This Week:

Quote of the Week

Reporting on the “Vast Chasm:” A Tale of Three Papers

What’s In A Name? Labeling the Media

Greetings,

Thanks again to all the well-wishers who contacted me about my little hospital stay. Now that it is over, I’ll tell you what happened. After having a small, completely unexpected, stroke earlier this summer, I was found to have a small hole in my heart. It needed repair, as the next stroke could be much more serious. So, on September 3rd I had a small “patch” surgically implanted in my heart wall. The procedure (technically not really “surgery”) went extremely well, and I appear to be recuperating quickly. I am not supposed to sit in one position for too long, however, since the patch was put in using a catheter that entered through my leg. So, this issue of the Notes was prepared in fits and starts, with lots of rest and stretching interspersed among the writing bouts. I think it turned out OK, but if it didn’t I am fully prepared to blame any problems on the lingering effects of anesthesia!

OK, that’s over with. At some point I hope to write about the experience, in particular the financial aspects, as some pieces illustrate quite well, I think, the profound contradictions in a medical system that can almost-painlessly patch a heart but can’t figure out how to keep from bankrupting people (and businesses, and units of government) in the process. Astounding, really.

The current resident of the White House appears increasingly desperate, as his September 7th speech showed quite clearly, I think. I wish I had time to comment on it here, but it’ll have to wait. I have to go stretch my legs.

Until next week,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

Here are a couple of lines of a letter from Minnesota’s Republican senator, Norm Coleman. He sent it to me last month, in response to my suggestion that he support an inquiry into the lies and other shenanigans that the current resident of the White House appears to have employed in the lead-up to the ongoing imperial intervention in Iraq:

“Like other Americans, I have been anxious to find out what happened to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction... While I believe it is important to look into [the quality of our intelligence about them], I also believe patience is appropriate as U.S. forces continue to search for WMD in a nation the size of California.”

Reporting on the “Vast Chasm:” A Tale of Three Papers

What a difference a headline makes.

On June 25th the Internal Revenue Service released a report on the 400 richest people in the U.S. of A. I saw the story reported in the local paper, the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!), in the New York Times (“All The News That’s Fit To Print”), and in the Wall Street Journal (“No Slogan to Make Fun Of”). The coverage in the three papers gives a little lesson in how a different “spin” can tell a different story.

In the Times, the story was front-page news with the headline “Very Richest's Share of Income Grew Even Bigger, Data Show.” The lead paragraph read:

“The 400 wealthiest taxpayers accounted for more than 1 percent of all the income in the United States in the year 2000, more than double their share just eight years earlier, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. But their tax burden plummeted over the period.”

The latter point was underlined later in the story with a graph illustrating that “the 400 wealthiest taxpayers’ share of all taxes rose by about 50 percent in recent years, but their share of all income more than doubled.”

In the Journal the story was pushed to page 3, but the headline was similar, reading “Wealthiest Americans Hold Rising Share of Income, IRS Finds.” And their lead paragraph read,

“So much money in so few hands. The nation’s top 400 taxpayers reported income of nearly $70 billion for 2000, a new Internal Revenue Service report shows. This startling accumulation of wealth at the very top of the income pyramid reflects the booming stock market of the 1990s and the widening of the income gap in the U.S. into a vast chasm.”

Of course, there are always other “angles” to any story, and this one was no exception. Look what the local paper chose to emphasize with this headline on page 22: “Richest 400 Paid 1.6 % of 2000 Taxes.” That is certainly true but, as the Times made clear, their tax burden has “plummeted” over the period. The odd thing about this headline in the Star Trib is that it appeared over a reprint of the very same NY Times article that emphasized the income gap. They even included the graph!

So, what’s the story here? “The Rich Are Getting Richer?” Or “Rich Pay More Than Their Share in Taxes”? Remember that, whichever answer you give, if you think this is a valid question, you are questioning the very idea that there is such a thing as “objective” journalism.

PostScript: It is not immediately obvious that, by taking the angle they did, the Star Tribune is making an attack on the idea of “progressive taxation,” which has long been a Minnesota tradition. That idea says that, as a matter of justice, the proportion of one’s income devoted to taxes should increase as one’s income increases, since the higher-income parts of the population can more easily bear the costs of supporting the social services best provided by government.

If that sounds like a bizarre, socialist idea, consider that as recently as 1980, income taxes on the wealthiest United Statesians were set at 70 percent. They are now set at less than 40 percent.

What’s In A Name? Labeling the Media

When the public intellectual bell hooks refers to the dominant culture in the U.S., she doesn’t hesitate to string together as many powerful adjectives as needed to name the beast. She often refers to it as the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture.” To some people it seems rather inefficient to utter all those syllables when referring to culture, but hooks is no fool. She doesn’t use these words casually—she doesn’t use any words casually!—and each of them has a specific and complex meaning.

I’m not a mind-reader, but I think hooks wants to constantly underline the idea that these aspects of the dominant—some might say “hegemonic”—culture are impossible to separate from each other. I suspect that hooks is also well aware that, by routinely stringing together these words in her writing and her conversation, she forces those in her audience to confront the fact that the critical thinking that she exemplifies allows for no shortcuts and no shorthand. Maybe, when our language (and the culture in which it develops) evolves a bit more, we will have words that more elegantly and efficiently express what she is talking about.

How we name things is important. As a critic of the media, I pay a lot of attention to how I label, or name, different types of media. For example, I call this humble newsletter “Independent Weekly News and Analysis.” I put a lot of thought into that name. I could have called it “Alternative” Weekly News and Analysis, or “Absolutely True” Weekly News and Analysis, or any number of other things.

On a weekly basis, I struggle with how to succinctly name the media that I so often criticize and analyze. You know I’m talking about the Big Dogs: NBC, CBS, NPR, Fox, The NY Times, the Washington Post, along with the newspapers and news shows in the larger cities (or “markets,” as cities are now called in the media business).

The MCFPASB Media (#$!%#&!)

Sometimes I call it the “corporate” media, sometimes the “mainstream” media. Sometimes I stress that it is the “for-profit” media, and sometimes it’s the “agenda-setting” media. I’ve toyed with the idea of calling it the “bound” media. All of these adjectives—these names—are accurate, I think, as far as they go. But none of them are sufficient to describe what it is we are dealing with when we talk about “The Media.”

I haven’t resolved this dilemma but, if I were to occasionally choose to refer to The Media as The Mainstream Corporate For-Profit Agenda-Setting Bound Media, here is what I would mean:

MAINSTREAM: “Mainstream” media refers to the fact that anyone who doesn’t make an effort to paddle their intellectual boat somewhere else will perpetually drift along in the “main stream” of thought expressed in the mass media. An anecdote to illustrate: I recently left a copy of Z Magazine, a radical rag, in the waiting room of a social service agency, in an effort to balance out the Oprah Magazines, TIME Magazines, and National Geographics that are always there. The next time I was there I noticed that the Z was gone, leaving the rest as before. I spoke with the person who had removed it, and she explained to me that the agency did not like to have magazines in the waiting area that might “upset people.” I attempted to explain to her that there are a significant number of people who get “upset” when yet another waiting room has nothing but Oprah and TIME (and People and Redbook and...).

Not only are the ads in these magazines offensive, I explained, but such magazines tend to endorse and support, through their content and their corporate ownership and so on, a very troubling status quo. I didn’t change her mind; Z remains off-limits in that agency as in most. So there you have it: “Mainstream” publications are thought by most gatekeepers (from social service agency staff all the way up to editors and advertisers) to not “upset people.” Magazines that are thought to “upset” people—no matter that they often WANT to upset people!—tend to disappear from waiting rooms in public places, and the explanation is that they are not “mainstream.”

CORPORATE: To call the media “Corporate” is to say that it is a business, subject first and foremost to the control of the “market,” which in turn in concerned with something other than creating or maintaining an empowered citizenry. What is it concerned with, you ask? C’mon, you know! It’s the next adjective in the list!

FOR-PROFIT: “For-Profit” is related to “corporate,” and pulls out the one fundamental demand of the “market,” which is, of course, the making of money for the owners. This is a key concept in understanding media in this culture, since it drives media to attract audiences that are either a) large, or b) likely to be consumers of their advertisers’ products. Many hard-working reporters think that I am commenting on their deep motivations and ethics when I bring up this point. Not at all. The profit orientation of the business can’t tell us about the insides of reporters, but it can and does tell us something about their behavior. Whatever their ethical beliefs, it is highly unlikely in a “for-profit” newsroom that you will find many people who have a habit of acting in a way that serves to orient the news “product” away from the target audience (ideally large, affluent, and in the mood to buy) and toward the minority of people in the potential “market” who are poor AND politically organized. That is simply not the way to make a profit, and those who do it consistently will fail to move up in the newsroom. Eventually they won’t be there at all.

Beyond Profit, What?

AGENDA-SETTING: When I refer to the “Agenda-Setting” media I am referring to one reality that can be seen at a couple of different levels. On the national and international level we have the wire services, like Reuters, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and a few others who have the power to get people around the world to talk about an issue, simply by reporting it. They are joined in the global power elite by the major networks and newspapers in the most powerful countries, such as CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the London Times, maybe Le Monde in Paris, and some others. What these large news corporations have is, first, the resources to simply go out and get important stories, such as far-flung bureaus, huge reporting staffs and the budgets to support them. Secondly, because the large corporations are the only ones to have this power to produce news, the smaller, provincial news organizations—in the smaller cities and in rural areas—must rely on them for much of their reporting on national and international issues. So the agenda becomes more or less universal.

As great as Nygaard Notes may be in many ways, it is definitely NOT an agenda-setting media outlet. Neither are any of the other not-for-profit media outlets, in my eyes. The recent “news” about the Bush administration covering up the potential health hazards in New York City after the Trade Center attacks in 2001 provides a good example. It’s “news” now because the Agenda-Setting media are reporting it. However, New York journalist Juan Gonzales had broken this story within three weeks of the bombings, on September 28, 2001 in the New York Daily News. That’s not an Agenda-Setting media outlet, so most of us are just hearing about it now, having been reported this month by an agenda-setting outfit, the New York Times. I could cite many more examples.

BOUND: It makes two different kinds of sense to use the word “Bound” when referring to the media. “Bound” in the sense of boundaries, the crossing of which will bring negative consequences to the news organization. Also “Bound” in the sense of the mental bonds in the heads of reporters and editors that are formed by their ideas about “how the news should be reported.” Every reporter is expected to stay within these boundaries, and has internalized the limitations that are necessary for success in the journalism trade, although usually a reporter isn’t aware of them and will usually vehemently deny that they exist.

So, for now, there is no short and easy way to refer to “The Media” that makes it clear that I am talking about The New York Times and not the Waseca Journal (my home-town paper). Although there are any number of short, entertaining, and colorful adjectives that I use in the privacy of my own home to describe the Media, most of them are not suitable for publication. When I need a more descriptive, and less profane, term to describe The System, I guess I’ll be stuck with the ungainly “Mainstream Corporate For-Profit Agenda-Setting Bound Media.” You’ll know what I mean.