Media doing a poor job, but maybe not for the reasons you think

Sure, the mainstream media stinks—but maybe not for the reasons you think.

Date published: 5/22/2005

ISN’T THE NEWS terrible?

That was the rhetorical question posed by the late British culture critic Raymond Williams in the 1970s. He was referring to the quality of reporting, not the events being reported (though they were often bad, too).

These days there are plenty of people who share Williams’ belief that the MSM (that’s “mainstream media” to the unhip) are pretty rotten. But the most common—and certainly the loudest—media bashers among us are the intellectual descendants not of Williams but of another revered culture critic of the ’70s: Spiro Agnew.

Like all great minds, Agnew was misunderstood by many of his contemporaries. A lot of highbrow types made fun of him for branding the media “nattering nabobs of negativity.”

Granted, this wasn’t the kind of phrase that would ever have cachet on university campuses and in coffeehouses, but it expressed the attitude of much of “middle America”—which is code for “conservative white people,” or sometimes “angry and resentful conservative white people.”

Today these folks—let’s call them neo-Agnewites —are ascendant in our culture, and they’re continuing the crusade of the late, great vice president and his boss, Tricky Dick Nixon, who once growled to his staff: “Remember, the press is the enemy.”

When Newsweek screwed up its coverage of alleged Quran desecrations by U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, the neo-Agnewites pounced, condemning the article as yet another example of the “liberal” media’s eagerness to distort reality to make America and the Bush administration look bad.

The White House itself had a go at Newsweek. “The report has had serious consequences,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. “People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged.”

Now, there’s nothing wrong with slamming sloppy journalism. But sober minds have to admit that the recent outpouring of anger among Muslims didn’t occur just because of one magazine article.

The Newsweek piece may have stoked the coals of anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, but why were those coals already so hot? Could it be because the United States had done numerous other things to alienate and enrage many Muslims?

Let’s also bear in mind that no article can be blamed for shooting protesters— in this case, the cops in Afghanistan get credit for that.

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Date published: 5/22/2005