I distrust the media. This is entirely separate from believing the media to be biased, and it is also separate from believing that the media intentionally sets out to deceive. My distrust goes to the nature of our visual news medium and, I realized in conversation tonight with my family, dates back to October 17, 1989.
I was on vacation on October 17, 1989. My friend and I came back from a raft trip and, as we were walking through the parking lot, heard a strutting teenage boy boast to two awestruck teenage girls that San Francisco had been destroyed by an earthquake. My friend and I discounted his story, which we assumed was a complete put-on to impress the girls. When we returned to our hotel room, though, we saw on CNN that a large earthquake had, in fact, struck the San Francisco Bay Area. I was terribly worried about my parents, who lived in the City, not to mention wondering whether I had a home awaiting my return. CNN had non-stop footage of devastation — collapsed buildings, flames leaping into the sky, freeways destroyed, etc. After an hour of this, I stopped worrying just about my family and my own home, and started wondering whether the City would ever rise again.
And then I watched another hour and caught on to something. There had definitely been severe damage, with the highest loss of life tied to the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland. Someone had also died when a single span of the top section of the Bay Bridge collapsed. But these were extremely local problems — tragic, but defined. And as I watched more and more footage, I realized, as only a San Franciscan could, that the other footage — the collapsed buildings and the fires — were in just two locations. One was the Marina District, which had long been a disaster waiting to happen, since all the houses were built on sand and fill. The other was a single corner in downtown San Francisco. Sure, CNN could change the camera angles all it wanted, which would mislead those not familiar with the City, but to one familiar with the City’s geography, the ruination was just as defined as that which occurred on the Nimitz or the Bay Bridge.
When I eventually returned home, I was able to confirm my realization that CNN was using visuals to make the disaster seem further reaching than it was. The City was still without power in many neighborhoods when I got back, but in other neighborhoods, life was untouched. My parents lost a TV and a plate. I came home to find one of my pictures hanging crooked. (My parents and I lived in buildings built into rock.) Some of my colleagues had, sadly, lost their homes entirely; others had lost knick knacks or had damage to their cars. All had frightening stories to relate about escaping from the highrises. It had been an adventure for everyone, an inconvenience for many, and a life terminating tragedy for 66 people. Economic losses were huge.
What the earthquake wasn’t, was the Armageddon-like tragedy that CNN had been pushing on its newscast. In the same way, while Hurricane Katrina was truly a disaster, it too wasn’t another Armageddon-like tragedy, complete with cannibalism, no matter what the MSM was touting.
It’s true that the media’s pushing the tragic dimensions of Hurricane Katrina had a definite political edge to it — given the media’s hostility to the Bush administration. The same, however, cannot be said for the Loma Prieta quake reporting. This reporting was devoid of political orientation, and the MSM still managed to present it as the End of Days. This is the nature of a visual medium. In the competitive world of modern news, one old adage still drives the press: “If it bleeds, it leads.” And there is no better way to present that oh-so-attractive blood than to point the cameras at the nearest tragedy, regardless of the normalcy surrounding that tight shot. Visual balance doesn’t sell TV commercials.
And so I distrust the press. The latest example, of course, was CNN’s tawdry coverage of Hezbollah neighborhoods, a journey its reporters took with a Hezbollah tour guide. Mark Steyn rightly compared this to the useful idiots walking placidly through Trezienstadt, clinging to their ignorance about the ultimate fate of the violin playing Jewish inmates they so admired. Even the CNN reporters, while they wouldn’t admit in their own broadcast to their visual game-playing, conceded that they had absolutely no idea what the truth was, and were just going for the good photo-ops. To the extent the reporters are probably less pro-Israel than I am, they may not have minded the little charade they played. But again, I’ll acquit them of political malice and just say that their shoddy, dishonest reporting has its roots in the inherent falsity of the visual medium in which they work.
So, next time you watch the news, remember not to believe everything you see.
Talking to Technorati: Media, Media dishonesty, Loma Prieta, Propaganda, Useful idiots
Filed under: Media matters |
Bookworm Room (ARCHIVES) 
For someone to disbelieve their eyes, they would have to disobey their biological and genetic imperative that demands belief in what the eyes see.
Just imagine what someone with a slightly duller mind than Bookworm’s, trying to handle the perceptions of the situation. By appealing to the common denominator, they are not doing humanity any favors.
Loved your post. I stopped trusting the news in the early 90s when CNN and The Weather Channel proclaimed coffins floating away after severe flooding in a smalltown in Alabama – a smalltown where my grandfather is buried. After several phone calls to locals, it was revealed that the news reports were all lies. For awhile there, though, my mom was crying because the news convinced her that her poor father was floating down the road and would possibly be lost forever.
For my wife, it was seeing television reporters in her home town egging kids to throw rocks at windows for footage during the 1960s race riots. For me, it was Walter Cronkite sonorously pronouncing the Vietnamese Tet offensive to be a defeat for the U.S. when, in fact, it was a huge victory against what was supposed to be a last-gasp Communist offensive, as acknowledged by North Vietnamese General Giap.
Watching CSPAN for the first time did it for me. It was a fascinating symposium on the allegation that acid rain from the rust belt was destroying New England forests. The consensus among the experts was that it was arrant nonsense, but the evening news painted an entirely different picture.
That was a long time ago when CSPAN was apolitical before the Clintonistas put the pressure on and turned it into just another arm of the msm.
BTW – Bookworm, how did your friends and neighbors in SF react to CNN’s deliberately misrepresenting the damage done by the 1989 earthquake? The logical mind might deduce/infer that people would have been outraged.
Something you younger people might not know. When CNN first came on the scene, it was pretty even handed and apolitical. It wasn’t until a short time later when Jane Fonda got her hands on Turner that the worm started to turn and I regret to say, Fox News, except for Brit Hume’s hour, has also turned so it’s no better than CNN or the networks.
My denouement came when my last shrivelling hope turned to dross one morning in 1990, it was the front page of the Washington Post . Some elite– whose name I had scarcely heard–was given a picture and article about his being soon named to the US Supreme Court. Not only did it not happen, he was never on the rumored shortlist. I began to see the making of news on the front page as the prime aim of the WaPo. I dropped my subscription. (I admit to looking at a local story occasionally on the web.) The TV networks were “always” slanted and sometimes staged. I assumed the great NYT and WaPo were slanted, but honest. Not so.
I read the web to really get the news and I trust several people to give me more than radio. We turned off the TV several years ago, finding the TV news superfluous.
Thanks bookworm, for this vignette.
I was watching Black Hawk Down, and that was the first chip in the nail for me in terms of trusting Hollywood movies and shows. I didn’t watch news at all really, boring and not very understandable to me at the time. No interest in current events, mroe or less, back then. Still, BHD was a good movie that first caused me to question some of the anti-military biases in Hollywood shows and productions, that I had seen over the years.
After being burned on one topic, it still took awhile for me to internalize how the media fitted into things in terms of news.
Fantastic choice of example….so fantastic for me because I lived through it. I am a native San Franciscan who was working at an afterschool program at a Catholic school just up from Union St. That means I am in the Marina district. I lived just off Lombard St. My father was at Candlestick. For some reason, our phone was the only one on our block that worked for outgoing calls. As we and our neighbors called relatives and friends, they all thought that we were dead, injured, or had lost our houses because the Marina was gone. Argh!!
Also, the local press immediately started lauditory articles about how the projects were peaceful and there was no rioting or looting. Wrong! My father saw it on the way back from the ballpark and police officer friends verified it. But that story didn’t fit the storyline so out it went.
Last, the then-mayor Agnew came to Marina Junior High where many people who tagged out their flats were staying to announce a meeting about what would be done. The meeting was to be held at the Marina Green on the Bay about 6 blocks away. All the people trooped down there and many were elderly. Then, the mayor with the majestic Bay, bridge, etc. in the background and lots of cameras in front of him did a no-meaning speech with no details but did kindly let the crowd know that a further meeting would be held back at the jr. high with real details and info. Still, such a photo-op.
I was in college at the time (SFSU) and this was definitely one the chinks in my already weakening liberal armor. Taught me to take everything with a grain of salt.