elected representatives, the political leanings of most of the media are far to the left of those of most of their customers.”

At moments when they are off guard, even bonafide members of the informonoply candidly admit their bias and boast of their influence. On the July 10th edition of the program “Inside Washington”, Newsweek’s Evan Thomas declared: “There’s one other base here: the media. Let’s talk a little media bias here. The media, I think wants (sic) Kerry to win. And I think they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards—I’m talking about the establishment media, not Fox, but—they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as young and dynamic and optimistic and all, there’s going to be this glow about them that some, is going to be worth, collectively, the two of them, that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points.”

Yet despite their very best efforts to elect John Kerry, the informonopoly watched President Bush glean more than 61 million votes and defeat their favorite decisively. What happened? A new countervailing power has arisen to challenge the entrenched power of the informonopoly.

The challenge had not been entirely unanticipated. Indeed, it was presaged long ago when leftist Ted Turner founded CNN and initiated round-the-clock cable news television. But Turner’s efforts were directed at breaking into the ranks of the informonopoly, not dissenting from its orthodoxy. In many respects, CNN carried left apologism to an extreme unmatched by its more established counterparts.

While Dan Rather’s infamous Saddam interview on the eve of the war in Iraq was appalling, it paled beside the shocking revelations, almost boastfully admitted, by CNN’s chief news executive Eason Jordan in the New York Times of April 11, 2003. As confessed by Jordan, CNN exhibited an utter indifference to the truth, hiding the realities of the ruthless and violent Hussein regime from its audience, and willingly allowed its network to be used as a propaganda tool of the Baathist dictator—covering up torture, disappearances and murders—solely in order to preserve its access. CNN reported lies, misled the American people, and isn’t embarrassed to say so on the pages of the “newspaper of record.” That’s arrogance.

Still, while CNN would never contradict the received wisdom of the informonopoly’s left bias, its wedge into the ranks of the “mainstream media” showed others that a different kind of challenge was possible. The rise of Fox News and of talk radio during the last decade of the twentieth century were bolder efforts. These upstarts refused to limit their offensive to the merely inoffensive, choosing to dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy rather than conform.

But it was only with the rise of the internet and the emerging new countervailing power of the weblogs that the devastating blow was finally struck.

The initial indication that the internet would be a crucial arena in the 2004 presidential campaign came from a more expected quarter, the political left. Howard Dean’s campaign manager Joe Trippi deftly exploited the websites meetup.com and moveon.org to generate intense enthusiasm for the antiwar Vermont governor, to raise extraordinary campaign contributions that vaulted Dean into the cash sweepstakes lead among Democrats (he ultimately collected more than $20 million via the internet, almost 40% of his total contributions), and to reap an email contact list exceeding 600,000 names. But Dean’s implosion in the Iowa caucuses betrayed the shallow depth of his broad support. The “mainstream” media lost their avatar.

The truly disconcerting events of the 2004 campaign for the informonopoly were of more enduring significance. The two most important were the Swiftboat Vets and “Rathergate” phenomena. Each has received considerable attention from the alternative media, and now even from the “mainstream”, but in each case the initial inclination of the “mainstream” was toward silence.

On the 4th of May the Swiftboat veterans held a press conference to present a letter signed by virtually all of John Kerry’s commanders in Vietnam, declaring that Kerry was unfit to serve as commander-in-chief. The establishment media ignored it. As a result, the Swiftboat Vets determined to write the book Unfit for Command to make their case, and to raise enough money to produce a television spot advertisement. As Edward B. Driscoll, Jr. explained in “The Year of Blogging Dangerously,” “the Swift Boat Vets’ ad campaign and their book . . . was a certified new media phenomenon. Bootstrapping their ad campaign through contributions solicited via their website, their first commercial was relegated to late night spots on Podunk TV stations. Nobody saw it.

“But actually everybody saw it: via the internet. Glenn Reynolds [Instapundit.com] linked to it, and a reader called it ‘the most devastating political ad I have ever seen—bar none.’” The Kerry campaign met the rising storm in the blogosphere with a disdainful silence for more than a week as the crescendo rose. Nearly a million and a half internet users downloaded the ad and sent it to friends and colleagues. Without having entered a single large media market, within three weeks of its release, more than half of all Americans had heard about the ad and about the Swiftboat Vets’ case. Throughout the remainder of the campaign, the “mainstream” media continued to characterize the Vets’ charges as “discredited” or “refuted” without ever having actually considered them in any detail. Yet it was Kerry’s own credibility that was severely damaged. And that of the establishment media. (Despite the fact that Unfit for Command appeared on their own best seller list from August onward, the New York Times failed to review it in its own pages until October).

Ultimately the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth raised more than $27 million for their advertising campaign, and consistently denounced Kerry as dishonest regarding his Vietnam service and in his testimony before Congress upon his return. Since Kerry had chosen at the Democratic convention in Boston to frame his entire campaign around his four months of service in Vietnam, it is almost certain that the internet blitz surrounding the Swiftboat ads was a crucial event, grievously crippling his campaign’s carefully tailored message during the last three months of the election. A potent new alternative to the informonopoly had entered the American political scene, and altered the balance of forces in ways previously unforseen.

Rathergate has been so extensively and expertly reviewed, analyzed and re-analyzed elsewhere, that it would be superfluous to do more than offer a brief recapitulation of the events and assessment of its ramifications.

Obsessed by the unevidenced conviction that George W. Bush had shirked his duty as a Texas Air National Guardsman three decades before, CBS and its anchor Dan Rather attempted an immediate post-convention strike on the Bush campaign using clearly faked documents.

Whether CBS cynically exploited the forgeries, or was so mesmerized by unexamined bias that it believed in their inherent veracity as an act of faith, they continued to stonewall more than a week after the conservative blogosphere had definitively destroyed their “evidence” and its supporting rationale. When finally forced to respond by the shear volume of dissent, their assertion was that the documents were “fake, but accurate”—because CBS said so. Instead of skewering the Bush campaign, legacy media had shattered its own already tainted credibility.

A preliminary evaluation of the role of the internet in the 2004 campaign suggests that nearly 4 in 10 American adults used the internet to obtain political news and information or to participate in some way in the political process (contributing, volunteering, emailing, etc.) For perhaps as many as half of these internet participants the web was a primary source of political information. In 1996, by way of contrast, just 4% of the population used the internet as a source of political information. This precipitous growth prepared the way for a revolution.

While many of these millions of new internet users are simply using another convenient communication channel to secure political news, others have gravitated to the web because they had developed a deep and abiding distrust of the extremist politics of the informonopoly, and are actively seeking a credible alternative. Blogs and other online political news and commentary sources give them that alternative. By the next presidential election cycle these new alternative sources may well rival or exceed newsprint in readership.

The change we are witnessing represents nothing less than the democratization of information. Never again will the informonopoly be able to determine the course of our national dialogue unilaterally. Henceforth, other voices will be heard.

–From the December 2004 Austin Review