Barthel gives four explanations, which we'll examine more closely in minute:
- They lacked a simple, relatively novel takeaway point....
- They did not have a direct, obvious impact on readers....
- They lacked compelling visuals....
- They didn't play into current political narratives....
Note that the first and last reasons are somewhat in tension, if not contradiction with one another: the first speaks of novelty, the last of familiarity. But before exploring further, consider how Salon's own Glenn Greenwald decribed the neglect of the first story the Friday before:
Remember how The?Washington Post spent three days documenting on its front page that we basically live under a vast Secret Government -- composed of military and intelligence agencies and the largest corporations -- so sprawling and unaccountable that nobody even knows what it does?? This public/private Secret Government spies, detains, interrogates, and even wages wars in the dark, while sucking up untold hundreds of billions of dollars every year for the private corporations which run it.? Has any investigative series ever caused less of a ripple than this one???After a one-day spate of television appearances for Dana?Priest and William Arkin -- most of which predictably focused on the bureaucratic waste they raised?along with whether the Post had Endangered the?Nation by writing about all of this -- the story faded blissfully into the ether, never to be heard from again, easily subsumed by the Andrew Breitbart and Journolist sagas.Any doubt about whether there'd be any meaningful?(or even cosmetic) changes as a result of the Post expos? (it was really more a compilation of already known facts) was quickly dispelled by the reaction of the political class:??not just one of indifference, but outright contempt for the concerns raised by this story. ?On Tuesday -- 24 hours after the first installment appeared -- the?Senate's?Homeland?Security Intelligence Committee removed a provision from the Intelligence Authorization Act which would have provided some marginally greater oversight over the Government's secret intelligence programs, because Obama was threatening to veto any bill providing for such oversight.? Then, Obama's nominee to be the next Director of?National Intelligence, Ret. Lt. Gen. James Clapper, all but laughed at the Post's work, dismissing it during his Senate confirmation hearing as "sensationalism," praising the bureaucratic redundancies as "competitive analysis," and insisting that the National?Security and?Surveillance State are perfectly "under control."? The?Post's Jeff Stein today documents how Congressional Democrats can barely rouse themselves to the pretense that they intend to do anything to impose any restraints or accountability on Top Secret America. ?And it was revealed this week by McClatchy that our vaunted "withdrawal of all combat troops from Iraq" will be accomplished only by assembling a privatized militia that will serve as the State Department's "army in Iraq" long after our actual army "withdraws."
Political elites don't even feel compelled to pretend to be able or willing to do anything about this.? Just think about this:??on Monday, the Post documents a vast Secret Government bequeathed with unimaginable secrecy and unaccountability, and the rest of the week is filled with stories of the administration's blocking greater oversight and plans to escalate the privitization of our National Security and Surveillance State. ?That's why there was so little government angst over the Post's "revelations": ?aside from the fact that it revealed little that wasn't already known?(Priest and?Arkin withheld substantial amounts of information at the Government's request), even the impact of having the Post trumpet these facts was not a threat to much of anything, since there's nobody in a position to do much about this even if they wanted to.??And few people seem to want to.
There is some slight overlap between Barthel's explantions and Greenwald's: the story did not fit with prevailing preferred elite narratives. But Greenwald provides a coherent explanation for what this means and why it so (in the paragraphs following the excerpt above). Barthel provides nothing similar, virtually no analysis at all--and, indeed, he actually adds to the obfuscations of hegemony, as we will see below.
As for Barthel's other points, Greenwald acknowledges that most of the reported facts aren't new--but the picture they paint surely is, at least for the Post's national audience. That picture is, in Greenwald's words, "that we basically live under a vast Secret Government -- composed of military and intelligence agencies and the largest corporations -- so sprawling and unaccountable that nobody even knows what it does." And that's a pretty good " simple, relatively novel takeaway point," despite Barthel's claim to the contrary.
But look at what else Greenwald noted: "the story faded blissfully into the ether, never to be heard from again, easily subsumed by the Andrew Breitbart and Journolist sagas," neither of which had "a direct, obvious impact on readers" or "a simple, relatively novel takeaway point," or even particularly "compelling visuals" (at least until folks started reacting to the media coverage--a phenomena that very well could have arisen with either of the stories Barthel puzzles over, if the media had picked up on them.) In short, the more one looks at Barthel's "explanations", the less and less they actually explain--at least about the media non-response. But they do tell us something about how that non-response is rationalized. So let's look at them some more. Here's the entirety of his first point:
- They lacked a simple, relatively novel takeaway point. Absent a newsworthy revelation that can be conveyed in a headline, neither readers nor media figures will have much interest in digging deeper into a complicated story. Though both investigations provided a rich trove of information, neither prominently presented anything that could be said to be a new scandal. As publishers of political books know, this scandal doesn't need to be as important as the surrounding story, it just needs to be new, interesting and simple.
Headlines? He wants headlines? NY Times headlines are notoriously dull, in the service of seeming serious and sober, so "View Is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan" is suitably ominous, if understated. But how about "Pakistan Aids Insurgency in Afghanistan, Reports Assert"? Although it's not news to serious war critics, for just about everyone else, that surely qualifies as "a simple, relatively novel takeaway point.... a newsworthy revelation that can be conveyed in a headline." And for the Post's story, "A hidden world, growing beyond control" may be a bit vague, but it's also mysterious and menacing. If it's good enough for a movie trailer (as it clearly is), then it's good enough for a compelling headline--and the picture painted in the story itself lives up to the promise.
And what of Barthel's claim that "neither prominently presented anything that could be said to be a new scandal"? This is a classic rhetorical move of the Versailles media: dismissively under-report a story for years, so that no one can get their arms around it by reading your coverage alone, and then when the story finally breaks out into the open (for whatever reason), you dismiss it as "old news". In short, this is not an explanation for citizen disinterest, it's a rationalization for media disinterest.
Barthel's next two points, "They did not have a direct, obvious impact on readers" and "They lacked compelling visuals" are derived from good, standard advice for working journalists--and particularly for assignment editors. But most newspaper stories lack compelling visuals by tv standards--and so do most cable tv stories, too. (One of the things Rachel Maddow does particularly well is visually illustrate her stories.) Neither Watergate nor the Pentagon Papers had compelling visuals in and of themselves, but they were epochal stories that defined a generation. What's more, they only had "a direct, obvious impact on readers" because of the political environment of the times. And this is the key: These two points are actually vehicles for legitimizing the one genuine reason Barthel offers--although even here he fails to recognize it for what it is: the power of predominant hegemonic narratives. If we examine his somewhat bungled account of this last point, we can then look back at the middle two points with much greater clarity. Here it is in its entirety:
- They didn't play into current political narratives. Both stories conveyed a sense of government incompetence and failure, which were hallmarks of the press's coverage of the late Bush administration. Under Obama, they've harped on government overreach, not government incompetence. Though both concerned current issues in some way, the major criticism of the way the government works didn't have much resonance to current concerns.
Here Barthel simply takes "current political narratives" as given. He never stops to ask "Why are these the current political narratives?" Once you do that, something amazing happens. You realize that:
- (1) Casting the late Bush Administration as exemplifying
In short, once one starts asking "why?", the explanation of why these two stories failed to catch on becomes a searing indictment of the press as a whole, rather than a criticism of the "failed" stories it is supposed to diagnose.
With this in mind, let's look at his two middle points. First:
- They did not have a direct, obvious impact on readers. Readers will be uninterested in pursuing a complicated story unless it affects them in some way. The WikiLeaks document trove ultimately isn't the new Pentagon Papers because of the absence of a draft. Nobody likes the war in Afghanistan particularly, but most of us don't know the soldiers coming home in body bags. Similarly, though the national security fiasco in "Top Secret America" is incredibly wasteful, it doesn't seem to involve any new intrusions on our privacy, as warrantless wiretapping did.
The fact that the WikiLeaks documents lack a high-level government draft is a complete red herring. Even if it did matter in some global sense (it does in some ways, but not others), it's completely out of place as part of an argument about impact on readers' lives, and as such reveals the shoddy reasoning at work. The fact that we don't have a draft, and that elites are entirely shielded from war's consequences are part of the hegemonic reshaping of America to make it more war-happy and conservative. But this doesn't mean that war has no impact on people. Money spent on war is not magical, it does drive up the deficit, and the war itself makes future terrorism more likely, not less. The fact that Barthel blissfullly ignores these facts in offering his "explanation" is evidence that this "explanation" is actually just another way of making the conservative hegemonic argument that this should not be a story.
There's another red herring, indicating yet more shoddy reasoning, when Barthel argues that "though the national security fiasco in 'Top Secret America' is incredibly wasteful, it doesn't seem to involve any new intrusions on our privacy", as if only new violations of privacy have an impact on readers. It is true that new stories about ongoing privacy violations may pack less punch, but that's at least partially because many people are demoralized by the fact that electing a Democrat to change all that has not made a bit of difference. As hope dies, denial--or at least disinterest--sets in to dull the pain. But this all traces back to hegemony, and solidifying conservative/neo-liberal elite consensus. All the rest is window-dressing.
Finally:
- They lacked compelling visuals. The Abu Ghraib story was an incredibly complicated one that came out only slowly, but those initial pictures of torture were undeniable. They conveyed the essence of the story in a split second. But the stories here lacked any such compelling visual that might serve as an accessible entry point to the larger issues.e
The Pentagon Papers, too, lacked compelling visuals. But it wasn't too terribly hard to connect them to nearly a decade of harrowing pictures that had come before. In the coverage of Afghanistan, such pictures have generally been suppressed, but still, they have been taken. The stories themselves (the Times, like the Guardian and Der Speigel ran multiple stories) could have been made more visually compelling by including some such visuals. But this isn't the NY Times style, and it seems perverse to argue that the agenda-setting paper of the nation should have to change its style to have this story make an impact. Anyone wanting to run with the story who felt the need for visuals could find them easily enough. You see, there's this thing called "the Internet"....
In short, this is yet another attempt to dress up the real culprit--elite hegemony--in the clothes of tradecraft advice that's entirely appropriate for your typical story of mis-government. But that advice does nothing at all to explain why such extraordinary stories have been largely ignored. Rather, it seeks to further normalize the extraordinarily dysfunction media and political system that we are now saddled with. In short, Barthel's "explanation" is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
No comments:
Post a Comment