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Moore's Ax Falls on a Derelict Media Too |
Current rating: 0 |
by Neal Gabler
(No verified email address) |
07 Jul 2004
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What Moore and the film have done is take dead aim on one of the most sacred of journalistic shibboleths: the idea that journalists are supposed to be fair and balanced. This isn't just a function of Moore having a point of view to push; there have always been provocateurs. Rather it is a function of the film revealing the harm that balance has done to our public discourse and the distortions it has promoted. |
No one can accuse documentarian and bedraggled, beer-bellied gadfly Michael Moore of having a hidden agenda. He has raised a firestorm of controversy and generated a torrent of publicity not only by bludgeoning President Bush with his feature-length attack, "Fahrenheit 9/11," but also by declaring that he made the film in hopes of booting Bush from office.
In the end, he isn't likely to affect the presidential race. But "Fahrenheit 9/11" may have an altogether different effect: a change in the practice and the values of journalism. What Moore and the film have done is take dead aim on one of the most sacred of journalistic shibboleths: the idea that journalists are supposed to be fair and balanced. This isn't just a function of Moore having a point of view to push; there have always been provocateurs. Rather it is a function of the film revealing the harm that balance has done to our public discourse and the distortions it has promoted.
The words "fair and balanced" have been largely discredited in recent years because of the Fox News Channel, which uses them to mean not that Fox takes an objective, evenhanded approach to the news but that the cable channel is redressing the purported liberal bias of the mainstream news media, balancing them. But Fox aside, the idea of "fair and balanced" is still a mainstay of most journalistic practice, at least in theory. Reporters are not supposed to take sides. For every pro on one side of the scale there must be a con on the other. If the 9/11 commission declares that there is absolutely no credible evidence of any collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, the press must also prominently post Vice President Dick Cheney's view that there was a relationship, whether he provides evidence or not. If the preponderance of scientific opinion says global warming threatens the environment, the press must still interview the handful of scientists who dismiss it. That's just the way it is.
And then into this staid and carefully counterpoised media culture came Moore, who chortled on "The Daily Show" recently that he was unfair and unbalanced. But he was only half right. Obviously "Fahrenheit 9/11" is not balanced in its approach to Bush. There are no Bush spokesmen giving the Bush spin. But by the same token, virtually every factual statement in the film, as distinguished from Moore's interpretation of those facts, is accurate. In short, the film isn't balanced, but it may be fair.
Even before Fox appropriated them, the words "fair and balanced" had been yoked as if they were somehow synonymous, but if by "fair" one means objective and unbiased, then more often than not "fair" and "balanced" may be mutually exclusive. To cite one glaring example of just how balance can transmogrify into unfairness, there is the story of a television host who once invited Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt on his program and then had a Holocaust denier as a counterweight, implying that the two sides were equally credible.
It should come as no surprise that conservatives have increasingly relied on this little journalistic loophole. They have come to realize that they can do all sorts of things, the more egregious the better, and the press will not call them out because balance, if not fairness, requires that the press not seem to be piling on. So the Bush administration can fashion a prescription drug program that is a shameless giveaway to the industry or continue to insist that the war in Iraq is the front line in the war on terror, knowing full well that the press will not report a giveaway as a giveaway or a trumped-up link to terror as a trumped-up link without also giving at least equal measure to the administration's own spin, even if it is demonstrably false.
At the same time, the adherence to balance that has so clearly aided conservatives has made liberals seem like the hapless fellow in a science fiction movie who keeps trying to convince everyone that the kindly new neighbors are actually aliens, only to be dismissed as a paranoid. Take Bill Clinton. However one felt about Clinton, it was perfectly obvious that the right had conspired to gang up on him just as he and Hillary said, though the press shrugged off the charge. After all, to privilege it wouldn't have been balanced.
In noisily forswearing balance for genuine fairness, Moore has shamed an American press corps that, for fear of offending conservatives, refused to report what Moore was now reporting — everything from the cursory interviews the FBI conducted with members of Osama bin Laden's family in America before letting them leave to the eagerness of big business in exploiting Iraq to the astonishing fact that only one of the 535 members of Congress has a child serving in the military in Iraq. And that shame, added to the film's success, may be the reason why Moore has not been summarily dismissed by the mainstream media as a left-wing shill.
The media know that whatever "Fahrenheit 9/11" exposes about Bush, it also has exposed something arguably even more important about them: that balance is itself bias and that under its cover they have protected a president whose administration, if examined fairly, may very well be indefensible.
Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC's Annenberg School for Communication, is author of "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality."
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/ |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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Re: Moore's Ax Falls on a Derelict Media Too |
by gehrig
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
07 Jul 2004
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Gabler's right; some stories just don't have two sides -- they have several, or they have two that aren't equally meritorious, and the cookie-cutter nature of reporting can imply a non-existent parity between two very unequal sides. He gives the classic example:
Gabler: "there is the story of a television host who once invited Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt on his program and then had a Holocaust denier as a counterweight, implying that the two sides were equally credible."
If I'm remembering this incident right, Lipstadt immediately withdrew from the program upon learning this, and for exactly the right reason: some stories just don't have two sides.
@%< |
