esrosedotblog

SPIN DOWN

My comments about the bushies' Pravda like cooptation of the press evoked a response from Hal Phillips.

I think he makes some good points, though a bit scary, about the effect of all this manipulation and deflation of the press' power and role in our society.

You mentioned the government video PR "scandal" in your blog recently. As an ardent opponent of the administration and pretty much all it stands for, I want to be outraged - but there's no difference between sending out a press release from, say, the Dept. of Agriculture (we can accept that such a gov't entity is allowed to issue press releases), and the Dept. sending out video press releases of the sort that have been picked up by perfectly witting TV news organization. As always, it's on the journalist or the media organization to vet and attribute the info if used. As a print guy, and a PR guy, I'm not surprised that the general laziness and cluelessness of TV journalists exacerbated the issue here. Indeed, it was knowingly preyed upon by Bushco.

What is wrong, or sinister: the Bush Administration sees a larger purpose in this fake news/pr initiative. Every time a station gets caught running gov't video without attribution, every time some columnist is outed for being a paid shill of the administration, every time someone like Jeff Gannon is caught impersonating a news person, the overall concept of legitimate "news" is devalued in this country. And when you make a practice of lying on subjects of grave importance, as Bush and his people do routinely, this devalued news community is less able to call him on it. It's a systematic attack on the media's watchdog function. Of course, the press hasn't helped itself in this regard. Every time Jason Blair or Jack Kelly get caught plagiarizing, the power of the press (utterly tied to its credibility) suffers.

As an aside, it's also interesting to me that the Administration and much of the right continue to beat on the media as a leftist institution. They do this, I believe, because it furthers the effort described above. But they also do it because, in the main, it seems to me folks on the right cannot conceive of putting aside their political views, their political fealty really, when producing any sort of communications piece. It seems to me a given for right-leaning folks that THEY will use their positions to further the party line/agenda. They can't imagine that, say, a liberal reporter at the NY Times would do everything in his/her power to supress his/her views so it won't affect the reporting. I agree the working print media is mainly liberal, but they put those views aside in a way Republicans (at Fox, at the Washington Times, at the NYPost) would never dream of doing.

h