Why media neutrality over the US presidential election is fuelling lies

Journalists' failure to challenge Paul Ryan's Tampa speech showed the lack of rigour and challenge

The Guardian
Emily Bell

When Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan closed his speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa last week with the emphatic incantation "let's get this done!", the inner pentagram of the Republican party was on its feet cheering its approval.

Cut back to the CNN studio where anchor Wolf Blitzer noted how enthusiastic the delegates seemed, although he also noted there were one or two items the fact-checkers might want to come back on. He had, he said, made a list of "seven or eight points" that might be contentious, but didn't mention what they were. Cut to a panel discussion for instant reaction, cut to Ryan and family looking pleased, cut back to the studio. Still no specifics on those pesky facts.

Meanwhile Democrats and those with reasonable knowledge of US politics were furiously filling the internet with accusations that the speech was at best disingenuous, at worst deliberately misleading. What about the car plant Ryan referred to – mocking Obama for talking about it lasting 100 years, yet it was closed within a year of his becoming president – when the Bush administration had closed it? Or chiding Obama for failing to act on a fiscal report when Ryan himself had sat on the committee which blocked the adoption of its recommendations ? Or his Medicaid calculations?

Back in the CNN studio, Blitzer finally felt comfortable listing the points where Ryan had clearly created a misleading impression, noting that "emails and Twitter" had raised such questions, rather than producers and correspondents. For the viewer, it was puzzling.

A major news network that doesn't say, even as the ovation continues, "hang on a minute", is surely falling short. The reluctance of American journalists to tackle the substantive issues raised by politicians, lobbyists, pressure groups and others for fear of being seen as "biased" forms part of a culture of "neutrality" that is essentially driven by economic forces but which is presented as an ethical touchstone.

"The view from nowhere" is a phrase coined by philosopher Thomas Nagel, which was applied to American journalism by academics and commentators like Jay Rosen and James Fallows. It describes a flawed process of delivering "unbiased" reporting. The "neutral" journalist conveys two sides to an argument without forming a judgment. The theory sounds fine until you try it out: "some scientists believe in the Darwinian theory of evolution, but many other people believe that God created men and monkeys from different pieces of magic clay'. An extreme, and absurd example perhaps, but one which illustrates the fundamental bankruptcy of "the view from nowhere".

The culture that favours "neutrality" over "truthiness" was illustrated by Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin's now infamous assertion that "legitimate rape" carries almost no risk of pregnancy, when his interviewer Charles Jaco allowed it to slip by unchallenged. Again, this local interview rapidly found an international audience through the hyper-connected web of consumers and commentators, making the journalistic failure to tackle this at source even more egregious.

The existence of a "fact-checking movement" which runs parallel to, but is not part of, the press shows how disjointed the process of informing the public has become. So much so that a former public editor of the New York Times attracted some ridicule earlier this year when he asked if it was the job of journalists to be "truth vigilantes".; given the prevailing conditions, however, one can see why he was asking the question even it if was phrased in a rather unfortunate way.

Every one of the 15,000 editors, correspondents, producers, gofers and commentators who packed into the convention last week should be asking themselves the same question. If the job of journalism is to strengthen democracy, and if you can't move in downtown Tampa for accredited press, why did Ryan and his team of speechwriters produce something so wilfully misleading? The ugly truth is, they did it because they could.

Anarchists and lawbreakers: Media ramps up propaganda prior to RNC

PressTV

Jacob Crawford has produced a video for Indybay.org documenting the brazen scare tactics and fear-mongering used by the establishment media in the days and weeks before the RNC show now underway in Tampa, Florida.

The video reveals just how politically naive and one-dimensional the corporate media is - for instance, describing the hacker group Anonymous as anarchists (see Biella Coleman‘s disputation of this). It reveals the establishment’s overall agenda to discredit and delegitimatize all the RNC protesters and conflate them with violent anarchists (who have been repeatedly exposed as agents provocateurs). Anarchists are now portrayed as a domestic terror threat by the government and the corporate media.

The simple and mythical nature of the propaganda is designed to play on the emotions of the politically uninitiated and produce a knee-jerk reaction against street demonstrations previously protected by the First Amendment.

Earlier this month, prisonplanet.com reported on a bulletin released by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI warning that “anarchist extremists” may use IEDs, or Improvised Explosive Devices, during both conventions.

Left unmentioned is the fact downtown Tampa is now a virtual police state and this is a now feature of all “official” events, from globalist confabs to political conventions. Speaking engagements by establishment political candidates have provided the TSA with an excuse to rifle through bags and conduct impromptu searches.

Tampa cops have used control freak rules dictating what citizens can carry in public during the convention to circumvent the protests of puppeteer activists.

“One deputy told a group of protestors carrying an oversized puppet of Mitt Romney the sticks they were using to hold up the puppet’s arms were against the rules,” Bay News 9 reported today.

The “code” imposed on the residents of Tampa, Florida, is another example of the state acclimating the public to the incremental imposition of a police state under the guise of national security and supposedly protecting us from phantom terrorists.

Ron Paul Could Still Win Enough Delegates To Deny Mitt Romney The Republican Nomination

End of the American Dream

Despite what you may have heard from the mainstream media, Mitt Romney does not have the Republican nomination locked up. In fact, he is rapidly losing delegates that almost everyone assumed that he already had in the bag. To understand why this is happening, you have to understand the delegate selection process. Each state has different rules for selecting delegates to the Republican national convention, and in many states the "voting" done by the public does not determine the allocation of delegates to particular candidates at all. And the truth is that delegates are the only thing that really matters in this race. In state after state, the Ron Paul campaign is focusing on the delegate selection process with laser-like precision, and it is paying off big time. At this point, there is still a legitimate chance that Ron Paul will be able to win enough delegates to deny Mitt Romney the nomination on the first ballot at the Republican national convention in Tampa. If Romney does not have the 1,144 delegates that he needs on the first ballot, then it becomes a brokered convention and anything becomes possible at that point.

Sadly, most Americans have no idea how this process really works.

For example, originally we were all told that Mitt Romney won Iowa.

Then, later on we were told that a mistake was made and that Rick Santorum actually won Iowa.

Well, it turns out that Ron Paul actually won 20 out of the 28 delegates in Iowa. That is because the process of actually selecting the delegates occurred long after the voting by the public was over.

So what happens if the Ron Paul campaign is able to produce similar results in state after state?

The Ron Paul campaign is very organized, very motivated and they understand the rules of the game. As a recent Politico article detailed, there are huge amounts of unbound delegates out there that are still up for grabs....