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December 03, 2006
The Shoddy Game of Political Telephone
In his new book, Bush's War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age Professor Jim A. Kuypers precisely articulates my experience of what has gone on in the months and years following 9/11 with regard to the media game of interpreting the President's messages into the narrative they prefer to give to it:
“What has essentially happened since 9/11 has been that Bush has repeated the same themes, and framed those themes the same whenever discussing the War on Terror,” said Kuypers, who specializes in political communication and rhetoric. “Immediately following 9/11, the mainstream news media (represented by CBS, ABC, NBC, USA Today, New York Times, and Washington Post) did echo Bush, but within eight weeks it began to intentionally ignore certain information the president was sharing, and instead reframed the president's themes or intentionally introduced new material to shift the focus.”This goes beyond reporting alternate points of view. “In short,” Kupyers explained, “if someone were relying only on the mainstream media for information, they would have no idea what the president actually said. It was as if the press were reporting on a different speech.”
There are plenty of occasions when people I know have disputed points that the President made often and early about both the War on Terror and its subdivision into the War on Iraq - for example about the length of the war, etc.
My understanding of why liberals so often get these points wrong, is because they can't stand listening to the President. Therefore, they didn't listen to the speeches or read them. And instead relied on the media to interpret them for them. So that they only know the points that the media wanted them to understand, and not what the President originally said.
In fact, Kuypers calls the mainstream news media an “anti-democratic institution” in the conclusion.Of course. The modern media is a very elitist institution that values its power above all things.
Alcibiades | 12/03/06 at 03:12 PM | Categories: WWIV
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Comments
This is sooooo true. One reason I can't have discussions about the war with anyone is that they have so many assumptions that aren't true, based entirely on what they read, and they won't sit still for anyone patiently refuting them.
My favorite example is the NYTimes staff editorial - NOT an op-ed - which casually mentioned Bush "shifting to a humanitarian motive after no WMDs were found." I knew the NYTimes was mendacious, but this is blatantly lying, and something that could be fact-checked in 5 min. by "the paper of record." Hell, I can go to whitehouse.gov and find Bush's speeches from 2002 where he spoke eloquently about the humanitarian motive. One of those speeches was to the General Assembly of the UN, not exactly an unreported or obscure event.
So even someone who may know that the NYTimes is biased, would never imagine that a staff editorial would misrepresent facts so blatantly.
There's a lot of that going around, and even conservatives or centrists who don't listen to Bush's speeches don't suspect how much manipulation there is.
Judith | December 3, 2006 07:36 PM
My favorite is the claim that the goal of freedom for Iraq was never an original goal of Operation Iraqi Freedom- just something Bush, Cheney and Rove cooked up later when Operation Iraqi Freedom, which was named Operation Iraqi Freedom before the first tank crossed the border, failed to turn up enough WMD's.
Ben
Ben | December 4, 2006 10:19 AM
And in keeping with the way the MSM has treated the President's speeches, on the rare occasion that they address the translated materials from Saddam's various ministries they ignore the facts that are emerging: that that Saddam was close to restarting his nuclear weapons program in 2002 and that he was colluding with Al-Qaeda leadership in advance of 9-11. All the NYT has had to say, that I am aware, was to raise an alarm that materials were posted that the Iranians could employ to develop nukes? Now, how could that be if there was no evidence that Saddam was acquiring or trying to acquire WMDs?
Lynne | December 4, 2006 01:06 PM
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