Op-Ed Column: Advocating for a Revolution in News

advocacy journalism: journalism that advocates a cause or expresses a viewpoint (Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary)

Another year. Another annual Doctors Without Borders "Top Ten Underreported Humanitarian Stories."

Coverage of such stories by alternative media sources and independent journalists is often labeled "advocacy journalism” by the mainstream media. But if mainstream outlets were doing their job, it might just be called "news."

Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman is often identified as an advocacy journalist. But Goodman's reaction to this categorization crystallizes how the term is used to marginalize stories – as well as the journalists and outlets who report them - that don't support the prevailing views of corporate-owned media or the state. Says Goodman, "I am accused of advocacy journalism. If that is true, then the mainstream media is my model."

In other words, why should reporting on uncomfortable, underreported, fact-based stories be framed as advocacy journalism while mainstream reporters and their outlets regularly produce news stories that advocate the worldview of media-owned conglomerations, their corporate sponsors and their friends in government.

The run-up to the war in Iraq, of course, served as a prime example of this advocacy journalism. As Goodman has shrewdly questioned, “If we had a state-run media, how would it be any different?" Indeed, our mainstream media advocated daily for the Bush administration's view: pre-emptive war with Iraq was justified on the flimsiest of evidence, against a country that never attacked us.

As Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote in his revealing (and, in alternative media circles, now infamous) 2004 op-ed “Red Flags and Regrets”:

“In a sense, the media were victims of their own professionalism. Because there was little criticism of the war from prominent Democrats and foreign policy analysts, journalistic rules meant we shouldn't create a debate on our own. And because major news organizations knew the war was coming, we spent a lot of energy in the last three months before the war preparing to cover it -- arranging for reporters to be embedded with military units, purchasing chemical and biological weapons gear and setting up forward command posts in Kuwait that mirrored those of the U.S. military."

Their craven acquiescence to the war's inevitability and their equally disgraceful exuberant embrace of the TV generals’ war-gaming, epitomizes a kind of advocacy journalism, steeped in bias and oblivious to facts, that has no place in journalism at all. Moreover, because it purports to be “serious news” - the official word from the most trusted outlets – it’s all the more damaging. And, in the end, all the more damnable.

In his article “Corporate Media and Advocacy Journalism,” Norman Solomon, a media critic well-versed on this issue, says, “We’re encouraged to see high-quality journalism as dispassionate, so that professionals do their jobs without advocating. But passive acceptance of murderous priorities in our midst is a form of de facto advocacy. It’s advocacy of the most convincing sort -- by example.”

Nevertheless, in typical Orwellian fashion, it’s this type of “journalism,” one pushing a point of view regardless of the facts, of which the media elites accuse skilled (not to mention brave and principled) journalists like Goodman.

But if a journalist is advocating for the facts - for the relevant and accurate application of historical context, for logic and science over fear and jingoism, for vetting assertions of the government and big business and holding them accountable when they break the law - is that not advocacy for what should be the guiding journalistic principles in any democratic society?

How did it ever come to pass that this is the marginalized version of journalism in our country, while the version presented by Fox News and other more subtle (to varying degrees) yet also complicit members of the media class - from “respected” circles such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, NPR, PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and MSNBC – is not considered advocacy journalism for the elite corporate-imperialistic interests of those who fund it?

As fake news journalist Stephen Colbert said in an interview in 2005, "When Dick Cheney says, 'I never said that,' and then we play the tape, why did we do it? Why wasn't it done broadly? Because he wasn't speaking about something inconsequential. It wasn't like we were playing gotcha journalism over some quibble. It was over weapons of mass destruction. That's not advocacy journalism. That's objectivity in its most raw form."

Conversely, the journalists in our mainstream media who advocated omitting, altering, ignoring or inventing “facts” in their efforts to champion the Bush White House's war, as well as the shredding of our Constitution and civil liberties, presented not even a form of advocacy journalism that might be subjective yet fact-based (i.e. potentially viable), but rather corporate-and-state-sponsored propaganda. Nearly 100 percent unadulterated.

Meanwhile, with all-consuming, ever-intrusive, pathological obsession, mainstream media outlets bombard us daily with coverage of the pop or movie star du jour’s rise and fall, the latest missing Caucasian female or newest serial killer on the scene. Go ahead and try to tune out every news item about Britney & Co. These days, in order to avoid glimpsing or overhearing tidbits of this bottom-feeding sludge called “news,” U.S. citizens would have to almost completely disengage with society at large. It is our daily muck. And like it or not, it still takes up space by omission in our national consciousness. 

For every story of Britney and Co.’s latest escapade, millions of human beings truly deserving of news coverage are abandoned in the darkness, destroyed by tyranny and neglect. Alone. Starving. Tortured. Raped. Murdered. Displaced. Silenced.

Of course, daily coverage of Britney and Co. serves as a masterfully distracting counterpart – aka “weapons of mass distraction” - to the hawkish, corporate-slanted news. In the process of squeezing time that might otherwise be used to disseminate substantive information, this daily muck dulls critical faculties and squelches empathy, isolating us not only from our own citizens and fellow human beings around the globe, but from reality itself.

Let’s be blunt here: it is a preemptive attack against natural human impulses to reverse injustice and to block the hand of a bully before it strikes another innocent victim. The very opposite approach of the journalistic credo to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.”

In Amy Goodman’s interview with Doctors Without Borders-USA executive director Nicolas de Torrente, she noted, “You’re talking about some of the worst crises in the world. And according to Andrew Tyndall, publisher of the online media tracking journal, the Tyndall Report, the countries in context that you highlight at Medecins Sans Frontieres [Doctors Without Borders] account for just eighteen minutes of coverage from January to November 2007 on the three major nightly newscasts.”

That’s roughly 1.6 minutes a month.

Keep in mind this occurred during the same year that after Anna Nicole Smith died, as Jon Stewart (yes, another fake newsman) pointed out on The Daily Show, “The media unleashed a full-scale coverage orgy, with CNN at one point going 90 minutes without a commercial, making the death of Anna Nicole Smith a more significant news event than a State of the Union address and slightly less than 9/11.”

So when the next war comes down the pike, events will once again move with an inexorable sweep. Too many of our citizens simply don’t have the tools to assess the situation: to cut through propaganda, read between the lines, ask necessary questions, contact their representatives, and stand up for their rights and the rights of people abroad. Too many of our citizens no longer understand what it means to be a citizen. And while, of course, free will (a concept often manipulated in defense of our national media’s diseased fare) does exist, free will is inarguably dependent upon the quality of knowledge one receives and is capable of comprehending. 

For the relatively ghettoized segment of our society that does stay abreast of domestic and world events, that actively fights to circumvent or break through the onslaught of received corporate-imperialistic wisdom and numbing relentless banality, the brake lines, nevertheless - as was the case with Iraq - have often already been cut. Or as Bob Dylan once said, "The pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handles." (Maybe we can avoid war with Iran; though new opportunities await.)

So, at that point, the best we can hope for is the smoothest of crashes, the least bloody and tragic of aftermaths.

Make no mistake about it: American citizens, and the rest of the world often more so, suffer as a direct consequence of the mainstream media’s complicit hand in this entrenched pathological cycle. The assertion that our news outlets wouldn’t have been able to stop the administration from going to war even if they had asked the right questions - another excuse used to defend the status quo of the media elite - is akin to a drug pusher saying of his client’s OD, “Well, you know, if it wasn’t me he got the stuff from, it would’ve been someone else.”

Certainly we, and the rest of the world, deserve better than a drug pusher mentality from our national news outlets. And if the stories on the Doctors Without Borders list constitute “advocacy journalism,” then maybe nothing better illustrates how crucial a need there is to advocate for a revolution in the quality of our news. 

Editor’s Note: I would be remiss not to direct you once again to read about each story in the Doctors Without Borders report. And feel free to contact the editors and owners of our big media outlets to demand they do a better job in 2008.

(Cross-posted at Larisa Alexandrovna's at-Largely.)

Comments

[Brad Jacobson]

Advocating for a Revolution in News

[Richard Pietrasz]

I have observed that one of the requirements for being a modern "professional" journalist is a short and selective memory, plus an inability to research related material even in one's own employer archives.

[All Bran]

What's wrong with advocacy anyway, as long as you're telling the truth?

[John Bakalik]

Amy Goodman's Link TV is great as is Free Speach TV, but guess where the Satellite Dishs locate the stations, not anywhere near the likes of the so called news networks, MSNBC, FOX, BlOOMBERG, CNN NETWORK, and CNN's Blitzer Shituation Room. Why are they grouped like this, so you can get all the hollywood hipe, and tripe that is repeated for days on end. Got to go to the Bloggers for real news, this old Vet must open them daily.