How the Liars Get Away With So Much, Part 1

Why are facts and reality always on the defensive? Why do lies - from Iraq's WMDs to creationism to climate change denialism to death panels to "tax cuts increase revenue" always get top billing, despite mountains of proof to the contrary?

There are multiple factors and everyone has his own pet theory, but let's start with one addressed by The Nation in a recent cover story: the infestation of cable news by corporate lobbyists.

These incidents represent only a fraction of the covert corporate influence peddling on cable news, a four-month investigation by The Nation has found. Since 2007 at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials--people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests--have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC and Fox Business Network with no disclosure of the corporate interests that had paid them. Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens--and in some cases hundreds--of appearances.

For lobbyists, PR firms and corporate officials, going on cable television is a chance to promote clients and their interests on the most widely cited source of news in the United States. These appearances also generate good will and access to major players inside the Democratic and Republican parties. For their part, the cable networks, eager to fill time and afraid of upsetting the political elite, have often looked the other way. At times, the networks have even disregarded their own written ethics guidelines. Just about everyone involved is heavily invested in maintaining the current system, with the exception of the viewer.

While lobbyists and PR flacks have long tried to spin the press, the launch of Fox News and MSNBC in 1996 and the Clinton impeachment saga that followed helped create the caldron of twenty-four-hour political analysis that so many influence peddlers call home. Since then, guests with serious conflicts of interest have popped up with alarming regularity on every network. Just examine their presence in coverage of the economic crash and the healthcare reform debate, two recent issues that have engendered massive cable coverage.

Bad news for liberals: the worst violator appears to be MSNBC, and even our beloved Howard Dean is a registered lobbyist for Big Pharma.

Sebastion Jones goes into great detail on the extent and history of this phenomenon, but barely touches on what I see as the real failure behind the dependence on lobbyists:

Substituting pundits and analysts (or what the Rude Pundit calls "analpundits") spouting opinion or corporate spin for reporters reporting facts.

Remember reporters? Wingnuts love to whine about Walter Cronkite's supposedly revealing his liberal bias when he announced live during the CBS evening news that the Vietnam War was unwinnable. But Cronkite didn't get that "opinion" from armchair peaceniks at The New Republic, the way Faux gets its marching orders from the fat-assed warmongers at National Review.

No, Cronkite was a reporter. He went to Vietnam and tramped through the jungle himself, asking questions and listening to what the grunts on the ground had to say, and developed a logical conclusion based on facts, reality, and his own experience of covering other wars.

For (Aaron) Brown, though, the lack of disclosure is symptomatic of larger problems in cable journalism, rooted in the shift to putting numerous analysts and strategists on television as an easy, inexpensive way to fill time. It's "a lot cheaper than sending a correspondent to Afghanistan," he says.

"What I find unconscionable about this is that it's not like a struggling newspaper is looking for an inexpensive way to do journalism because they have no money. These are highly successful profit centers for the corporations that they're spawned from," Brown said.

SNIP

Jay Rosen, a media critic and journalism professor at New York University, has a different take. "More disclosure is good--I'm certainly in favor of that--but why are these people on at all?" asks Rosen. "They have views and can manufacture opinions around any event at any time."

Rosen echoes something Brown mentioned to me. Watching cable news cover the 2008 election with more analysts crammed at one table than ever before--as if to ask, "How many people can we put on the set at one time?"--Brown said he was "amazed how little they had to offer." He went on, "We live in a time where there are no shortages of opinions and an incredible deficit of facts."

Up until 20, maybe even just 10 years ago, you could count on newspapers, which then still employed more reporters than opinionators, to keep the television analpundits somewhat restrained by printing the facts of the reality-based world.

But even the Gray Lady herself has turned into a pox-ridden whore for the military-industrial complex, as evidenced by the Times allowing Judith Miller to fuck and lie this country into the Iraq catastrophe.

The most terrifying part is that there is no longer anyplace anyone can go to find actual facts that are accepted as such by a majority of the population. If Faux reported that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, liberals would go outside to double-check. And if MSNBC reported that burning coal cures cancer, wingnuts would suspect a conspiracy.

A popular liberal trope today is "you're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts." But if the only "facts" we have are derived from opinions, then reality itself has no place to stand.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....