Steve Leitner's Journal

To understand the way media handles “contested scientific issues”—situations where scientific knowledge as political relevance and “major policy ramifications”—I suggest we only need to look at a single issue, global climate change. Here, the basic guiding principal for coverage and reporting is revealed: the media allegiance to Industry* trumps all else. Given this, I find Chris Mooney’s recent CJR article, “Blinded Science”, a fantastic example of my perception of much of the mainstream media criticism. An author begins with a good idea, but often seems to fail to address the real problems; in doing so, incoherent or redundant solutions are offered up, and perhaps accepted, as being quite sensible. Let me explain:

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OTM’s “Tender is the Night” consisted of an interview with Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Jonathan Storm and host Bob Garfield about the new election polling consortium, the National Election Pool. It’s replacing the Voter News Service (VNS), which dissolved after the 2002 election. However, the VNS’s problems started famously in 2000 presidential race, when it played a role in ‘the media’s’ now-notorious election-day coverage.

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With the first elections since the overthrow of the Taliban coming up soon in Afghanistan, and the democracy of these elections resting in some part upon the ‘freedom of the press’, my OTM piece “Thin Air” examines the condition of the Afghan media and the progress it has made.

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Okay, so the ‘”duh’ factor” of Outfoxed: Robert Murdoch’s War on Journalism’s premise may be a bit of a turn-off at first. However, I think the film goes beyond just stating evidence to support a conclusion that many, including myself, consider self- evident: Fox News’ is nothing more than a “conservative” propaganda machine. Director Robert Greenwald has, in fact, made an important contribution by demonstrating the danger in simply writing off Fox News as biased and leaving it at that. Outfoxed exposes the internal mechanisms of this remarkably influential and effective propaganda machine. It provides some relevant and largely valid discussion of the broader implications posed by Fox News and offers some opinions on what effects the network has already produced.

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Unusually strong feelings of anticipation among the media and public for the upcoming presidential debates would be understandable considering the high-stakes and viciously contested presidential race playing out before us. This is notion of drama is reflected and examined by interviewer Brooke Gladstone and guest journalist James Fallows in OTM’s “Mano a Mano”. The discussion featured some thoughtful comparison and speculation on the two candidates debating records and contrasting strengths and weaknesses; Fallows assures us this will be the “clash of the debate titans”. Despite all this excitement, the piece’s most important insights come the analysis is turned to the performance and function of the “the debate”. Brooke and Fallows treat the debate as a distinct media object or mechanism that upon close inspection appears to reflect many of theories of function and operation that are also attributed to the larger system of television media, as outlined by authors David Marc and John Fiske.

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