Page 45 Review by Stephen
"The media do not control you. They pander to you."
So true. The Daily Mail panders to its readers' base prejudices by confirming their worst fears with histrionic fiction, whilst The Guardian panders to our moral outrage by decrying the Daily Mail as histrionic fiction. They're all equally biased, just like me, as I've more than ably demonstrated there! The key is to recognise that, for this too is true:
"News consumers say they want objectivity, but they choose news outlets that reflect their views."
No? I for one would only watch Fox News for comedy value - as indeed I did as Weazel News in Grand Theft Auto. This is why the outlets pander. They want the biggest possible audience so that they can attract more advertising, hence the media milestone in 1833 when the New York Sun slashed its price to a penny. It meant less revenue per copy but the circulation rocketed. Suddenly a whole new, less affluent readership had access to news, actual news! Well, advertising anyway.
This is the kind of material which Brooke Gladstone, eminently qualified to talk about, is in total command of here, and as illustrated by Josh Neufeld I was gripped from cover to cover. That's no mean trick for what is essentially one long talking-head piece. The compositions are clear as Scott McCloud's and as equally inventive, allowing Gladstone to concentrate on the salient facts backed up by case studies and quotations which she does with an admirable humour, coherence and brevity. So much here you may half-know, but never in my experience has it been evaluated in such a comprehensive yet accessible manner. In this instance its chosen medium helped me absorb what could otherwise have been information overload which, coincidentally, is something Brooke discusses towards the end: the fear that modern technology risks presenting us with Too Much Information. It's been that way for centuries, going right back to the Gutenberg Press and revisited ever since during each technological advance! TV was decried as the enemy of the brain, and radio before it. At which point Gladstone quotes this pertinent observation by Douglas Adams:
"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things."
Not so much now, perhaps - we stay young a little longer - but he knew what he was talking about. There are of course dangers in modern technology, but not necessarily the most obvious ones:
"The big threat of photoshopification is not that we will believe documents and photos that are fake. It's that we'll find it easier to disbelieve documents and photos that are real. When it's convenient," she writes… against a back-drop of tortured Iraqi prisoners.
Here you will learn of the origins of the political leak, press pass, press release, by-lines and the emerging distrust of journalists post-WWI as soldiers returned from the frontline with very different accounts to those force-fed to the public by papers during the war itself. Indeed there's an extensive section devoted to war-time journalism, and it's pretty damning. It takes in Vietnam, WWI, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the invasion of Iraq (the whole Saddam Hussein statue-toppling affair was a journalistic travesty orchestrated by US soldiers) and indeed Kuwait where being embedded with the troops had severe limitations:
"They could see where the missiles were launched… not where they landed."
But Gladstone explains how easily war-time reporting is compromised for, having investigated the various biases affecting journalism (commercial, bad news, status quo, access, visual, narrative and fairness), almost every one shows up during war.
"Access bias? The military can bar, expel, and jail reporters. It can also - this goes without saying - save their lives. Without friends in uniform, war reporters are more at risk."
One of the biggest biases is the thirst to report first rather than accurately, and how we react to later corrections - and truth and lies - is fascinating. She also explores the whole sorry saga of the US government's and UK parliamentary hostility towards a free press. In England newspapers were actually banned for six years then aggressively censored (though not as comically as detailed in BURMA CHRONICLES) while even the First Amendment was effectively overwritten by President John Adams in his Sedition Act just a few years later. While we're here, did you know that truth used to be no defence against libel? You want to read about Super-Injunctions? Try Nixon here.
If I were to pick out one section of so many (which in spite of my long-windedness I still don't have room to discuss here) it's on objectivity which at least brings us full circle. Not only does Gladstone explore whether such a thing is even possible as the "naïve empiricists" hoped, but also the ways that its failings has been or can be balanced either by self-awareness or full disclosure. There's a very good reason beyond entertainment or vanity that we have a Staff Profiles section on our website: if you're aware of our own biases you can judge for yourselves how much of what we say is coloured, and so filter our commentary accordingly!
"U.S. newspapers try to build a wall between the editorial pages and the news pages. They have different editors. In the twentieth century, it was a fundamental principle of journalism. Not so much in the twenty-first century."
It's all editorial here!
