In October, when two public radio producers were sacked in separate incidents for participating in the Occupy Movement, I was dismayed, but not surprised. NPR is often accused of liberal bias. But I can testify, as a former NPR freelancer, that the network's real slant lies neither to the right nor to the left, but to the spineless center, that is to say toward championing the views of mostly middle-aged white guys with money, power and influence, who are disproportionately represented on its airwaves, according to a recent study by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting).
NPR -- and they are hardly alone, in this respect -- is like those embedded soldiers covering a war. They never find out what life is like for those on the other side. Mainstream media outlets like NPR tell us that they are having trouble figuring out what the Occupy Movement is about. They claim the protesters have no clear goals or coherent agenda. But while the pundits profess to being confused by what the activists are trying to say, polls show that more than half of Americans support the movement's aims.
So why are these savvy and perceptive journalists so befuddled? Perhaps it is because they are hopelessly embedded in the very power structures that the protest is targeting. It may be hard for these inveterate insiders to hear what is going on beyond the political intrigues and legislative maneuvering which they are so adept at covering.
My own brief fling as a freelance reporter for NPR is instructive, I believe, mostly for the way in which it crashed and burned, so let's get right to that. Back in the mid nineteen-nineties I used to serve food at an open air soup kitchen near the Bowery in lower Manhattan and noticed how the lines were getting longer, and included more people who, judging by their dress, were neither the homeless, nor in many cases even the unemployed. Why were these "middle class" folks standing out in the cold for a free meal?
So I pitched a story to my editor in Washington on hunger in our nation's cities. The piece, which was broadcast on NPRs premier newsmagazine show Morning Edition on the day that Clinton's new welfare law went into effect, contained interviews with emergency food providers, people who were responsible for feeding the poor in the city's less affluent neighborhoods. The brunt of what I was being told was that there were millions of people in America who go to bed hungry, and that their numbers were poised to swell as welfare and food stamp regulations became more restrictive. Sadly, this prediction has proved all too accurate.
I was emboldened by the enthusiastic response to this underreported story, to pitch a piece on homelessness, even fantasized briefly about becoming NPR's poverty reporter-- you know, like they have a business reporter. For some reason my editor did not warm to this idea. He didn't even respond to my emailed pitch. So I gave him a call. "Haven't we spoken after your hunger story?" he asked. We had not. "Well you have been accused of liberal bias and we are not going to give you any more policy assignments," he summarily announced.
I was stunned -- accused of bias for reporting that people are hungry? "But Ken, you edited the piece yourself," I stammered, "Where exactly was the bias?" He had no answer, and I sensed from his halting tone that he was not happy, either. But the higher ups at the network had spoken, and I was now blackballed from reporting for the NPR newsmagazines, though I continued doing occasional pieces on the fringes of the public radio world for a while longer.
This experience was a wake-up call for me on the nature of the media. I had always looked up to reporters and been drawn to the journalistic profession from an early age. As a boy, I remember marveling at the logo on the masthead of the New York Times -- "All the News That's Fit to Print" -- not because I was skeptical of this audacious claim, but, on the contrary, because I believed it. Nobody could doubt back then that the Grey Lady was the newspaper of record, the veritable house organ of reality itself, at least in my family.
Like so many other Americans, we had unqualified faith in the luminaries of the press. If Cronkite or Huntley or Brinkley said it, then it had to be true. This naive faith was about to be shattered -- for me, at least -- by the Vietnam War, and the early complicity of the media in cheer-leading America's ill-conceived military adventure in Southeast Asia. Eventually, coverage of the conflict took on a more critical tone. LBJ famously commented, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America," after the beloved journalist called the war "unwinnable." Several weeks later, Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection as president.
It is useful to recall this bit of history as a yardstick for how much things have changed. A poll last year ranked the U.S. media as the least trusted major industry in America, tied with the insurance companies and just behind the banks. Surveys such as this elicit the obligatory bouts of hand-wringing by journalists, who wonder why their efforts have come to be so under-appreciated.
Others, like Salon commentator Farhad Manjoo, see the falling levels of trust as being largely justified by the splintering of the media into partisan camps, such as Fox News and the hyper-politicized blogosphere, which increasingly drive the coverage of even the mainstream outlets.
In his 2008 book, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, Manjoo cites the Swift Boat controversy, where undocumented allegations by conservative partisans, picked up and repeated verbatim by the media, undermined John Kerry's run for the presidency in 2004. Manjoo argues that in the Internet age the line between fact and opinion is vanishing, leading to an upsurge in conspiracy theories, unscientific views (like the rejection of Climate Change by the right) and dangerous levels of political polarization.
The biggest casualty, in his view, is that many of us no longer believe what we hear. We have become skeptical of all claims to truthfulness in the increasingly unregulated and unruly bazaar of words, with the result, according to Manjoo, that the very glue of trust which binds a society is being eroded.
I take his point. Nevertheless, I don't see this as an unmitigated disaster. On the contrary, skepticism of the mainstream press is richly deserved, a healthy sign that we have begun thinking for ourselves, though not without risk. The risk, as Manjoo rightly points out, is that we will fall still further into a paralyzing cynicism in which it will become increasingly difficult to work together as a society toward shared goals -- witness the current gridlock in the House and Senate on virtually every major crisis which confronts America.
The upside, on the other hand, is that lies are getting exposed and alternate views are rapidly gaining currency in an atmosphere of unprecedented access to information.
The meteoric rise of the Occupy Movement testifies that millions of people have begun thinking outside of the box about the fundamental nature of our society and economic system. They are challenging the received wisdom that the tide of free market capitalism lifts all boats. They are also awakening to the intimate interconnections between the unrestrained greed that led to the banking and loan crises and housing bubbles and the greed which is destroying the ecosystem, undermining our economy and fueling the seemingly permanent U.S. wars in the Middle East.
And it isn't just the received message that people are becoming dubious of -- they are also questioning the messenger. OWS is about financial malfeasance and income inequity, to be sure, but it is also about the lack of equity in the marketplace of ideas. It is about taking back our voices from the media-cracy that has silenced and marginalized the 99 percent.
For me the most enduring images of the Occupation before Bloomberg raided Zuccotti Park was the computer bank from which the activists were live-streaming the event around the world. I found out about the occupation, not from the press, but from friends who emailed me links to these websites more than a week before the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge catapulted the protest into the media spotlight. A bunch of bloggers with handheld cameras had scooped the world on what may turn out to be the leading political story of 2011. Equally important, they were bypassing the gate-keepers in the press and telling their own story in their own terms -- arguably the first populist movement in history to do so.
Well, not quite the first. The Arab Spring has that distinction. That the Occupy Movement sprang up hot on the heels of this historic uprising, and indeed resembles it in so many ways, tells us that the worldwide contagion of events, rather than the pronouncements of the self-anointed opinion-makers, is the driving force in the digital age, and the social media rather than the mainstream press is now in the driver's seat.
That may be the biggest news of all to come out of the Occupy Movement.
I was just thinking about how the younger participants--college kids and recent college grads, the Millennials--of the Occupy movement may view digital media in a slightly different way from those of us who're slightly older--I'm a late Baby Boomer myself. For us, it can still seem if not magical then amazing, even when we're proficient at using computers and the internet. But for the Millennials, it isn't like that, I think; for the Millennials, all this digital stuff is commonplace, and so they see cell phones and online resources more as utilities. Seems like the wiser view to me. Anyhow just thinking about it
How exactly is the "mainstream media" even capable of doing that? Anyone with a cellphone, digital camera and Net access can upload any "news" they want and make it visible to millions of people. If you're not seeing the news you want, put it out there yourself. Nothing is stopping you. And I'm not singling out Quiet Riot when I say that. It applies to everyone who has Internet access. The Internet is mainstream. (Newspapers used to be mainstream, but the Internet has driven them to the verge of extinction.) You post on the Internet. You are the "mainstream media."
"so biased and run through so many different filters that its anything but objective reporting."
Objectivity is an unattainable goal, an ideal, an abstraction. Reporters, photographers and editors are human beings, not Vulcans. Get out there and produce your own version of "objective" reporting and see how it flies.
Information that is needed by voters, to make decisions, must accurately and factually reflect what is happening in our World. Older voters Expect that the Media is bound legally to tell the Truth, so they believe Fox and other Corporate Media. They think that we still have "Truth in Advertising" laws. Shows how far behind the times they are!!
Occupy movement is self-aborting as it refuses to advance to stage of having leadership and specific goals.
Your naivety is horrifying. The Arab Spring is collapsing because the masses of the poor and unemployed care not for democracy. They want jobs. They want a life. Not a load of post me-generation feelgood progressive BS about constitutions and rights. They vote for ultra-populist Islamic parties not bourgeois liberal parties filled with students listening to half-decent rap.
And in the advanced economies people want jobs. Stop raving and start thinking. The biggest sacrifice you have to make is in acknowledging that you cannot get all of what you want. You have to compromise in order that the many may have strength in a single view.
The task of people in the media is to help unite the many voices into one. It is not to join in the cacophony and jerk off on the emotionalist self-indulgence of a movement that does not know where it is going because handfuls of anarchists are vomiting on every attempt to define policy.
Occupy movement must grow. Preferably UP.
"The task of people in the media is to help unite the many voices into one." in a dictatorship, this is true. Is democracy too hard for you?