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Overview
The author describes the goals of advocacy journalism—i.e., journalism that transparently advocates a biased worldview—and shows that it has been a part of our history since the 1700s. He assesses the role of talk radio, cable news networks, and the more recent phenomena of special-interest blogs, websites, and citizen journalists in creating the current media climate.
While conceding that advocacy journalism is undoubtedly popular and has some positive aspects, the author also points out its many negative features. Perhaps the most important of these is its polarizing effect on society.
Skewed will give readers the tools to critique the media, to see both sides of any issue, and to become better informed citizens and voters.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781633881662 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Prometheus Books |
| Publication date: | 08/16/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Skewed
A Critical Thinker's Guide to Media Bias
By Larry Atkins
Prometheus Books
Copyright © 2016 Larry AtkinsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63388-166-2
CHAPTER 1
Going Inside the Echo Chamber
Advocacy journalism outlets are notorious for taking readers and viewers way off track when trying to advance their agenda. Both conservative and liberal media have elements within their ranks that engage in demeaning the other side and promoting their own viewpoints, and sometimes their zealous nature results in mistakes that confuse the consumer.
In November 2009, Fox News's Sean Hannity used misleading video when reporting on an anti-healthcare rally held by Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann in order to bolster the crowd estimate. Hannity aired video from the Tea Party's September 12 march on Washington while discussing Bachmann's much smaller healthcare protest. Hannity alleged that over 20,000 people had attended Bachmann's protest. The September rally reportedly drew over 70,000 people, while the crowd for Bachmann's anti-healthcare event was estimated to be only around 4,000. Hannity later apologized for using the wrong video.
Fox News is hardly alone in making such errors. MSNBC's political pundit Ed Schultz misrepresented Republican Texas governor Rick Perry's alleged maligning of President Obama during a segment in August 2011. Schultz showed a clip of Perry at a campaign event telling the crowd that America's trillion-dollar debt was a "big black cloud" hanging over America. Schultz then stated, "That black cloud that Perry is talking about is President Barack Obama." It turned out that Perry was referring to this country's debt, causing Schultz to later apologize on air for not showing the full context of Perry's statements.
The political landscape of the United States has been highly polarized for a number of years now. It is harder than ever to get members of Congress to break with their party on a key vote in the hope of reaching compromise on even the smallest of legislative items. Many in the general public blame the polarized media landscape for contributing to this political gridlock. Generally, the public mistrusts the media almost as much as they do trial lawyers, used car salesmen, and politicians.
As reported by Rebecca Riffkin, a September 2015 Gallup Poll revealed that only 40 percent of Americans trusted the media. This result tied the all-time lows from 2012 and 2014, continuing a ten-year trend. Before 2004, from 1977 on, a slight majority of people indicated in polls that they trusted the media. The 2015 poll indicated that people under age fifty and those who were acknowledged Republicans had a greater mistrust of the media: only 36 percent of those under fifty trusted the media, while only 32 percent of Republicans trusted the media.
Perhaps most importantly, advocacy journalism is seen by many to be polarizing our country. A new Pew Research Center poll indicates that Americans are more politically polarized than ever. The Pew study states, "Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines — and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive — than at any point in the last two decades. These trends manifest themselves in myriad ways, both in politics and in everyday life. And a new survey of 10,000 adults nationwide finds that these divisions are greatest among those who are the most engaged and active in the political process."
As reported by Andrew Beaujon of Poynter, the website for the prestigious and influential Poynter Institute for Media Studies, on June 10, 2014, a newly released survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institute on religion, values, and immigration reform revealed that "People's media choices have a strong effect on their beliefs." For example, with regard to the volatile topic of immigration, the study stated that "Only 42% of Republicans who most trust Fox News to provide accurate information about politics and current events support a path to citizenship, compared to 60% of Republicans who most trust other news sources."
Advocacy journalists do not just set out to inform; they attempt to advance an agenda, whether it be conservative or liberal. Fox News and conservative talk radio show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are examples, along with Rev. Al Sharpton and Rachel Maddow, among others, on the liberal side. They are all giving their opinion and reporting news with a goal of swaying their audience via a biased agenda. This results in echo chambers and parallel universes of Red State (traditionally Republican) and Blue State (traditionally Democratic) viewpoints. The red state/blue state distinction became fairly standardized during the 2000 election, as the media used this color scheme on maps to describe Republican and Democratic states, and has since become commonplace and widely understood.
Advocacy journalism is not a new phenomenon. In fact, it has a long and, depending on how one looks at it, distinguished or checkered past. During the late 1700s to the early 1800s in the United States, as our nation was emerging and developing its roots, each political party had its own newspapers to advance its unique agenda — the only real source of news with the exception of word-of-mouth, pamphleteering, and private letters. (This will be discussed in the next chapter.) The late 1800s and the 1900s saw the rise of large-scale corporate media with syndicates of many newspapers owned by one person or company, reflecting early attempts at providing the public with objective journalism, although there were still muckraking or yellow journalists who reveled in publishing scandalous and sensational stories, and numerous newspapers started publishing op-ed pages featuring the opinions of noted persons or groups on issues of the day. The emergence of talk radio in the late 1980s and 1990s, spearheaded by Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, Bob Grant, and Dr. Laura Schlessinger, among others, started the reemergence of clearly biased, agenda-driven media. There had been earlier examples of such opinion-based programs, such as Father Coughlin on radio and Edward R. Murrow on television, but they were in the minority. In the late 1990s, biased blogs and websites, such as Salon, Slate, and the Drudge Report, started to sprout and become immensely popular. Then came Fox News and MSNBC.
In summarizing these journalism phases and contemplating the future, former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines wrote, in 2008, "In little more than a century, journalism has been conducted under a variety of short-lived labels. Yellow journalism begat objective journalism, which begat investigative journalism, which begat advocacy journalism. To some of us, the New Journalism looked like a destination, but that was before the passage through gossip journalism to our next stop: fact-free journalism."
Advocacy journalism can be a powerful tool, and sometimes it can be misused. In general, I am wary of some journalists advocating for a cause and using biased reporting to advance their agenda. An example of this was the ACORN incident a few years ago, where two conservative activists, James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, went undercover with a hidden camera into ACORN offices nationwide, pretending to be a prostitute and either a pimp or her boyfriend and making up a specific scenario about seeking alleged tax advice on how to conceal the source of illegal income while managing underage Salvadoran prostitutes who were in the United States illegally.
ACORN was a community organizing and voter registration organization that drew the ire of conservatives due to its alleged past voter registration irregularities. In light of these undercover videos, Congress shut down ACORN's funding and the group's contributions diminished significantly. O'Keefe and Giles released their heavily edited videos through conservative web entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart. Their reporting was clearly agenda-driven — to expose and embarrass ACORN. While they were celebrated as heroes among conservatives, others viewed their actions as an unethical prank. Richard W. Rahn, in a Washington Times op-ed, called Giles and O'Keefe "true American patriots." In contrast, according to AdWeek, Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik wrote in his blog, "Only on the cube-sided Bizarro Planet are [James] O'Keefe and Giles champions of the First Amendment"
Another concern advocacy journalism poses is when the host of a news program gets too involved with the story. Rev. Al Sharpton seems to do this often when he reports on incidents in which he is involved as an activist, such as the Ferguson, Missouri, protests over the death of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer, or the George Zimmerman case in Florida, in which Mr. Zimmerman was tried for killing Trayvon Martin. Sharpton's close connection with the people involved in these news stories gives him a definite advantage with respect to gaining access to the victim's relatives and their legal representatives, but due to his support for the victims and their families, many people would conclude that he is unable to report fairly and objectively.
Many critics of journalist Glenn Greenwald believe that he was too close to National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, who leaked agency communications regarding surveillance of various individuals, and that he was not impartial regarding Snowden's motives for such damaging disclosures. Glenn Greenwald, a journalist, lawyer, activist, columnist, and author, broke the news in his Guardian column on June 6, 2013, that the National Security Agency was collecting the phone records of millions of Americans. His source was Edward Snowden, a former computer security specialist for a defense contractor, who leaked classified documents to Greenwald, along with Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman and documentarian Laura Poitras. As Malcolm Forbes wrote regarding Greenwald in Columbia Journalism Review, "Attempts are made to discredit him by certain media figures. For some, he was not engaged in 'journalism' but embroiled in 'activism.'" Some people, including Congressman Peter King, claimed that Greenwald should be criminally charged for aiding and abetting Snowden's effort to avoid criminal extradition and criminal prosecution, while Meet the Press host David Gregory asked Greenwald this very question. Greenwald responded that the assumption that he had aided and abetted Snowden was completely without evidence. House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) told reporters, "For personal gain, he's now selling his access to information, that's how they're terming it.... A thief selling stolen materials is a thief." While some people felt that Greenwald was too close to his source (Snowden) and was acting as an enabler, others praised him as a crusading journalist who broke an important story that the public needed to know. In fact, Greenwald, Gellman, Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill received the prestigious George Polk Award for National Security Reporting for their coverage on the Snowden documents. In 2014, the Guardian and the Washington Post won Pulitzer Prizes for Public Service for their reporting on the NSA's secret surveillance.
Rolling Stone magazine's flawed reporting of the allegation by a female University of Virginia student that she was raped by members of a university-sanctioned fraternity resulted from a reporter wanting to satisfy her particular narrative regarding sexual assault on America's campuses. As reported by T. Rees Shapiro of the Washington Post on January 8, 2016, the student, Jackie, was the main figure in Rolling Stone's nine-thousand-word article that reported a brutal gang rape in a UVA campus fraternity house. After discrepancies and inconsistencies in Jackie's story were reported by the Washington Post, and Charlottesville, Virginia, police determined that no gang rape had occurred, Rolling Stone retracted the story. A Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism report commissioned by Rolling Stone concluded that magazine's investigation was a journalistic failure that could have been avoided.
As Shapiro reported on May 12, 2015, the complaint of a civil lawsuit against Rolling Stone, its parent company, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the writer of the article, by UVA associate dean of students Nicole Eramo, alleged, "Rolling Stone and Erdely's highly defamatory and false statements about Dean Eramo were not the result of an innocent mistake," according to the lawsuit, which was filed in Charlottesville Circuit Court. "They were the result of a wanton journalist who was more concerned with writing an article that fulfilled her preconceived narrative about the victimization of women on American college campuses, and a malicious publisher who was more concerned about selling magazines to boost the economic bottom line for its faltering magazine, than they were about discovering the truth or actual facts."
Edward Wasserman, dean of University of California at Berkeley's journalism school, told Paul Farhi of the Washington Post that although journalists can have a social commitment, people should be skeptical of reporters who are also advocates. Wasserman asked, "Do we know if he's pulling his punches or has his fingers on the scale because some information that he should be reporting doesn't fit [with his cause]? If that's the case, he should be castigated."
Advocacy journalism can also lead to overemphasis and overexaggeration of certain stories. This overemphasis through constant and continuous coverage can reflect a bias, especially when most of the coverage is negative. MSNBC succumbed to this with respect to New Jersey governor Chris Christie and the "Bridgegate" matter, and Fox News was equally excessive with its coverage of the Benghazi, Libya, attack that killed the US ambassador to that country while Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary of state. The Bridgegate scandal involved the intentional closing of the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee, New Jersey, to New York City. While Christie was cleared of wrongdoing, federal authorities eventually conducted criminal investigations and charges were filed against three of Christie's former political allies for plotting together to create lane closures and traffic jams on the bridge, allegedly to punish Democratic Fort Lee mayor Mark Sokolich for not endorsing Christie's reelection bid.
Regarding Clinton and Benghazi, Jim Tankersley of the Washington Post, citing Internet archive data compiled by the GDELT Project, stated that there were 1,500 individual shows mentioning Benghazi on Fox News in 2015, compared to about 650 on CNN. Tankersley noted that it was "likely that the extra airtime Clinton is receiving on Fox has often been spent discussing scandals related to her." According to the Washington Examiner, MSNBC's constant and obsessive focus on the Bridgegate scandal was mocked and criticized by many people, including MSNBC's own Joe Scarborough, HBO's Bill Maher, CNN's Don Lemon, the Daily Kos, and David Axelrod. As noted by PolitiFact, the night that the Bridgegate story broke, MSNBC spent 211 minutes, nearly all of its evening programming on the scandal, while CNN dedicated 53 minutes to it. As Daily Kos liberal blogger James Fidlerten (who posts with the byline "fidlerten") noted, "Unfortunately, of late I have had to either turn to CNN or just give up on the news entirely to watch sitcoms. The reason is that it seems to be wall-to-wall coverage on my favorite news channel (MSNBC) of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's travails concerning the George Washington bridge lane closures.... MSNBC has of late become obsessed with Chris Christie as much as Fox News obsesses over Obama."
After seeing each network spend days, weeks, and months on the Bridgegate and Benghazi incidents, it made many viewers want to say, "Enough already. Let it go." I know that these were my feelings. It got to the point that if the show's host indicated that the next segment would be about either of these two issues, I switched channels. I pretty much knew what the hosts and guests would be saying and arguing. It was too predictable.
Sometimes advocacy journalism is used to promote a narrative even if the facts don't fit. The host's bias can be shown through tone, choice of stories, opinions, and the way he or she interviews guests. Rachel Maddow from MSNBC often comes across as sarcastic and snarky to her detractors, while Bill O'Reilly of the Fox News channel comes across as pompous and arrogant. Most of the time, it's a lovefest, where the host and his or her guests all agree on a certain position. Other times, if a guest has a different opinion than the host, the latter will frequently interrupt the guest and not let the person get a word in edgewise. With the host in control, it's a bigger mismatch than the Harlem Globetrotters going against the Washington Generals. Viewers of the show are fans of the host and will more often agree with the host. Frequently, such adversarial confrontations reach a point at which all parties to the discussion talk at the same time and try to be heard over each other in such a cacophonous fashion that it reaches a crescendo and the viewer can't understand what either side is saying.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Skewed by Larry Atkins. Copyright © 2016 Larry Atkins. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments, 7,Introduction, 9,
Chapter 1: Going Inside the Echo Chamber, 13,
Chapter 2: What's the Goal and Purpose of Advocacy Journalism?, 27,
Chapter 3: The Early History of Advocacy Journalism: The Late 1700s and the 1800s, 33,
Chapter 4: The Rise of Corporate, Objective Journalism, and the Inverted Pyramid, 37,
Chapter 5: The Op-Ed Page, Editorial Page, Columnists, Editorial Cartoons, Yellow Journalism, Muckraking Journalism, and Investigative Reporting, 43,
Chapter 6: The Start of the Big Change: The Rise of Talk Radio in the Late 1980s, 61,
Chapter 7: The Rise of Fake Entertainment News and Celebrity Journalism, 73,
Chapter 8: The Rise of Sponsored Content, 85,
Chapter 9: The Rise of Fox News, 91,
Chapter 10: The Response of MSNBC, 97,
Chapter 11: The Rise of Blogging, Biased Websites, YouTube, Social Media, and Citizen Journalism and Their Relevance Today, 107,
Chapter 12: Is the Mainstream Media Liberally Biased? Does the Media Try to Be Objective and Balanced?, 131,
Chapter 13: What's News? What Are the Factors Used by the Media in Deciding What to Report? How Is Bias Displayed in the Selection Process?, 155,
Chapter 14: The Process of Reporting and How It Can Affect Bias, 167,
Chapter 15: The Polarizing Effect of Advocacy Journalism on Politics and Society, 199,
Chapter 16: The Popularity of Advocacy Journalism and Its Influence, 221,
Chapter 17: What's Good about Advocacy Journalism?, 227,
Chapter 18: What's Bad about Advocacy Journalism?, 235,
Chapter 19: The Future of Advocacy Journalism and Balanced Journalism, 249,
Chapter 20: The Importance of Being a Savvy Media Consumer, 255,
Conclusion, 299,
Notes, 301,
Index, 357,