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2009
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Managed NewsFor several years it was my job in graduate school to shelve the newspapers to which the East European Studies Library, of the University of California at Berkeley, subscribed. It was a bit of an intensive course (after all, I did read them, or at least some of them) in the realities of managed news; and so, when I not-at-all-jokingly refer to the New York Times as Pravda-on-the-Hudson, the parallel is intended to be sustained with substance.
Yesterday morning I got up at seven and walked across the street to the local Starbucks, where I picked up my weekly copy -- the Saturday edition -- of Pravda-on-the-Hudson. The advertisements are fewer on Saturdays; and the articles include some of the more thoughtful passages that the weekday editions omit.
What I found was a striking example of managed news, one which I thought it not unseemly to detail at sufficient length to convey the parallel with that of the late, great, not-very-much-lamented Soviet Union's Newspaper of Record.
The big story of the day was the plan of the United States Treasury to sink another large bundle of funds into propping up the large national banks. The lead spread across two columns on the upper-right-hand corner, twice the size of the usual headline: Treasury Plans to Provide Loans to Buy Bad Assets." The plan had already been criticized, in a number of knowledgeable quarters (including but not limited to Paul Krugman), for continuing the mind-set that had produced the credit meltdown in the first place: that is, the belief that the transfer of immense stocks of cash to the very same banks that had imprudently risked opaque credit swaps in the amounts of many billions was in some magical way going to right the leaning tower of financial institutions and end the crisis.
Two pictures, with captions, just above the fold on the front page provided editorial criticism, or, more accurately, editorial direction to the reader. "A Voice Modulates" in capital letters underneath the portrait of New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo introduced the thought that the concerned public official "has given voice to disgust with the financial industry's abuses. But now, he's wondering if the baying has grown too loud"; "Time to Calm Down" beneath a picture of a woman demanding leaders of the American Insurance Group be sent to jail led to the judgement that "the political reaction to the economic crisis is making the situation worse, with the Treasury Department caught off guard. . . and Congress simply out of control."
The entire top of the front page not given to this calming message contained a picture, four columns wide, of the First Lady, Michelle Obama, planting a vegetable garden in the South Lawn of the White House. It was the caption, again, that did the didactic duty: "White House Foresees Growth This Year."
Readers of The Economist, published in London, are advised that the International Monetary Fund is predicting a 3% decline in gross domestic product in the U.S. in 2009, and no change in 2010; but the New York Times, more accurately Pravda-on-the-Hudson, smarmingly captions a picture of a group of people planting a garden with claims of growth being foreseen.
Sikpping the puff-piece on page A11 telling us how steely-stern Andrew Cuoma is, yet aware of the drawbacks of too much outrage, and glancing over the usual obsequious "White House Memo" -- for more than a decade a grant by the newspaper of whatever the White House wants to have published -- on the facing page A10 ("As the Public Simmers, Obama Lets Off Steam" read the headline, and the 'hard news' therein was the fact that the President said once "The buck stops with me" in answer to a reporter's question), I turned to the editorial page.
Three-quarters of the space devoted to readers' letters had the headline "An Overreaction to AIG Bonuses?" The reader did not need, by this time, to be told that the question mark was purely a formality. The carefully-selected first letter, and second and third and fourth, all answered in the positive. "Our elected leaders," wrote Hilda Blair of New York City, "need to stop falling over one another to declare their outrage and instead start focusing on passing programs that will get our economy back on track."
The the economy has been going "off track" since at least 1980 is not to be contemplated.
"The grandstanding members of Congress who questioned [A.I.G. Chief Executive Officer] Edward M. Liddy on Wednesday ignored the substance of his testimony," began Bill Mullin, of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and concluded with "Mr Liddy is a hero who deserved better treatment from our representatives."
That one usually does not regard it as heroic to conduct business as usual, giving millions in bonuses to financial officers whose poor judgement had already cost their investors billions, was not to be contemplated.
And so forth. No letter applauded the expressed hostility toward the decisions by the large financial conglomerates receiving public bailout funds to shower large bonuses upon their employees. All the letters' authors seemed to share the editors' concern that the expression of opposition to immense executive pay packages, fifty to a hundred times the salaries of 20 years ago, was dangerous to the public weal.
Facing this little display of groupthink was the Op-Ed page. Guess what, reader? About half the page was devoted to a large diagram showing how small the A.I.G. executive bonuses -- 165 million dollars -- were compared to the 170 billion dollars given to A.I.G. by the US government. This was accompanied by the opinion column of Charles M. Blow entitled -- at this point, what else? -- "Anger Mismanagement."
The very next page, B1 had across four-fifths of the top the headline "Why Flogging A.I.G. Isn't Solving the Underlying Problem," which might well be the truth for all I know, but the context says something beyond dispute.
This is not the news. This is not a journalistic enterprise. This is a propaganda organ, giving a constructed version of the day's events, telling the reader what he or she is to understand as received opinion.
This is, in all its managed detail, Pravda for our time and place. |
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