Swanson: Yeah. I agree. A friend of mine, Jeff Cohen, who appears frequently in Outfoxed, you know, had Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting up and running for many years, but there has been this proliferation of groups and activities of this sort in recent years that has just exploded. And I think the book that you've put together is a good example. I mean, you have some chapters that you've authored in "Project Rewire: Media from the Inside Out" analyzing what is going on with the media, and then you have this collection of short articles and blog posts. Is everything here taken from a blog or website?
Daubenmier: Yes, yes, all of them are blog pieces. And they are just really delightful to read. You know, the whole idea is when you read the internet, you know, you start researching a certain topic and pretty soon you click on a link here and there and you get way a-field, you know, from where you originally started. But what if you could sort of freeze the internet and look at everything on one topic, you know, and what would it look like? And that's kind of what we tried to do here is gather together a lot of articles all on one topic, the topic being, you know, what I perceive to be the declining quality of news reporting in the last recent years and put them all together. And some of them deal with FOX, others of them deal with sort of the broader media climate and systemic changes that are influencing them. But, you know, I do talk about the FOX effect which, you know, is mentioned in Outfoxed, and I think that has been diminished, I really do, because of Outfoxed and all the other pressure. I think that copying FOX is no longer seen as a sure-fire path to ratings by the other news organizations.
Swanson: Well, there are definitely some at least partial changes that you can point to, you know. Keith Olberman has not been fired yet, as Phil Donohue was. There are some changes you can look at and yet, I'm sure you're far from satisfied with the state of the media today.
Daubenmier: Yeah, that's right. You know, FOX News is starting to have ratings problems. In '06 they were down 26 percent in the key demographic of under 54 age group compared to 2005, and we're happy to see that. But as far as the broader media, you know, I think that there has been a bit of a rebound from the low point between 1997 and about 2005, I'd say, 2004 or 2005. I think Katrina was a turning point when news organizations began to see that everything the Bush administration said couldn't be taken at face value. I mean, they had the Bush administration telling them what a great job they were doing in New Orleans taking care of the hurricane aftermath, and yet they could see with their own eyes what was happening. And so they sort of made them a little more willing to challenge authority. And more recently I certainly think things like the McClatchy News Service coverage of the firing of the eight US attorneys is reason to hope that people are now more willing to challenge the Bush administration on pronouncements than they were before.
Swanson: And clearly in this lead up to a possible attack on Iran we are seeing a degree of skepticism that wasn't there in the lead up to Iraq and it is possible that those lies and experiences like Katrina have been, and exposures of what FOX News is have been influences in that, but in the book you also suggest a major role, I think, for the internet. I want to just quote a couple of short passages. Just on page 3 of the book you suggest, "Perhaps progressive bloggers that aggressively critique and occasionally compete with the mainstream media will save us from a captive press by being for the press what the press is supposed to be for government, a watchdog that is vigilant, vigorous, and vociferous."
And on page 35 you go on, "The more internet journalists dig into government reports for clues on the effects of government policy, contrast conflicting official statements at different points in time, or file Freedom of Information Act requests for information that has been withheld, the more traditional journalists will need to do the same to avoid being embarrassed by these new competitors."
To what extent to you think that is up and running now?
Daubenmier: Well, I certainly think the critiquing part is very vigorous and, and I think another part of it is, uh, there is a blog article that's in the collection by Jay Rosen about the internet serving as sort of a court of appeals in news judgment. Bloggers can keep the focus on a story that before would have been dismissed by the news media and that would have been the end of it. You know, court of appeals now is bloggers who can say, "Now wait a minute," as many did with the Downing Street Memo, "Now wait a minute. There is something here you need to look at." And I think that is an important function as well, to give a story exposure and sort of force the mainstream media to use its resources to investigate it. And as far as competing directly as reporters, we know that the Washington Post has lost two of its investigative reports now to the internet, just a few months ago, so that is starting to happen. And in the past we've seen, uh, I think it was Josh Marshall break the story of Strom Thurmond's birthday party and the remarks that Trent Lott made, so it's beginning to happen and I think it is going to happen more because the blogs are staying around and they've got some revenue sources now with Google ads and other advertising, Advertise Liberally and so forth, and so I think it is beginning to happen.
Swanson: You know, I like that you brought up the Downing Street Memo incident, because when friends of mine and I set up this website afterdowningstreet.org and started trying to generate activism about the Downing Street Memo, you know, one big assistance there was blogs, writing about it, analyzing it, and the other that I think is maybe missing a bit from Rosen's and others' analyses is radio. There are now progressive radio shows all over the country that were pushing that story for us. But then there was also in that case endless activism. Tens of thousands of phone calls and emails and protests in the lobby of the Washington Post and, you know, since that there have been several pieces of evidence that this war was based on lies that have been at least as powerful as the Downing Street Memo and they have been analyzed and written about at least as well by the blogs, but the activism hasn't been there, I think because people are less hopeful that exposing the evidence will make any difference because we exposed the Downing Street Memo and nothing happened. But without that huge level of activism it seems you can have great analysis going on the blogs and it doesn't make it into the corporate media.
Daubenmier: Right. And I think that the media, or that the blogs and the internet can help organize that sort of pressure. MediaMatters for example always includes information on how to contact news organizations . .
Swanson: Right.
Daubenmier: . . . about a story. And on the FOX attacks websites, for example, we're gathering information about the local advertisers on FOX news so that people could put in their zip code and find out who advertises locally on their local FOX news cable and pressure them. So the internet is a good way to mobilize that kind of thing. For example, the brouhaha over ABCs mocumentary The Path to 9/11. You know, there was a lot of phone calling and other activity around that, and I think the minimal changes that ABC agreed to make in that so-called documentary would not have occurred without those phone calls and without that activism that was made possible by internet networking.
Swanson: Yeah. You are very much an optimist. These are good signs for hope, and I'm uh, . . maybe it's the war. I don't know. I'm in a pessimistic mood. But, this book is full of signs for hope. There is a quote on the cover of the book from David Bender of Air America that says, "This book powerfully reminds us of what the old media has plainly forgotten, that truth is not a matter of opinion." But I think that phrase can have a lot of meanings and it can suggest the desirability of being objective and position-less and free of all bias in the way that the corporate media pretends to be. And there is, early in the selections there is an article by John Nichols talking about the Dan Rather brouhaha with the forged or not necessarily verifiable documentation of Bush's skipping out on his guard duty. And John Nichols points out that a couple of authors had done a tremendous, accurate, verified, documented job of reporting this story already, that CBS could have turned to Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose. But he writes, "Perhaps the CBS executives thought that because Ivins and Dubose write with a point of view rather than feigning journalistic impartiality, they could not be trusted to get the straight story. That, of course, is the common bias of the elite broadcast media in the United States."
Which raises the question: Should we be, should we aspire to achieving that reputation of impartiality or is it just as well or even maybe a good thing for media consumers to recognize that everybody's got point of view, but some people can still be honest and accurate and others not?
Daubenmier: Well, I'm not ready to give up on an independent press. Maybe nonbiased or impartial isn't exactly the right word. I think they need to be independent of all sources of power and independent of partisan politics. I think they should be independent of partisan politics. I don't think we need to go back to, you know, in earlier in our history newspapers were partisan affiliated entities and I don't think that that is good because I think, you know, truth is not a matter of opinion. We can strive for uncovering the truth.
Swanson: But Molly Ivins and Dubose are not affiliated with the Democratic Party or the Green Party or the Republican Party.
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