Fox Not-News And the Reputation Of Bad Journalism

Everything I said about the failures of journalism during the Brian Williams exaggeration-and-lies fiasco remains true.  Especially as a follow-up revelation: that Bill O'Reilly, prime promoter of the Fox Not-News media charade, is himself caught in a web of falsehoods regarding his coverage of the Falklands War.  It's built up into a series of additional revelations that O'Reilly has fibbed and exaggerated his way through various news stories and major moments over the decades he's been paid as a journalist.

To wit:

• O'Reilly claimed to have witnessed deadly rioting - "bodies in the streets" - in Argentina during the Falklands War. While there were riots, none were lethal nor as bad as he claimed.  Adding to this fib has been O'Reilly's contention that being in Buenos Aries qualified him for being in "a war zone" even though the real war zone - the islands themselves - were hundreds of miles away.  There weren't any American reporters in that actual war zone during the firefights.
• O'Reilly claimed to have been at the house when a prominent figure in the JFK assassination conspiracy theories committed suicide in 1979.  The police reports from that incident never mentioned his being there (which would have been investigated, he would have been interviewed as a potential witness), and there's eyewitnesses and documentation O'Reilly was in Dallas that day (oh irony).
• A recent report that O'Reilly claimed to witness "nuns getting shot" in El Salvador during the violent civil war there in the early 1980s.  While nuns were killed, the only documented cases were in 1980, and O'Reilly didn't get there until 1981.

Making O'Reilly's struggles against the accusations more poetic is the reality that his channel has a poor reputation with truth-telling when it comes to reporting.  The channel repeatedly passes along unverified stories as factual, edits clips to distort statements by experts or political figures the channel openly despises, and places on-air people who are not experts on topics to discuss opinions instead of facts.

O'Reilly's not even the worst culprit: the bigger fact-denier has been Sean Hannity, who goes after ill-informed opinions that sync with his own rather than getting actual research and expert opinions.

Fox viewers tend to be the least-informed viewers among the three major cable news channels.  A lot of that is due to Fox News providing reports that tend to be false.  A lot of that is due to Fox News not really being news at all.

There's a push to get Fox Not-News to suspend O'Reilly for his exaggerations/outright lying about his professional career, but considering that cable channel thrives on exaggerations and lies, why expect them to punish him for it?  He's probably going to get a pay raise for this.

Addendum: there's a Washington Post article by Paul Waldman that simplifies the O'Reilly scandal in five easy-to-understand points.  Not only why O'Reilly lies...

So why not just say, “I may have mischaracterized things a few times” and move on? To understand why that’s impossible, you have to understand O’Reilly’s persona and the function he serves for his viewers. The central theme of The O’Reilly Factor is that (his) true America, represented by the elderly whites who make up his audience (the median age of his viewers is 72) is in an unending war with the forces of liberalism, secularism, and any number of other isms. Bill O’Reilly is a four-star general in that war, and the only way to win is to fight.

The allegedly liberal media are one of the key enemies in that war. You don’t negotiate with your enemies, you fight them. And so when O’Reilly is being criticized by the media, to admit that they might have a point would be to betray everything he stands for and that he has told his viewers night after night for the better part of two decades...

...but also why O'Reilly will never admit or acknowledge his lies...

Brian Williams got suspended from NBC News because his bosses feared that his tall tales had cost him credibility with his audience, which could lead that audience to go elsewhere for their news. O’Reilly and his boss, Fox News chief Roger Ailes, are not worried about damage to Bill O’Reilly’s credibility, or about his viewers deserting him. Their loyalty to him isn’t based on a spotless record of factual accuracy; it’s based on the fact that O’Reilly is a medium for their anger and resentments...

Welcome to the Fox Not-News War on Truth. They distort, you abide.

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The Fall of Journalism As a Principled Profession

While there's a sizable amount of schadenfreude involved, there is a sadness to the scandal surrounding NBC News anchor Brian Williams' fall from grace.

A lot of it has to do with the part of the scandal few are talking about: the failure of ethical behavior among the media profession.  The lack of quality control within what is a billion-dollar industry, with regards to offering a product - news - that ought to be factual and trustworthy.

The fact that NBC News was warned as far back as 2003 - during the Iraq War - that Brian Williams was "embellishing" the story about his being under fire highlights the problems within an industry that barely polices its own and ignores warning signs in the pursuit of "the hot story" and the Eternal-Loving Almighty Salacious Scoop.

It's worse than wanting to be the next Woodward and Bernstein (who at least vetted their reporting efforts even as they pursued the "hot" story of Watergate, which wasn't that hot until another year into their investigating).  It's wanting to be the next Drudge (who lived, still lives, for the rumor and innuendo of political sniping), and working a story to look credible enough to anchor a nightly news channel.

The paradox of modern journalism is how "personality" and "celebrity" - being the cool guy of the moment - has to blend with the credibility of being an "accurate" and "fair/balanced" reporter of the facts.  In theory there shouldn't be any conflict between those two sides of journalism.  In practice, the desire for the fame (celebrity) keeps trumping the professional and ethical requirement of being a reporter (accuracy).

The pursuit of celebrity makes someone like Brian Williams work harder at the image - such as making himself look like a fearless, hard-nosed war-front reporter surviving the risks of a rocket attack on a helicopter convoy that didn't really happen to him - to where the need to keep telling the story grows, with the story growing with it.  Up until the point the Truth - not just the spiritual or relative truth, but the factual truth - turns out to be not what he was telling at all.  What's incredible here is that it took over 11 years for the accountability surrounding all this to catch up to him and to the news channel paying him $50 million for his celebrity and not his reporting...

I highlighted this point before: there is no accountability for being wrong.  Well, there may be some accountability now for Williams at least.  In most respects, Williams isn't getting punished for mishandling a news report, or issuing ill-informed opinions on political issues.  Williams is getting punished for aggrandizement, for promoting himself falsely as a courageous newsman therefore deserving of respect or trust.  While there's no evidence (yet) that Williams has committed the mortal sins of mis-reporting or lying - attempts to discredit his stories about seeing bodies floating during the Katrina disaster haven't gone anywhere yet - he's committed the mortal sin of Doubt.  Because we can't trust him when he talks about his personal actions, we can't trust him when he tries to tell us about the economy or a government scandal or even the weather.

As I wrote earlier, your plumber is better vetted than your news host.  This debacle with Williams is just one more proof of that.

What is happening now, the real scandal here, is the lack of accountability for the entire media/journalism profession.  The news channels that failed to vet their staff... the editors that failed to rein in egos and stick to the reports... fellow reporters and media celebrities who kept up with the embellishments and enabled Williams - and themselves - to keep selling each other as people they weren't...

From my years studying for journalism as a college degree, one of the things debated was the importance of retaining trust in the readership and the audience.  Whenever a story was mis-reported it was vital to get a correction printed or stated as soon as possible.  Journalists were liable in matters of defamation and libel if we got "facts" about people wrong.  Any irresponsible report from us could have hurt or killed people.  If we lost the audience's faith in the facts we try to present, they won't believe us the next time when the reporting was accurate and important.  These were serious matters.

Nowadays, I don't see much interest or focus in accuracy AND honesty.  The cable news channels bring on talking head guests who are not experts on the topics discussed.  There's a rush to report something scandalous only to find out hours later the reports were wrong... only for the reporters to either ignore the facts to report the rumor, or worse double down on the rumor to make the story even more scandalous.  The quality of reporting, of journalism, has slipped.  The quality of journalists has slipped as well.

There's been a push towards inserting the reporter into the narrative: a means to personalize a report, but fraught with the risks of bias and conjecture and the same embellishments that Brian Williams deployed.  The reporter becomes the story - in part or in full - rather than an impartial witness.  Losing that impartiality makes it harder for the reporter - and the media institution backing that reporter - to step back when the story proves false or wrong.  It's been one of the key reasons the Stephen Glass scandal was so huge... and it's been so horrifying how the journalism industry quickly ignored the lessons of that.

Journalism was, ought to be, an honorable profession: it's supposed to keep the public informed and forewarned.  It's supposed to check against the lies of those in power - the leaders of government or a corporation or a church or any institution threatened by corruption - with cold hard facts.  It's not like that now.  Because it lacks accountability, in a timely and just and appropriate manner.

We've got professions that require certification and has authority to punish misconduct.  Lawyers and doctors have ethics boards (and can get disbarred / lose their licenses), teachers have certification boards, plumbers have associations and unions (and government regs where they haven't been gutted yet).  Journalists need the same thing.  There ought to be standards, a code of behavior, something to ensure the public can keep the faith with us when it comes to the facts.

P.S. It does not help that the most trusted person reporting the news is a comedian anchoring a satirical news review show.  And it does not help that today Jon Stewart announced that he's leaving The Daily Show by year's end.  AAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGHHHhhhhhhhhh...

P.S.S. We will not get to hear Brian Williams rap to Ludacris after all.

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The First Book I Kept From College

(EDIT: Hello, everyone from Crooks & Liars, thanks for visiting!)
I went for a Journalism degree at University of Florida, thinking of getting a career as a writer.  It didn't work out - reporting itself as a skill eluded me - but that's what I got my bachelors' degree (parents didn't back my request to switch majors to Poli Sci).

Of the textbooks I purchased over the semesters, when finished with the classes I traded most of them back in as I no longer needed them.  Except for a select few that caught my eye and became favorites for me to read and re-read as time went on.

One of the ones I kept - the first one, actually - was Joe McGinniss' Selling of the President.

The professor was using the book as an example of investigative, in-depth reporting covering a prolonged event: a Presidential campaign.  Specifically, Richard Nixon's 1968 return to politics as the Republican nominee.  But to me - with my interests in politics and history - there was a lot more to what it was about.

McGinniss was covering one of the key moments in the American political landscape.  During the 1960s, television had become the most powerful communications medium in the nation, surpassing radio which had been the dominant form since the 1930s and surpassing newspapers which had been the standard since the colonial era.  Before, most political campaigning relied on print ads, banners, crowds, speaking events, buttons, etc.  There'd been radio ads but they were easy to produce and ship out.  Television was different - a visual format that punished the unworthy and elevated the vain - and required a more cunning approach.  Advertising had by that time become a major profession using all of these mediums - print, radio, TV - to sell products: by 1968 with television leading the way, it was going to be used to sell politicians on a massive scale.

McGinniss lucked into the story by accident: his introduction to the 20th anniversary edition which I owned gave the details.  Hanging around New York City to interview Howard Cosell, a rising sports announcer, he met an advertising executive crowing about "landing the Humphrey account:"

The ad man was quick to explain.  Hubert Humphrey, who, now that Kennedy was dead, would almost certainly be the Democratic presidential nominee, had retained the agency to create a winning image for him... A week earlier, I'd been in Los Angeles because a leader of potentially heroic dimension had been slain. Now I was hearing an ad man say he'd be selling Hubert Humphrey to Americans like so much toothpaste or detergent... (p. xiii-xiv)

McGinniss, a young columnist for a Philadelphia paper who attracted the interest of a book publisher, conveyed the story he heard to the publishing agent meeting him later that week.  Intrigued, the publisher convinced McGinniss to pursue this as an investigatory piece for a book, one counter to the "official" historical tomes written by Theodore White (a respected author who wrote dry but impressive volumes about previous Presidential campaigns).  McGinniss even came up with a title mimicking White's usual Making of The President: this book about the ad campaign would be The Selling of the President.

When he followed up with the Humphrey ad exec to see about doing it, the ad man was obviously horrified. What he said was off-the-record, and above all the thing about advertising is how some ad men don't like revealing trade secrets: it's akin to pulling the curtain back on the All-Powerful Oz to realize people have been sold a humbug (Humphrey as the pro-war candidate in 1968 was not the most popular choice in his own party for the job).

McGinniss, stuck with an idea but not a subject to cover, decided to give Nixon's campaign - since at that time he'd sewn up the GOP nomination - a call to see if their ad execs were more accommodating.  He was put in touch with a Harry Treleaven, who "was most congenial.  He said he'd be happy to meet with me at ten o'clock..."

So that was it.  A dime in a pay phone was the genesis of this book...  He said he had no problem with that, but protocol required that such an arrangement be approved by his superior, Len Garment, whose own office was at Nixon headquarters.

That afternoon, Garment said no problem, with one stipulation: that nothing I observed would be printed until after the campaign was over.  I told him, as I'd told the man from Doyle Dane, that I would not even start writing until November and that it would be months after that before a book would be published...

...I asked Humphrey's people and they said no and I asked Nixon's people and they said yes...

As it was, when first published the book was widely perceived as being an attack upon Richard Nixon rather than a report on a very nearly apolitical process which promised (or threatened) to forever alter the way national campaigns would be conducted...

...It was fashionable in the season of the book's first publication... to lament the amorality of the process of selling the President and to bemoan as tragic the surrender of something so sacred as our method of choosing our leader to cynical, mercenary... soldiers of fortune.

But, look: who were the Watergate villains?  Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Magruder, Dean, Colson, Liddy, Hunt, and of course Nixon himself.  These were the people (excepting Nixon) whom even Harry Treleaven (my note: Treleaven is pretty much the hero of the book) considered the forces of darkness...  As for the supposedly venal ad men... their hands are clean, their souls unsullied (my note, again: this was written before Roger Ailes committed the deadly sin of producing Fox Not-News)...  What's more, every one of them was absolutely correct about Spiro Agnew. (introduction)

I liked the writing: wordy but not showing off, leavened with a dash of self-deprecation and awareness, an attempt at objective analysis while letting the author's bias show up in bits of levity.

The book itself then dives into the actual mechanics of what a modern Presidential campaign is anymore: a series of staged, well-managed media events staggered by a round of making televised ad snippets.  Interwoven into the scenes of Richard Nixon - not the most comfortable of souls - doing what he could to be both dignified (his only saving grace as a figure at that point) and (formally) informal, McGinniss wrote about the ad men themselves, dedicated to an increasingly demanding job of marketing to an electorate whose moods and whims shifted with each changing news story.

I loved McGinniss' introductory chapter to Treleaven: a rather middle-class guy who worked in L.A. for the Times and wrote radio scripts for a few years and grew to loathe it out there:

One night he and his wife were having dinner in a restaurant in L.A. with a couple he did not like.  Halfway through the meal, he turned to his wife.  

"Do you like it here?"  

"You mean the restaurant?"  

"I mean Los Angeles."  

"No, not especially."  

"Then let's go." (p.42)

At which point Treleaven left that night to New York City to find another job and never looked back.

It's a brilliant way to write a descriptive of your subject.  It highlighted Treleaven's sense of self, and an impulsive earnest willingness to break the routine when realizing the routine was killing his soul.  Elsewhere, McGinniss noted how Treleaven was annoyed that a newspaper misspelled his name, but found out later it wasn't about a sense of pride, it was Treleaven being disappointed someone didn't do their job right.

It was Treleaven, working on a 1966 Congressional campaign in Texas for this businessman named George HW Bush, who noted that "logical persuasion" was difficult to sell because he found "probably more people vote for irrational, emotional reasons than professional politicians suspect." (p.45)  He found that image worked wonders, as long as he presented Bush as likable, hard-working, and expressing empathy for the voter.  Bush won in heavily-leaning conservative Democratic Texas beating the incumbent 58 percent to 42, an unheard-of victory margin in that day and age (and even remarkable in this one where incumbents are even harder to defeat).

It's in these revelations that McGinniss details the shift in political science away from the logical to the emotional.  In some ways, politics had always been emotional and partisan.  But previous campaigns there were serious issues that had to be debated seriously.  The new method, due to television requiring an expressive empathic presence, needed to rely on emotional impact more than ever.  It stains the political discourse we have today, where actual facts and the complexity of real-world issues are drowned out by impulsive and inaccurate posturing.  Because of all the money that all this marketing requires, every candidate for every office has to campaign to the emotional impulse... nearly every minute of every day.

It was both eye-opening and horrifying to read the book when I was in college.  I keep re-reading every so often to compare it to the horrors of the political stage we see today 24/7.

But for more than just the outrage about the destruction of honest politics.  I kept this book because it's a great read.

McGinniss' skill as a writer-reporter comes through during the most compelling chapter in his book, the one where Nixon's campaign stages a "Question & Answer" broadcast where they actually bring on a fire-eating liberal radio show host, by the name of Jack McKinney (whom McGinniss suggested when Ailes asked him for any liberals they could bring onto the show).  McKinney goes after Nixon like a bulldog, and for half a chapter McGinniss details how Nixon works the stage, projecting somewhat Nixon's inner rage but also making you cheer Nixon on as he verbally spars with an opponent out to ruin his night.

Yeah.  Cheering Nixon on.  And this is an admitted Kennedy-following liberal reporter in McGinniss making you root for the sonofabitch.

I'm writing all this because McGinniss just passed away.  Andrew Sullivan at The Dish dedicated a decent-sized memorial to a fellow political writer/junkie:

...It’s not an exaggeration to say that Joe – at the tender age of 26! – transformed political journalism with The Selling Of The President, the legendary expose of the cynicism of media optics in presidential campaigns – and, by the by, a lovely, ornery rebuke to the magisterial tomes of Theodore H White... And the first thing to say is that the man could write. He couldn't write a bad sentence. His narratives powered along; his prose as clear as it was vivid; his innate skill at telling a story sometimes reaching rare moments in non-fiction when you’re lost in what is, in effect, a factual novel.

The book I keep from college over twenty years ago was itself twenty years old when I got it.  It was relevant in 1968 and 1988 and 2012 and will remain relevant.   Because it's that well-written.  And that important a topic.

You must read it.

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