Poll finds that poor journalism drives nation to the right...

[marmar]

New Retro Poll Findings:
How Poor Journalism Drives Nation to the Right
(700 words)

Berkeley--According to findings from several recent polls the public is split about 50:50 on whether the U.S. should immediately withdraw its military forces from Iraq. Now in a poll completed October 1, the Retro Poll organization takes an in depth look at what's behind that split. Retro Poll's findings reveal that opposition to withdrawal, like support for the war in the first place, comes mostly (59%) from people who have been fooled into believing that Saddam Hussein and Iraq worked with the Al Qaeda terrorist network. This difference was highly significant (likely to happen by chance less than 1 in 1,000 trials by chi-squared test).

"The glass is both half full and half empty," said Marc Sapir, Retro Poll's Executive Director. "Twenty nine percent of our sample still believes, in the face of no evidence at all, that Al Qaeda worked with Saddam's Iraq and this group heavily supports continuing the occupation. But the group is getting to be a lonely place. At the beginning of the war the media did little to dispel the neo-con myth, so over half the public held that view. A year ago it was 41%; in May it was 39%; and now only 29% of our latest sample is holding on to this."

"Moreover," Sapir continued, "it's just one of many examples that expose how corporate media's weak journalism and inadequate defense of the truth drive the U.S. public to the right and away from support of democratic values and their own best interests."

Similar dramatic findings in the poll pertain to the death penalty, often a major issue in political campaigns. Only 16% of the sample knew that more than 110 convicted murderers have been proven innocent and released from prison in recent years. About 80% (of that 16%) oppose the new rule allowing the Government to bug conversations between lawyers and prisoners while it's about 50:50 for removing that basic confidentiality among those who believe that 10 or less innocent people have been released from death row (a significant difference).

The complete story is at: http://www.retropoll.org/press_release_poll05.htm

[BootinUp]

1. If the truth is written and nobody reads it, is it the truth? n/t

[madmusic]

2. "moral panic" controls them.

Makes it impossible to think rationally, or any deeper than the sound-bites fueling the panic. Very effective. They are still panicked.

EDIT:

Urban Nightmares: The Media, The Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City
by Steve Macek
University of Minnesota Press
May 2006, 360 pages, $22.95
by Chris Sahl

But what a refreshing change of pace. In our current political environment, the constant refrain from the Right insists that Hollywood and the media are rampant political tools of the liberal establishment. Macek turns the clock back and inverts the equation, examining the “conservative” agenda promoted by depictions of American cities in the news media, Hollywood films and advertisements of the 1980s and early ‘90s. Close-readings of these popular cultural forms are his greatest contribution to the rich academic bibliography of race and the city.

Macek dissects with profound disappointment and regret the effects of victim blaming, repressive law enforcement policies and scapegoating of urban residents by conservative pundits, politicians, news media and popular culture. If only “everyone but the very rich could have joined together to demand a more progressive income tax and other measures to reverse the dramatic polarization of wealth and incomes that wreaked such havoc on working-class urban neighborhoods,” he laments. Instead, the increasingly distant and anxious middle class was preoccupied by the pathological behavior, violence and depravity they perceived in America’s cities, “and that fixation more or less guaranteed” that no lasting social policy could ever occur and exacerbated urban poverty.

Macek notes that the poverty rate in central cities more than doubled from 1959 to 1979, leading to a suburban antipathy towards (mostly minority) urban dwellers that first manifests itself in “obsessive fear” about crime. A sense of physical and psychological distance between suburb and city emerged, intensified by alarmist and derogatory stories through the hegemonic informational source: newspapers and television. Macek fingers the news media as the critical vessel of transmission for the right-wing ideology and rhetoric about the dangers of the city, particularly television news and its embrace of the “if it bleeds, it leads” approach and the fear-mongering journalism that ensued. The perception of rampant crime and inhumanity in suburbia led to a “panic over the city” that Macek describes as “neither a simple reflex of the suburban mentality nor a realistic response to a genuine threat; rather, it was created, fueled, and organized by a right-wing discourse on the ‘urban crisis’ that supplied an ideological framework and a set of ideologically laden concepts for interpreting conditions in the inner city.”

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/books/reviews/5035/urban-nightmares-by-steve-macek/

[marmar]

10. Great article...

I so agree.

[madmusic]

18. Then, as the walls come tumbling down...

It's the city's fault. They can't lose using that kind of propaganda.

[madmusic]

3. Sex, Lies, and Moral Panics

By Cindy Kuzma, Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Posted September 28, 2005.

Some Christian conservatives are comparing colleges to brothels. But don't withdrawl your daughter quite yet, it might just be the latest example of a mass moral panic.

Don't panic, but if your child is a college student, she or he is likely to be having lots of casual sex with a random string of partners. That's according to Dr. Joe S. McIlhaney Jr., founder and chairman of the Medical Institute for Sexual Health in Austin, TX, who recently warned Washington Times readers and parents of the "sexual chaos" on college campuses today. Similarly, Loyola College in Maryland theology professor Vigen Guroian compares college to a sex carnival in a January article for ChristianityToday.com titled "Dorm Brothel."

Their exaggerated rhetoric and fear-mongering strategy seem designed to inspire a moral panic. Sociologists define a moral panic as mass hysteria generated by exploiting people's worst fears, often for the sake of an underlying political agenda.

For example, remember the furor in the 1980s over the supposedly widespread satanic ritual abuse of children by daycare workers and parents? It turned out to be a series of hysterical events that have since been entirely discredited -- although some of the accused remain in prison.

Moral panics have taken place throughout history. From 1730 to 1731, for example, scores of homosexuals were burned alive in a sex panic that rose out of the fear that God would punish "sodomy" by allowing the North Sea to break through the dikes that defend Holland. Two hundred and fifty trials were held, and 75 men and boys were executed -- frequently burned alive.

http://www.alternet.org/rights/26131/

[madmusic]

4. Moral Panic and the Politics of Knowledge

Conservative organization’s moral crusade targeted sexuality researchers

By American Sexuality magazine

Steven Epstein is an associate professor of sociology at University of California, San Diego. He has studied a recent attempt to promote moral panic about publicly funded sexuality research in the United States. In the early 2000s, the Christian right group Traditional Values Coalition compiled a “hit list” of scientists doing research in sexuality. After the list made its way to policymakers, named individuals found that their funding from the National Institute of Health was in jeopardy. Epstein’s paper, “The New Attack on Sexuality Research: Moral Panic and the Politics of Knowledge” is published in Volume 3, Issue 1 of Sexuality Research and Social Policy: Journal of NSRC. In it, he argues that such controversies should be approached simultaneously as moral struggles around sexual norms and as credibility struggles around knowledge production.

American Sexuality: How have Christian right groups impacted the work and lives of sexuality researchers?

Steven Epstein: The story I tell in my article looks at a recent wave of what’s actually a longer trajectory, going back decades, in which sexuality researchers found their work under hostile scrutiny or under attack. In the most recent episode, researchers found that their names had been compiled on a hit list of, essentially, so-called suspect individuals. The hit list that was circulating through Congress had originated from the Traditional Values Coalition, the ultra-conservative organization based in southern California. They compiled a list of people they thought were suspect, some of whom were no longer doing research, some of whom were, in fact, deceased. They gathered information on the federal funding people received for doing research related to sexuality. By getting members of Congress interested in the issue, the organization created a more generalized kind of fear in which researchers were beginning to feel that one could not talk openly about issues of sexuality. Scholars doing work in sexuality and health in the ’80s and ’70 and ’60s have talked about similar problems. They either had to be relatively secretive about what they were doing, avoiding certain words in the titles of grant proposals, or they would have likely been investigated for doing work that was a scary threat to certain people.

http://nsrc.sfsu.edu/MagArticle.cfm?SID=EB0236558D6305B185EC04A646AA7F62&DSN=nsrc_dsn&Mode=EDIT&Article=593&ReturnURL=1

[madmusic]

5. Fear of terrorism is a moral panic

By Jeffrey S. Victor, Ph.D.
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Sep 5, 2006, 00:45

The terrorism scare is another moral panic, similar to many that have occurred in the past. Social scientists call these society-wide scares, “moral panics,” because they are founded upon fear of threats to society from immoral evildoers of the worst kind.

Moral panics begin when events occur that cause a great many people to feel threatened by an internal enemy, hidden deeply in their society. Secret groups of foreign terrorists believed to be fanatics who kill without guilt, fit the bill perfectly.

The terrorist attack of 9/11 was so deeply shocking, because it was the first alleged foreign attack on the continental United States. And, it killed so many people using a surprise weapon; hijacked airplanes as suicide bombs. When people perceive that a new and dangerous threat exists, political leaders commonly rely upon certain rhetorical claims to increase their influence and power to deal with the situation. If these claims are conveyed by the mass media as “news,” with no critical analysis, most people will take the claims as unquestioned truth.

The Bush administration and their right-wing sycophants have employed a time-honored battery of claims to hype fear of terrorism. An ancient one is that our enemy is an abominable evil, compared with “our own essential goodness.” For example, we supposedly fight for “freedom,” while they kill to dominate the world. Another claim is to exaggerate the numbers of evildoers and the extent of the threat. A related claim is that the evildoers have ingenious new ways to kill people. These claims are typically accompanied by attributing guilt by association to anyone who might disagree; meaning that all dissenters give aid and comfort to the evil enemy.

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1165.shtml

[magellan]

6. "corporate media's weak journalism and inadequate defense of the truth

...drive the U.S. public to the right and away from support of democratic values and their own best interests."

So obvious. But of course this won't be reported till its unearthed some time in the distant future, after the collapse and eventual restoration of the US (if we survive as a nation at all), at which point our descendents will shake their heads and say, "They threw it all away because they would rather be entertained than educated."

[Selatius]

7. It seems all the forms of entertainment and distraction we have today...

have replaced the spectacle of the Roman Colosseum.

I fear one day, our own politicians, like the Roman senators of old, will vote to cede power to a future Octavian Caesar.

[magellan]

9. They've already done that, haven't they?

Ceded power to our own Augustus. The Republic is dead. All that's left is the figurative crowning.

[marmar]

11. Just about...

:cry:

[madmusic]

17. There is another side to that coin, though.

Neocons equate pop culture with the anti-establishment revolt that ruined their plans with the Vietnam war. They much prefer 25/7 news, religious channels and CourtTV. As we saw with "The Path to 9/11," they want complete control of the media and do it with boycotts, ActionAlerts for censorship, and subtle propaganda.

Neocons do not have to fund or believe in any of these, but are more than happy to see them. And if something anti-liberal has legs, they exploit it. BushCo took the already existing "war on crime" terminology and simply converted it to "war on terror." The public was already predisposed to accept the fear and terror along with with the sacrifice of rights.

When the neocons take control of the arts - film, music and literature - that is when we are lost. Because they haven't been able to yet, there is still hope the free spirit can survive. Better bad art, even disgusting art, than neocon art.

[madmusic]

8. Policing the Crisis

What is it about: In 1978, Hall and his team produced Policing the Crisis, a study that looked at how the public debate about mugging exploded following stabbing of widower Arthur Hills in August 1972. The study argued that news does not just detail events that happen; it also imbues events with meaning, turning the chaotic into an ordered, patterned idea of what is, at that moment, taking place in the world.

The book included a chapter on journalistic practices, arguing that they cause the news to reproduce the interpretations of events offered by the powerful. Ironically, it is the effort to remain objective that leads journalists to inadvertently reproduce the views of this dominant class.

Imagine you are a reporter, writing up a report on a burglary committed by a 15-year-old just released from a young offender's home. To turn dry facts into a story, you need to include an interpretation of what they "mean". The obvious way to do this without slipping into personal opinion is to quote an accepted authority – someone in the know. So you phone your police contact and ask for comment. He tells you that the incident is symptomatic of what happens when the courts give criminals soft sentences.

If you had telephoned a social worker, she might have told you that rising juvenile crime is the result of the closure of the youth club last year. But social workers produce fewer stories than the police, so you have never cultivated the same close relationship with her that you have with the local DCI. Moreover, "alternative" sources like her have fewer resources and media contacts. Busy journalists, with tight deadlines, are less likely to go hunting around for alternative interpretations, when they know they can pick up the phone and get a quote from a respected and recognisable name.

more: http://www.ak13.com/article.php?id=233

Related and very good:

http://jci.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/25/3/258.pdf">Conspiracy or Consensus? Reconsidering the moral panic. (PDF)

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

12. DUH!! And what does poor and biased journalism do?

Answer: Drive it to the right faster.

[Canuckistanian]

13. Actually, it's the right that drives poor journalism

Journalistic standards on the major media outlets are probably the lowest they've ever been with a clear slant to right-wing interests.

So, are they exerting undue influence? I'd say it was fairly obvious.

[RedEarth]

14. Actually, it's spin on the part of the right wing media

[madmusic]

15. Didn't mean you hijack your thread, marmar.

And was only trying to support it by offering a possible explanation of HOW journalism does this, intentionally or not.

I firmly believe the neocons need not care who is in power, Dems or Rethugs. As long as they can keep instilling moral panic, they will remain in control.

[marmar]

16. That's OK...those were some very interesting analyses...

:hi: