Manipulating the Mainstream Media

I just finished reading Ender's Game for the seventh or eighth time since eighth grade. For the first time, I read it for a class. For the first time, I was conscious of how smart Orson Scott Card really was in regards to the media.

Card predicts a ubiquitous Internet accessible from anywhere. Everyone has a "desk" akin to today's laptop, and even the kitchen table is wired so people can read their Internet-delivered papers at the breakfast table. "The Net," as it is called, has seemed even to replaced television. Now "vids" are accessible online through newspapers and what I can only imagine what is similar to YouTube. His predictions are not too shabby, considering the book was published in 1985.

One of the subplots of the novel involves siblings Peter and Valentine Wiggin, perhaps the two smartest pre-teens on 22nd-century earth, creating false identities on the Internet and using them to post political essays. These essays are in turn picked up by newspapers and quoted by politicians. The two rise to prominence in complete anonymity. The father even quotes Valentine's columns regularly, not knowing he is repeating his daughter's words, and that they are her political, rather than heartfelt, sentiments.

The Internet presents a stunning opportunity for political and media influence, but as was reinforced in readings for my independent media class today, media manipulation is nothing new.

In Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America, Rodger Streitmatter describes people and outlets that changed the face of the nation via a dissident press. Streitmatter takes a dissident medium as one that not only offers a differing view of society, but also one that seeks to "change society in some discernible way." What he seems to be referring to is journalism with a point of view, advocacy journalsim, whatever you want to call it. In some istances it's not so different from Peter and Valentine Wiggin, or if you want something classical, Thomas Paine.

But it's not the independent/dissident media itself that I'm focusing on for this post, but the way it can be used to manipulate the mainstream/corporate media.

The entire second chapter of Streitmatter's book is a biography of William Lloyd Garrison, a man whose egotism was perhaps only exceded by his desire to end slavery. In his paper, The Liberator, Garrison championed the abolitionist cause when mainstream newspapers shied away from "the most contentious issue of the era." With just a circulation of 2,500, however, Garrison was able to have a lasting impact on the abolitionist cause through his manipulation of the mainstream media.

One texhnique Garrison used was delivering the premier issue of his paper to over about 100 other editors, most of whom defended slavery. Rather than tossing them in the trash, these editors

were so offended by his words that they quoted him at length, accompanied by their own statements of outrage, to inform their readers of the extreme nature of the abolitionist credo.

Garrison then reprinted the response and his own rebuttal. Writes Streitmatter:

So by the end of this carefully orchestrated editorial chain reaction, Garrison had not only provided his own subscribers with a double-dose of lively reading, but healso had introduced readers of a pro-slavery paper to The Liberator and the anti-slavery ideology it promulgated.

Garrison also capitalized on the death of Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, who published a New England abolitionist paer, who was killed by a pro-slavery mob. By focusing on the loss of a great man and suffering of his family, as well as the loss of a paper, Garrison was able to promote the abolitionist cause without specifically speaking to it. His subtlety allowed him to skirt the issue but still make a connection in his readers' minds between abolitionism and this great man. Because Lovejoy was a reverend, Garrison's piece was quoted in churches across the country, igniting a word of mouth phenomenon.

Garrison also used media events with the idea that even bad press is good PR for his cause. At one gathering he set fire to a copy of the Fugitive Slave Law and United States Constitution with mock reverence, as though he were performing a sacrament. Mainstream media reports lambasted him, but also quoted him on the front page. Even the New York Times ran verbatim transcripts of his speeches!

Through clever tactics, Garrison was able to get his word out. It didn't matter if coverage was good or bad. What mattered was that people were seeing and hopefully considering his words.

Perhaps because I'm a journalism major, or spent a summer doing PR, I'm obsessed with this idea of the ability of individuals and organizations to manipulate the media. Just yesterday my professor pointed out that a Starbucks PR piece got top-column placement on Huffington Post (Thanks, professor!). The responses were minimal, and some questioned the ethics of the decision. One reader asked:

Is this article an advertorial? It reads like a press release. If this isn't a paid ad it should be, and if it IS a paid ad you need to let people know that.

Starbucks Via isn't "Breaking News and Opinion." It's advertising. But if I were a corporate executive, gosh darnit I'd probably do the same thing. I'd want to stop losing money and get some good press for a change.

Geeze, I even tried to manipulate the press this morning when I answered an e-mail from and Ithacan journalist who was just assigned the crew beat. I told her the sites to visit, the polls to look at, the things to focus on. The coverage was horrendous last year, and this year I want the articles written about the team to accurately reflect the sport.

I wonder how many people consider that when they are interviewed. It must be media week for me because there was another Ithacan reporter at the SCAR meeting last night covering the Emily McNeill story. Something happened that really bothered me as a journalist. People would interject their own ideas in their responses to questions, ideas that did not reflect the views of SCAR. They were more interested in representing themselves than the organization. I hope the reporter can sort through all the contradictory details she received.

As I sat there, I realized how easy it would be to manipulate a reporter who is totally uninformed on a subject. You just need a message and an agenda. It's a scary thought. It's what pushed us into Iraq.

Maybe it's better that these people were unaware that they are able to manipulate the media. It keeps the responses honest, even if they are misguided. But in the real world, it does not work that way. It is a good thing that Garrison was able to manipulate the media, but I think all too often the media does not realize that it is being duped by more malignant entities.

He's Wrong on Rights

I was really surprised to see this piece (also below) on the Daily Show: Jon Stewart ripping on Bill O'Reilly over hypocrisy on the "right to privacy." In it Stewart concedes O'Reilly's point that there is a right to privacy written into the Constitution. He's missing the issue. The real issue is there there's no right to privacy written into the Constitution. At least not in terms of one citizen or non-government organization prying into person's life. All the Constitution does is keep the government from snooping. Why would Stewart concede that point when it's wrong?

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The ideas O'Reilly and Stewart refer to were first explicated in Warren and Brandeis' "Right to Privacy," published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890. These ideas have entered the law to a degree, but they are not found in the Constitution.

Here's why: The Constitution protects us from the government, not each other. It keeps the govenrment from quartering soldiers in your house, but if Jan is using a telephoto lens to snap shots of you walking around in your underwear, the Constitution will not protect you.

The closest the Constitution comes to mentioning a right to privacy is in the fourth amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This protection against "unreasonable search and seizures" applies to the government only. It does not stop neighbor Phil from coming over and admiring your Hot Wheels collection.

It's a well-known fact that O'Reilly lies on the air. But Jon Stewart not doing his research, especially when he's calling someone out, is unacceptable.

Absurdism and Post Structuralism as the News

I made the title as boring as possible so it would only appeal to English majors, which journalist Matt Taibbi happens to be. "One of the bold new voices in journalism," the whole of him (not just his voice) spoke Monday at Ithaca College.

To keep you interested, I'll intersperse random interesting facts throughout this entry.

What initially struck me about Taibbi was his openness. He didn't sugarcoat anything. He admitted to having a drug problem in Russia, said there were no profound moral reasons behind a lot of his life choices, and declared his favorite Johnny Depp movie was Edward Scissorhands. It's geting journalists to translate this honesty off the job to their writing that is the problem.

The majority of Taibbi's presentation focused on one independent media operation, The eXile, published for the American expatriate community in Russia. The rest was about his life and why Mainstream American media, which "is sometimes only tangentially [focused on] telling the truth" fails in the truth it does attempt to tell.

Fact: It is all subjective reality. The only truth is there there is none. Shantih. Shantih. Shantih.

From Taibbi's account, The eXile was a perfectly absurd, post-modern publication. It examined the rules of traditional journalism and produced writing that did the opposite. Rather than putting a b.s. story on the front page, it would be left blank with no headline and no top story. Rather than relying on a consistent style so the audience would buy a brand, the paper changed styles based on what the publishers thought looked good. The paper even put out an issue in French, which annoyed the advertisers because the expatriate community could not understand the ads.

Fact: Matt Taibbi played in the MBA, the Mongolian Basketball Association.

Most of all, the writing was open, free. Taibbi described it as the way journalists talked about their stories, versus what they would actually write, more on that later. It got bold. The paper even put out an issue with a picture of then-(living)-president Boris Yeltsin with the headline, "DIE ALREADY!" (It might be a good thing the authorities were not reading the paper. Russia is notorious for journalists being murdered, with 91 deaths between 1996 and 2006.)

Lucky as he may be, the point is that Taibbi practiced a sort of political absurdism that seems like the dream of Tom Stoppard. And it thrived because it had a captive audience - American expatriates in Russia. Well, actually it thrived because it had captive advertisers - Russian club owners wishing to cater to well-off American expatriates. But it's fun to pretend journalism works the other way around.

Fact: Matt Taibbi did a lot of drugs. So did Hunter S. Thompson.

The style Taibbi began to develop at The eXile was one he would pursue for the rest of his life. The way he sees it, it's a more personal, engaging form of journalism. That's where the post structuralism comes in. In traditional American journalism, you have to deconstruct the news if you truly want to understand the story. A journalist for the New York Times is writing through the mouthpiece of an "objective tone," when in reality (hopefully) the journalist experienced the events described in the article and had feelings about what happened. Writers must keep their opinions to themselves and often write euphemistically. Instead of "John Kerry can't make up his mind," Taibbi said, it becomes "John Kerry has nuanced opinions." All you get is a false reality.

Fact: "John Kerry has nuanced opinions" as a text string yields no google results...Until now!

For Taibbi, writing is supposed to be as clear as possible so you don't have to cut through extra b.s. Rather than creating a story and looking for a way to write it, Taibbi looked for a story and created it by experiencing it and writing about his experience. When a journalist is personal and open, at least you know that the news is being delivered with a point of view. If a new station claims to be "Fair and Balanced" while reporting unfair and skewed news, how different is it from a propaganda machine?

The direction Taibbi pursued is one growing now in alternative media. A point of view is a thing to be celebrated, not hidden behind the columns of a newspaper. What I would like to see more, though, is Taibbi's sense of absurdism. The eXile presented news that could be funny one day, serious the next. That's how life is, though, as Taibbi pointed out. One day you're celebrating Christmas with your family, the next your girlfriend breaks up with you over text message.

Fact: True story.

Because this newer model of news presentation more closely imitates life, I would argue it's in many ways a higher form of truth. Too much journalism does not speak the truth. The journalist instead puts a story through a strainer that too often removes the aspects that make it what is is.

For example, when i was just beginning my studies in journalism, I used to hate my home state journalist Bob Braun. Somehow he would find some way to inject himself into everything he wrote. I wasn't reading the news, but the experiences he went through. When I came home this summer I began to actually like him, recognizing that he was not removing things from the story. He would be as honest as possible about the people he met. Braun is a bit of a crusader, but every time you read his stories you know where he is coming from.

Same with Matt Taibbi. He's done drugs. He's made up a story for a Russian newspaper. He's written a scathing review of his own book.

Journalism, it seems, is becoming whatever a person wants it to be and will be read by whatever reader needs it that way. For Taibbi, it's iconoclasm written in hilarious prose in an attempt to capture the absurdity of it all.

Fact: It's all absurd.

Bad News for the Business School

It seems the front page of every paper these days is dominated by business stories. Business, and more specifically the economy, is the news for the time being. Editors and journalists have to keep these stories fresh and interesting. So while the headline of this week's issue of The Ithacan, "Beat the Recession" did not grab my attention, the right-hand column did.

"Dean Accepts Offer for New Employment."

We've seen stories like this before, most notably in 2007 when Dean of the Business School Susan Engelkemeyer decided she would in fact stay at Ithaca, despite being in selection pools at two other schools.

This time she's leaving for good, heading for UMass Dartmouth. The Ithacan reported:

Engelkemeyer said she will leave to take a deanship at a larger institution with more majors and students. She said the new position will allow her to be closer to her family in Massachusetts.

Those motives seem pure enough, and indeed, Engelkemeyer has done much for the business school in her four years. The Ithaca Journal reports (and by reports, I mean took the press release and added a sentence at the top):

Under Engelkemeyer's leadership, the Ithaca College School of Business earned initial accreditation by The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, attained a 17-year high in undergraduate first-year student enrollment and an all-time high in MBA enrollment and has been included in the "Best 290 Business Schools," published by Princeton Review.

I know from students I've talked with that she did a heck of a lot of fund raising. And we all know her greatest accomplishment, the business school's transition into the Dorothy D. and Roy H. Park Center for Business and Sustainable Enterprise (the only sustainable building I have ever seen to use flat screen TVs as menus).

However, I get the feeling she's sort of leaving the business school in the lurch. The business school right now is still searching for an assistant dean to fill the shoes of Meg Nowak, who left in Novenmber 2007. She was the replacement for Hugh Rowland, who left in 2005. Professor Hormoz Movassaghi has been in and out of the temporary associate dean position, filling in wherever needed, since Rowland left.

Now the school must search for a head dean as well, a no-doubt laborious process. But there's no word of that in the article, no fears from students or staff that the school now essentially lacks both deans. Nothing on the changing times and doubt and what this means for the future of the business school. The Ithacan article only focuses on the positives; the only negative quote is quickly twisted positive:

Jeff Lippitt, associate professor and chair of the accounting department, said Engelkemeyer has been good for the school but losing a dean is never easy.

“It always creates uncertainty when a dean leaves,” he said. “But it also [creates] the possibility for a new start and a new direction.”

I do not know enough about the inner-workings of the business school to comment on whether that new direction would be good or bad, but I do know this: there are business majors out there who are concerned. Parkies will remember the terror and anger when Park School Dean Dianne Lynch briefly decided to head to Berkeley before determining it would be better to stay.

I imagine it's a fear like that. But unlike Park, the School of Business will not be getting its dean back.

The Future of Journalism?

Science Fiction as Journalism? Maybe. I'm experimenting with the concept of putting legitimate news inside a story, and Sci-Fi seemed the easiest way to do it. If this turns out to be feasible I'll try my next idea: integrating poetry and journalism.

Without further adieu,

Nataraja
Chapter One: The Dance

"Look on my works, ye Mighty..."

...and despair.

Vijay knew he'd heard those words somewhere before. Something biblical, maybe? No. A quick Google search on his phone found they were the words of P.B. Shelly speaking through Ozymandias, the Greek name for the Great Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses II.

That made sense. Ozymandias was the name of the character speaking. Vijay was beginning the penultimate chapter of Watchmen, and with any luck he'd get through it before his lunch break was over.

"Multi-screen viewing is seemingly anticipated by Burroughs' cut-up technique," read the comic. "He suggested re-arranging words and images to evade rational analysis, allowing subliminal hints of the future to leak through..."

That was interesting. Vijay had always seen himself more like The Architect from the Matrix films, a man watching the swarming of every creature that creeped upon earth. But he always knew that was not a completely accurate analogy. As Senior Data Analyst for the Journal, America's foremost right-wing news aggregator, Vijay's job was to try to track every story that ever might break.

A bite of rice. A sip of beer. The job was easier when he was a little loose. Too much concentration and he was liable to miss something.

Ozymandias continued. "...An emergent worldview becomes gradually discernible amidst the media's white noise. This jigsaw fragment model of tomorrow aligns itself piece by piece, specific areas necessarily obscured by indeterminacy. However, broad assumptions regarding this postulated future may be drawn. We can imagine its ambience. We can hypothesize its psychology."

Ozymandias sat before his hundred television screens, each with video screaming for attention. Not unlike Vijay, who for eight hours a day watched a half-dozen computer screens, each swarming with hundreds of dots, each dot representing a story, or at least the possibility of one. The more people who wrote about a subject or linked to an article, the bigger the dots became. Digg and Google had developed similar software in the early 2000s, but the Journal's was more comprehensive. It filtered out information known to be false or untrustworthy, based on parameters Vijay set. The information was still on the Net, but it would not show up on front pages of the Journal.

Liberal, conservative, it didn't matter. Since the earliest days of newspapers it was common for editors to read the work of competitors. Vijay had to watch everything because sometimes liberals were his best friend. Bittergate broke when a blogger supporting Obama spoke about those gun-loving Pennsylvanians. What Vijay was searching for was quality.

This was hard to come by, given the millions of bloggers, hundreds of worldwide news sources, and thousands of citizen journalists "employed" by the World Journal, the best of whom were paid. It was crowd sourcing at its best. It was a nightmare, the staggering amount of false information that was tossed around the pipes, growing faster than bacteria in a petri dish. Part of Vijay's job was pruning: trimming the glut of stories whose information was not correct. He always aired on the side of caution, but there were sites so dastardly that they were banned alltogether.

A constant gardener, Vijay would nurture those stories that were factual and deemed important to the American right-wing. They would be featured in special sections of the Journal (front page if they were lucky), recommended to other sites, forwarded to the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Wall Street Journal, those last now-endowed bastions of "unbiased" truth in America. Some, not many, of the old papers were still around, most of them online, most of them now with a point of view. That was the only way for them to survive the rough times of the early 2000s.

Times were better now. You could get paid for your stories as a citizen journalist and if you got lucky or wrote well you would be hired by an outlet. Then you could rise up and one day be like Vijay Natarajan, the man whose job was to play god with what you know. He knew the dance of information better than anyone else, predicted patterns others would not see. And he could control it all. Sure, he had to file daily reports accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, but he was an honest man by nature. Very few people were paid to watch the world's data stream, and no one else had technology as strong as the Journal's.

There's a Reason Enron Field is Gone

Given my post yesterday, I was very excited to pick up the Wall Street Journal this morning and read the front page headline, "Citigroup Explores Breaking Mets Deal." [WSJ Online is by subscription, but you can check out a summary here.]

The deal would give Citigroup, Inc. naming rights to the new Mets stadium in a 20 year, $400 million marketing deal.

This comes on the heels of a letter by U.S. Representatives Dennis Kicinich (D., Ohio) and Ted Poe (R., Texas) advising Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner:

"Citigroup is not dependent on the support of the federal government for its survivall as an institution...As such, we do not believe Citigroup ought to spend $400 million to name a stadium at the same time that they accept over $350 billion in taxpayer support and guarantees."

But Citigroup says it is locked into a deal. A CNN report detailing how Citigroup does intend to spend its $45 billion in bailout funds read:

Citigroup told CNN in a statement though that it has a "legally binding agreement" with the Mets, and that it is "using no TARP capital for Citi Field, or for marketing purposes."

One must, of course, consider the fee that Citigroup would have to pay to back out. Plus that might set a "bad precedent." According to an executive quoted in the Journal:

"If we cave for political reasons, it will have enormous implications for our ability to contract with third parties."

Oh, really? I thought it was problems in "contracting" with "third parties" that caused this whole mess. Shouldn't your new financial backers (read: taxpayers) have some say in the way you operate? If you don't want to be influenced by politics, don't beg the government for taxpayer money.

There is hope in sight, however. The Journal goes on to make a very astute observation,

If Citigroup parts ways with the Mets, other financial institutions may find themselves under pressure to reconsider sports-marketing deals.

Right now, it's a spin on the prisoner's dilemma for the banking giants. If one defects, they will all be pushed to follow suit in an attempt to seem benevolent. If none defect, they will be able to remain as they are, mistrusted by the public but still operating on their own terms. The greatest hope is that one will crack under public pressure and set the precedent for the rest. Citigroup may be the first, given its report on spending and its consideration of backing out of the deal.


A note:
The article doesn't go here, but I would like to know exactly how banks benefit from these deals. Does the stadium just act as a giant billboard and place for people to sign up for bank accounts? I'm operating on the assumption that this is just $400 million worth of advertisements that will not be recouped, and I would like to see how else Citigroup intends to capitalize (as in, you know, make money) on the deal.

Tracking a Story

"Poor men wanna be rich,
rich men wanna be kings,
And a king ain't satisfied
till he rules everything."

Perhaps Springsteen should have played "Badlands" in yesterday's halftime show. But that might have been too real - the Super Bowl is all about escaping the world for one Sunday evening, right?

That's what Bank of America must think, anyway.

The Huffington Post headline this morning read: "Bailed Out Bank Spends Millions on Super Bowl Activities." It linked to an ABC News article on Bank of America's corporate sponsorship of the multi-million dollar "NFL Experience," a five-day carnival/midway/bazaar held outside of Raymond James Stadium. This is on top of an estimated $10 million in corporate sponsorship.

Granted, there had to be some contract. But Tom Schatz, president of the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste, notes that:

"The Super Bowl is a big deal, but it's a bigger deal that Bank of America is being bailed out by the America taxpayers," Schatz said. "This is an exceptional year and it's a time to say we're not going to do business as usual. We're going to say no, we're going to show some restraint, and we're going to cut back on something that really isn't absolutely necessary."

The Drudge Report also linked to the article (the headline was about the actual game). A bunch of bloggers picked up on it, but the only mainstream media article linked to is that ABC article. The media were all over that game. Where is everyone else's coverage?

I was confused a bit by NPR's coverage of the game versus the economy. Linton Weeks writes:

At a time when many Americans have to choose between groceries and gasoline, the idea of paying a grown man $78,000 for playing on the winning football team (in addition to the millions he is already hauling in) makes the executives of Bank of America look like pikers.

[A piker (I didn't know this) is one who makes small bets.] That assertion is nonsensical, considering Bank of America received $45 billion dollars in bailout money, $20 billion of which is said to be for problems caused by the purchase of Merrill Lynch. And they are not revealing how that money is being spent. Well, sort of. I suppose some of it must have gone toward a Super Bowl party...or something.

The NPR article continued:

And if you need more evidence, Playboy and Sports Illustrated have canceled their Super Bowl soirees this year. Maxim magazine has trimmed back its party plans. And the Tampa Tribune is reporting that corporate jet traffic may be less than expected.

"No one is immune from the economy," said Reid Sigmon, the Super Bowl host committee's executive director, "not [even] the NFL."

Though according to a Tampa Bay Tribune article, the parties in the corporate suites were pretty nice:

The corporate suites were filled with a "who's who" of corporate America. AT&T, Motorola, NBC and Pepsi. Even some executives from institutions that have received billions in corporate bailout money watched the game from suites. Capital One, Wachovia and Bank of America had suites with all the trimmings.

Today, perhaps it will be back to business as usual, including finding some way to scrape together the $7 million to keep the Carolina Panthers playing in Bank of America Stadium.