"Where Does the Right-Wing End and the Media Begin?"

This is part of an interview with Paul Krugman on the relationship between the right-wing and the media, and other matters:

Where Does the Right-Wing End and the Media Begin? By Rory O'Connor, AlterNet: I had the opportunity to sit down this week with ... Paul Krugman... He certainly pulled no punches during our conversation...

Rory O' Connor: ...What role if any do the media play in movement conservatism?

Paul Krugman: The media are a very important force... They shape perceptions, and they conceal issues. Look at the 2000 presidential campaign, for example, where the media were so heavily biased against Al Gore. That's what brought Bush to within a Supreme Court decision of the White House. ...[T]he role of the media in not telling you reasons why you should be skeptical about the course of the war, for example, it's enormously important. ...

[T]here are several major parts of the news media that are for all practical purposes part of "movement conservatism" -- Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Times -- and in which other news organizations are intimidated, at least to some extent. I sometimes talk about ... "asymmetrical intimidation." If you say a true but unflattering thing about Bush or in fact about any other prominent conservative, oh, boy! People are going to go after you. I mean, I've got people working full-time going after me, right? But if you say a false, unflattering thing about a Democrat or a progressive, no risk ... And that shapes coverage, no question about it. It's better now, but it's still very asymmetric. The other thing ... about the media is their addiction to the trivial. We've got the most substantive election coming up, I think, ever. ... And what are we seeing news stories about? John Edwards' hair and Hillary Clinton's laugh ... this is horrifying! And again -- it's asymmetric. ...

ROC: It sounds like you're saying there's a bias in the media. If you are, what is the bias?

PK: The media's bias, a large part of it is in fact right-wing bias, because they are effectively part of the right wing. Fox News ... there's ... no liberal equivalent..., there is no network that, if a conservative got the Nobel Peace Prize, would have responded the way Fox News did to Al Gore's Peace Prize...

Beyond that, there's two things at least; first, the hatred of substance -- they really want to talk about all that trivia -- and there's also the fetish of evenhandedness. ... Way back in the 2000 campaign, I wrote ... that if Bush said the earth was flat, the headline would read: "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Planet." I was thinking specifically about what Bush was saying about taxes and Social Security, which were just out and out lies! But no one would say that, and they still won't. It's better now, a little, but they still won't say it... [T]he Big Lies are all on the right right now. So it works much more to their advantage.

ROC: Do you think it's possible that economics is driving politics in the media?

PK: The role of economics in driving the media is an interesting one. One question is simply, "Do they respond to what sells?" And to some extent the focus on the trivial is there due to that. And also, by the way, talking heads screaming at each other is a lot cheaper than actually having reporters out in the field doing reporting...

I guess the question that you want to ask is, "To what extent is news coverage biased by the corporate interest of the parents?" And that's hard to pin down in any direct way... [T]here probably aren't, at networks other than Fox, ... memos saying here is how we are going to slant the news today -- at Fox there are, every day. But there's probably this general sort of pressure to go for the views that won't upset the CEO of the firm that controls the network ... so yes, this is a problem. ...

ROC: In your book, you talk about the media's use of "storylines" and what you've called the "Rambofication of history."

PK: Yes, I'm rather proud of the term "Rambofication." In the years immediately following Vietnam, all of this stuff that now seems so much a part of the story -- that we lost the war because we were stabbed in the back, that the "weak" politicians, the Democrats, can't be trusted on national security -- wasn't very much out there. ... In 1977, people still remembered what Vietnam had actually been like, and why we needed to get the heck out of there.

It wasn't really until the 1980s that the history began to be re-invented, so if only we'd let Sylvester Stallone flex his muscles, we could have ... won the war. The idea of Democrats as "weak" on national security really got invented then -- and you know there were a couple of events ... such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, which I really don't think had much to do with Reagan, but helped make the storyline. So when 9/11 came along, the realities ... were that the Clinton people had been working pretty hard to try to so something about Bin Laden, and the Bushies said as soon as they came in, "We're not interested, we want to think about a war with China." But the storyline that the media fell into was that, "We're the tough guys, the other guys neglected it." And that gave them a good run -- they won two elections, in '02 and '04, which I think otherwise they would have lost -- by playing on this notion of "We're strong, and they're weak." I guess the sort of good news is that they have done such an incredibly terrible job ... that we may have at least a while before all that scare tactic stuff comes back.

ROC: Or we may hear in four years how the Democrats "lost Iraq."

PK: I'm worried, obviously. Clearly, if it's a Democrat who withdraws from Iraq, which it appears likely it will be, then it will be more of the, "We were winning, we were on the edge of victory, then they stabbed us in the back ..."

ROC: "They spit on our soldiers ..."

PK: Yeah, that's amazing, the "spitting on our soldiers" thing -- because it never happened, there are no documented cases... Will that happen again? Certainly they'll do their damnedest to make it happen ...

I guess I'm more optimistic about the American public, that it will take a lot more than four years, ... because ... right now the American public has a pretty good sense of just what a disaster that's all been ... Maybe 10 years from now, they'll have forgotten and be willing to ... see movies in which some heroic guy goes back and wins the Iraq war but ... not for a while anyway. ...