Anchors Aweigh: The Refs Are Worked (RW influence on network news)

[Bossy Monkey]

column | Posted October 14, 2004

THE LIBERAL MEDIA by Eric Alterman

At the opening of the Democratic convention, long before Dan Rather put a big bull's-eye on his back, Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy hosted Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw, together with Jim Lehrer and Judy Woodruff, to discuss the state of network news coverage before an audience of political and media luminaries. They had some interesting admissions to make about the effect of conservative media pressure on them, offering fresh evidence of the right's effective campaign to "work the refs."

Speaking of conservative media activists like L. Brent Bozell III, for instance, Rather noted that they are "all over your telephones, all over your e-mail, all over your mail," and it "creates an undertow in which you say to yourself, 'you know, I think we're right on this story, I think we've got it in the right context, I think we've got it in the right perspective, but we better pick another day...'" Next thing you know, the CBS anchor continued, "your boss or somebody on your staff will say, you know what, if we run this story we're asking for trouble with a capital T. Why do it, why not just pass on by? That happens--I'm sorry to report that happens. Now you can say that it is the result of fear, it's the result of not wanting to deal with the trouble of all those e-mails."

Tom Brokaw likened the pressures created by Bozell's "pressing of a button" to "a kind of tsunami.... He's well organized, he's got a constituency, he's got a newsletter, he can hit a button and we'll hear from him."

Peter Jennings concurred, adding that he sensed a degree of "anxiety in the newsroom, and I think it comes in part from the corporate suite." He identified "the rise, not merely of the presence of conservative opinion in the country, but the related noise being made in the media by conservative voices these days" and their "effect in the corporate suites." Jennings professed concern that the media were "perceived to be, I think, infinitely more liberal, by the way, than the newsmedia establishment is," and as a result, "this wave of resentment rushes at our advertisers, rushes at the corporate suites and gets under the newsroom skin, if not completely into the decision-making process to a greater degree than it has before." Jennings observed that "what the conservatives in this country have learned in the last ten years especially, is they feel they have to go to war against the networks every day.... Our job then is to be resistant to that--we should have been more resistant."

(much more, all good, but distressing)
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041101&s=alterman

[The Zanti Regent]

1. Kerry should use the PATRIOT ACT on Bozell

Give that Nazi a taste of his OWN medicine.

[KoKo]

2. Yet in recent months when we Dems/Progressives do "e-mail blasts" to

media we are told that our "comments are all the same" so we are ignored.

It's always amazing to me how many DU'ers go to the online polls and try to "UnFreep" them. And, when we do turn the poll in our favor because of our overwhelming numbers, it doesn't matter, because the Media only marches down the road of more Conservative Bush Worship in defiance of the results of their own "citizen polls."

So, we are left to believe that their fear of the RW because of their "magnificent" news blasting machine...is hollow. They are listening to the Bozell's and the rest because their Corporate Whore owners tell them to, and "opposition" counts for nothing. :shrug:

However, the case of "Sinclair" is the test of what can be done when we put our "shoulders to the wheel" with massive targeted effort and attempt to turn the direction.

It's going to take a long time to "turn that wheel" back to even a "center" of public sentiment, imho...:-( But, someone's gotta do it!