The Media's Own Innocent Bystander Fable

As anyone who has read my columns, blog posts or book knows, I have a mild obsession with the Innocent Bystander Fable - the one whereby political actors pretend they have no power or even minor role in the arenas they are elected or hired to participate in. This fable has been most prevalent in the Democratic Party's posture toward the Iraq War and the bailout - they claim, rather idiotically, they have no power to stop the war or fix the bailout. But now, as I am three-quarters of the way through Newsweek's 7-part story on the gossip, innuendo and palace dramas behind the presidential campaign, I see that this Innocent Bystander Fable may be just as powerful inside the media itself.

If you read the piece, you might have noticed that the Newsweek reporting team is constantly referring to "reporters" and "the press" and "the media" - as if Newsweek reporters aren't a part (and a leading part) of those things - as if they are innocent bystanders. More broadly, the way they portray it, candidates and political operatives are larger than life heroes or villains who make Big Decisions and Face Consequences, while the media is a herd of lobotomized automatons that are so mindless and innocent and pure, that they cannot be held culpable for anything at all. Indeed, according to Newsweek, the entire political media is an innocent bystander to politics. And Newsweek creates this portrayal as if somehow the reporters writing their story have nothing to do with "the press" they are writing about.

The best example of what I'm talking about is this excerpt:

On the campaign trail, McCain was asked about Davis's "race card" remarks. McCain looked uneasy and tepidly endorsed his campaign manager's remarks, but said that the campaign needed to return to debating the issues. After a brief kerfuffle, the press let the matter drop. Reporters are as uncomfortable as the politicians they cover about discussing race.

So here you have one of the largest magazines in the country insulting readers by devoting only a single sentence to the widespread racial bias in the media (see Chris Matthews for some choic examples) - as if that's merely a trifling factor in a presidential campaign involving the first African American nominee in history. Worse, it's as if Newsweek correspondents are pretending not to be the "reporters" they are referring to. And the sum of the article ends up being a subtle - and perhaps unconscious - attempt to absolve the media of any responsibility to facts in a democratic society. That is, an attempt to forward the Innocent Bystander Fable.

If it wasn't that, and the piece was honest, then its coverage of the media would have said, "Newsweek reporters and the rest of the media are as uncomfortable as the politicians they cover about discussing race," and then devoted a little space to exploring this topic.

But no, we are expected to believe that the innocent bystanders perfectly report what they see, and that when they stampede off on silly, mindless, substance-free stories, there's no one to blame. While candidate and party decisions all come with responsibility, media idiocy is just a force of nature with no culpability whatsoever.

None of this is new. We all remember New York Times White House correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller justifying her sycophantic worship of George W. Bush by saying she was too afraid to ask the president questions before the Iraq War. Look, she effectively said, I was just an innocent bystander.

Now it's Newsweek depicting "reporters" as passive, disinterested observers with no responsibilities whatsoever - and certainly no faults. Indeed, we see the Innocent Bystander Fable alive and well inside the very media institutions that increasingly humiliate themselves and undermine our system of checks and balances.

Comments

[democralypse]

While I agree with the larger narrative about the media acting as innocent bystanders, I think its worth noting that the Newsweek article may have been consciously written that way but not for the reasons you think. The 7 section Newsweek story was written by one reporter that used notes taken by several reporters on the campaign trail. So, the person writing the Newsweek article was reporting on reporters, thereby considering himself an outsider. It's like some messed up fractal image.

[Karl-Friedrich]

there is supposedly no censorship in our news reporting, like 'fair and balanced'. news is written in order to sell advertising. if something does not sell, it is not reported or it is distorted to be sold.
a journalism professor -I don't recall his name- called it censorship for profit.
the innocent bystander is safely out of the loop when reporting about the reporting of others. David has got it right, sort of.

[katielady]

it seems we don't actually have a free and open press, do we???

[annis]

YOU SAID IT!

[Bluedrgn]

The problem is, if the press actually reports the truth the Republicans jump up and down and accuse the press of a liberal bias...

[go]

Thank God we don't have a media that worships wealth, power and celebrity. No they have no vested interest in the crap they spew. My the long hot showers they must have to take at night to try to feel clean. I am sure they must all have large prescriptions of Ambien to sleep at the end of a day working hard to find the easiest way to deliver the lowest common denominator.

[Filegirl]

......."herd of lobotomized automatons"......yep, that pretty much describes the media we have in the United States.

[texanna]

While I completely agree that the media has constructed this innocent bystander fable in order to excuse the utter incompetence that pervades it, I think We the People have some responsibility in all of this. Too many of us accept the loads of cr@%**p that the media heaps on us without any question.

[apoyo]

It's not news media, it's propaganda. They push what sells, regardless of the consequences. But, their job will be lots harder now with a president who will essentially marginalize the corporate media. The fact that people have less money to buy the products that their networks hawk will decrease their revenue to the point where they will be forced to downsize to reporting the truth.

[ObjectiveRealist]

I've become a more voracious media consumer over the past year, and I've found that the analysis of the corporate press is absolutely worthless. There are some astute pundits, but their insight only equals what I can find on Joe Public's weblog. The value that the corporate press, because of their financial resources, can uniquely contribute to politics is witnessing and conveying the central facts of important events including policy decisions, period. And if they don't even have the courage to inquire for the relevant facts, they are literally good for nothing.

[Lemeritus]

I believe that should be "Joe THE Public".

[Britisher]

Other examples of Innocent Bystander Syndrome can be seen in a week ( not sure of the date but 2005 maybe?) where NewsWeek's Europe, Asia and Latin America covers ( and the major story inside ) were titled "Losing Afghanistan", but the US edition was "My Life in Pictures"--all about Annie Leibowitz and her celebrity portfolio. .

Then in the run-up to the 2006 mid terms Newsweek ran a survey on "the issues" and discovered that about 50% (I'm going by memory here) still believed that Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks.
The authors of that article implied some dismay at the public's ignorance but themselves failed to point out WHY so many people were so badly misinformed, nor did they make it clear that the belief was absolutely unfounded. .

And what do those choices tell us about Newsweek's bias? It's apparently not so much about a political perspective as it is a marketing perspective--when in doubt, entertain the Americans but inform the rest of the world ; though of course this approach then does have political ramifications too. .

Of course the public has a responsibility to educate itself.
Fortunately the Web now allows the public the option to verify, challenge or refute the traditional media's conventional pre-packaged wisdom.

[bascombe]

brilliant and insightful. that's sirota.

[likeicare]

Ahhhh, yes, Mr. S., there's the dilemma -- the press refuses to examine itself.

And why should it? Hasn't Foxsnooze been supremely successful in convincing everyone in the fourth estate that it is THEY who determine who and who should not be a target for ridicule and derision?

How arrogant of journalists like yourself to suggest that the media should exercise some independence -- and intelligence-- when it comes to reporting reality, instead of depending on emailed talking points from the likes of Matt the Drudge or Rush Limpbaugh!!

The media has been dumbed-down to serve the needs of a dumbed-down presidency, and it's succeeded, just like Karl Rove knew it would. Just bully and coerce your opponent(s) long and hard enuf, and they'll succumb to your wishes.

Oh, yeah -- it never hurts to appeal to their innate greed and laziness, either. Or their over-bloated sense of self-worth and importance.

[Lemeritus]

Sadly, I think you sad it all when you noted "Foxsnooze been supremely successful" -- news is a commodity, just ask the failing newspapers, and the Fox recipe of fear and loathing sells best.

[StillAmused]

Two of my picks for the "innocent bystander" fable...

The press endlessly, and feverishly, ran Bill Clinton's "Jesse Jackson" comment in South Carolina (about 20 seconds), discarding the preceding 10 minutes or more of Clinton being pressed by reporters about -- EUREKA! -- the historical role of RACE in S.C. politics!

This was confirmed by Rep. Kendrick Meek [D, FL], an African-American who witnessed the whole exchange... and SAID SO on CNN! It was in that context that Clinton referred -- in COMPLIMENTARY terms -- to Jackson's and Obama's campaigns.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2008/01/28/intv.clinton.out.of.context.cnn

It was decided FOR everyone that Clinton was "injecting race"... by the sloppy, "innocent" press, whose own narrative-driven commentary, incidentally, has been wearily laden with endless calculations of the role of race in voting.

Similarly, it's a wonder Obama survived the repeated, baseless press characterization of McCain as a "war hero" with a distinct foreign policy advantage... seeing as how he was a prominent and EARLY cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq -- the most obscene foreign policy blunder in modern history -- still thinks we're "winning" and believes in Junior's imaginary, endless "global war on terror".

The news media will be just barely catching up with reality -- oh, let's say -- around Inauguration Day.

There's some basis for cautious optimism, but no thanks to them.

[lwaxanatroi]

Thank you, Amused, I didn't know this about the context of the Clinton remarks about Jesse Jackson. I didn't know this in spite of being a daily reader of this blog and also of Slate and Salon. I didn't know this in spite of listening to NPR on the radio and watching MSNBC almost every night. In other words, I'm steeped in liberal media and I still didn't know this. Bad enough the mainstream media wallows in the same old gossip instead of real news, but I am surprised no one else made this clear at the time Clinton was being excoriated. Yes, I could have missed one post on this topic, but it's clear the MSM would rather have the controversy about the injection of race rather than the truth. Now that our economy is melting, can we please grow up and pay attention to real news?

[texanna]

Well, there were lots of others that were trying to make the actual intent/content of the remark known, but just as the corporatist press had an agenda for the primary, so did Daily Kos and Huffington Post and a lot of other "progressive" media outlets. The agenda was all Obama all the time, and anything that didn't fit that scenario was tweaked so that it did. At this point, we are where we are and Mr. Obama will make a fine President, I hope. As to the future, I think you have now learned that aside from factcheck.org and a couple of other truly neutral sites you can't believe everything you read even if it's not from the well-known corporatist media.

[augiemarch]

The fact that the right wing blares "media bias" discourages me in the context. It tells me that, as in so many things, we use the same words but are'nt really talking about the same phenomenon. Scientists are'nt unbiased, either, but they have a widely accepted methodology to work from. Read the Columbia Journalism Review "Darts and Laurels"; after a while, the contours of good and sloppy journalism will come into at least some focus. Follow the money is a useful phrase; advocacy masked as journalism is usually planted, and someone pays for it.