Swanson: Yes. Good. I actually wrote one of the little articles in your book. Haven't gotten my commission yet, but (laugh) . . . The article that I wrote was about Cindy Sheehan's becoming a news story and the media suddenly focusing for a minute, really more than a minute, on the peace movement. And a couple of days ago, I sent a video to the media of a woman, a military mother, whose son has not yet been killed in Iraq being yelled at by Congressman David Obey.
Daubenmier: Uh-huh.
Swanson: And in a very similar way, although I don't think as big and it may never become as big, Tina Richards has become a national story and there are newspaper articles and she's on all the TV and radio shows, and yet the substantive reporting that's been needed on this war has yet to really materialize. The war is still with us. And, you know, what made Tina Richards' concerns into a newspaper story was a dramatic video incident that was put all over the televisions in a similar way to Cindy Sheehan's sitting outside the ranch was put all over the televisions. Is this the way we should be thinking about generating news stories, or is there a better way?
Daubenmier: Well, pictures matter. People matter. That's always been a part of news, I think, and it's still true. If you can put a human face on a story, it resonates with readers and viewers to much greater extent than a policy face. One of the problems with coverage of this war versus the war in Vietnam is that this war is more dangerous for journalists.
Swanson: Right.
Daubenmier: And they cannot get out and provide pictures of, you know, people being blown up and so forth the way we saw in Vietnam. It's just too dangerous. And I think that . . .
Swanson: Although there is video on the internet and on people's televisions in a lot of other countries showing the blood and gore of the war in Iraq. I'm not sure the problem isn't more that GE and Disney don't really want to show it to us.
Daubenmier: That could be part of it. You know, I haven't seen, you know, a lot of media pushback on not being able to photograph coffins or . . .
Swanson: Right.
Daubenmier: . . . so, I'm sure that's part of it.
Swanson: Well the collection you've put together in this book has a lot of focus on the war and it is absolutely terrific and I encourage everybody to get it. The book is called Project Rewire: New Media from the Inside Out. Is there anything else people should know who want to get involved in this issue?
Daubenmier: Uh, National Conference for Media Reform organized by FreePress is a great organization. Uh, they can help you learn how to monitor your own media locally because this is a local issue too. It's not just a national issue. And other than that, the book is available on Amazon.com. And I think that's about it. Covered everything.
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Excerpt from "Project Rewired"
In 1985, media critic Neil Postman warned that because of television, Americans were in danger of “amusing ourselves to death.” In his book by that name, Postman warned that television was transforming everything into entertainment or show business. One measure of that is the proportion of fluff topics that make up the nightly newscasts on broadcast television. Between 1977 and June of 2001, the percent of stories related to celebrities, entertainment, and lifestyle topics rose from 6 percent of the total to 18 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of stories related to government plunged from 37 percent in 1977 to 5 percent in June 2001. The disaster of 2001 began a slow reversal of those trends, so that by 2004, celebrity, entertainment, and lifestyle stories amounted to 7 percent of the total, while government coverage was back up to 27 percent.
This “dumbing down” of the news has brought with it an emphasis on certain types of stories—the disappearance of young, white females such as Natalee Holloway, the trial of celebrities such as Michael Jackson, and so on. Arianna Huffington counted how many news segments mentioned either Holloway or Jackson during an eight-week period in 2005 and compared that to the number that mentioned the “Downing Street Memo,” a memo from the British government that discussed Bush administration policy and U.S. intelligence prior to the war in Iraq. The totals—for six broadcast and cable channels—were 56 segments on the Downing Street Memo, 646 segments for Natalee Holloway, and 1,490 for Jackson’s trial. While news executives claim news on Holloway and Jackson are what people who watch these stations want, Huffington maintains that tens of millions of people are not watching any of these channels and must want something else, adding, “there are huge slices of audience a real news operation could go after.”
With television increasingly cowed by the right wing and content with its new “happy talk” formats, newspapers remained the logical source of watchdog journalism, but their ability to finance such projects depended on circulation, which was under pressure from television news. Newspapers held their own against television until 1970, when they were on the verge of a downward slide in circulation that would make it harder for them to pay for such investigative projects. The percentage of Americans reading newspapers began to drop much earlier—in the late 1940s—but the problem was masked by growth in the U.S. population, which kept circulation rising until 1970. At that point, newspaper circulation flattened out until 1990, when it began to actually decline. Between 1990 and 2002, circulation dropped at the rate of 1 percent every year. By 2002, 55 million newspapers were sold daily, compared to the 1970 peak of 62 million. Newspaper readership, as opposed to newspaper sales, also was declining rapidly. In 2004, 60 percent of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center said they read a newspaper regularly, down 15 percentage points since the peak of 75 percent in 1992 and the lowest since Pew began the survey in 1990.
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