Letters to the Editor
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Publiusendures
I Think You're a Bit Off - I usually agree with you, and most certainly think you're on the side of the angels on torture, telecom amnesty, etc. But I think you're misinterpreting what Drezner and McArdle wrote. Their posts are not normative arguments about what the media "should" cover, but are instead descriptive arguments about what the media actually does cover because that is what Americans care about.
I understand the distinction you're drawing (though I think it applies much more to what McArdle wrote than Drezner - he clearly was justifying, not just explaining, the coverage), but still have a few points to make about it -
(1) My original post had nothing to do with whether profit motive and ratings was a key reason why the media behaves this way. So if that's the only point they were making - as you claim - why would they think they were disagreeing with me?
(2) It doesn't really matter why the political press ignores serious government wrongdoing and focuses on petty and trivial stupidities. The fact that they do so -- and thereby keep the public ignorant and enable government wrongdoing -- is worth mentioning and documenting.
(3) What you claim is merely descriptive is, in fact, a normative argument. To say that "the press is and should be motivated by ratings, and therefore they should only cover petty stories that people want to hear, not boring stories people don't want to hear" (which is McArdle's, but not Drezner's claim), is to defend the press. It's to say that they are doing what they ought to be doing.
(4) I specifically critiqued this mindset in my original post, when I explained that these journalists patronizingly claim that the lowly regular Americans don't care about weighty matters and only want to hear vapid trash. But it's a self-fulfilling prophecy -- the media ignores vital stories and thus the public doesn't know about them -- and the claim is also baseless.
Who says that Americans care more about Obama's bowling than about lawbreaking and torture? The cable news shows that focus almost exclusively on the former aren't exactly great successes. There's this myth that whatever journalists chatter about it what Americans care about. That myth should have been forever dispelled during the Clinton impeachment obsessions.
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Wha'd I miss???
"PW
I'm not going to baby-sit my blog, vigilantly looking for the 10-20% of comments you write that are about issues in order to keep them, while having to delete the 80-90% that have no purpose but to spew childish, vulgar, stupid insults. "
That's what I get for attending to my work...
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another great post...
I send Glenn's posts to everyone I know every day. All people reading Salon should do the same. You might be surprised by people's responses..."OMG - I didn't know that was going on!"
Mainly because the MSM doesn't report on any of this stuff. So good job Glenn!
I do have a question for you. I am sure that you caught Steve Kroft's interview on Sunday with Douglas Feith. I am surprised that you haven't written about this interview yet (maybe it is coming tomorrow). I thought Kroft really let this guy off easy. He seems like a complete idiot and much to blame for this war. If he was being interviewed by BBC, they would have let him have it. And of course, he is a "distinguished" professor at Georgetown. Any thoughts?
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Every once in a while
I send a msg around to my "Political" distribution list that says "READ GLENN GREENWALD" along w/ a linky...
Today was one of those days.
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LWM
"Can you even imagine the horror of the founders at the prospect of something like this? Torture? The Inquisition was in the not so distant past and the Salem Witch trials were recent history..."
Well given that a good portion of the founders were slave holders and indescriminately slaughtered innocent Indians to take their land, they might not have been as horrified as you might think.
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We get "vapid trash" from the media...
I specifically critiqued this mindset in my original post, when I explained that these journalists patronizingly claim that the lowly regular Americans don't care about weighty matters and only want to hear vapid trash. But it's a self-fulfilling prophecy -- the media ignores vital stories and thus the public doesn't know about them -- and the claim is also baseless.
Be it the current craze in "entertainment" programming, "Reality TV" or the garbage that passes for news these days because of the bottom line. It's cheaper to produce it than real news and programming, plain and simple. It would be expected to hear a defense of that from certian quarters by arguing the ubiquitous "invisible hand" was the cause and justification.
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Glenn. Thanks. Your defense is believable. I'm appreciative. You tolerate obnoxious comments er, and you never tolerate the pro-war lies and cold bloodied killing.
Before I head to the garbage dump.
Yoo was bred on cream Queens bagels?
Whatever? Thanks for showing no respect.
Never respect the big killing lies. Never.
Yes. "Great job Glenn." Off to the dump!
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Market driven media
First, Glenn, thank you for all your efforts. Your work is consistently high quality, and you have that rare ability to remain constructively critical even when you are attacked personally. I rarely disagree with your analyses, but know that when I do, that you will give my critique serious thought before replying.
Second, since a significant part of McArdle's argument comes down to judging the media by how well it succeeds in the free market, I think a critique of the strengths and weaknesses of a free market approach to the news is important. As a biologist, and and evolutionary biologist in particular, I would offer that it is quite possible that human nature and the free market will often "conspire" to drive the news in the direction we've seen it take. It has been argued for literally millenia by educators and philosophers that there is a "baser" side of human nature (selfishness, greed, etc.) that can be appealed to by unscrupulous individuals and that we can be distracted by powerful people who take advantage of these predispositions. In the free market, where profit is the ultimate determinant of success, it's hardly surprising to find that a large corporation would produce news that attracts the most eyeballs by using emotional triggers rather than news that informs to the greatest extent.
Nearly everyone who has considered this problem, especially in the context of a democracy, has acknowledged the need for education to ameliorate these tendencies and to cultivate minds that will consider the world critically in an intelligent way. Clearly, there is a subpopulation within the United States that does think critically (or no one would read you or the other good sources on the internet), but if we are too small a proportion of the viewing public (or, in my case, non-viewing since I find the signal-to-noise ratio too small), then the news media will cater to the larger subpopulation for more profits.
From my perspective, this is the longer term crux of the matter. How do you get a people that has a very large proportion of individuals who prefer bread and circuses to seriously participating in their society to care enough to change things? Under a free market model, it may be very difficult even when there is an external threat that makes that participation particularly important.