Janine Wedel - Unaccountable - How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security

And that view came from a time before the Internet was king; these days, the old media is getting crushed by the new, as we’ll explore in-depth shortly. It’s no surprise, then, that cheap talking heads with hard-to-discern agendas are all over the airwaves.

The rise of the interview, typically at the expense of reported stories, has been quantified for one network. According to the 2012 Pew report: 34

On CNN, the cable channel that has branded itself around deep reporting, produced story packages were cut nearly in half from 2007 to 2012. Across the three cable channels, coverage of live events during the day, which often require a crew and correspondent, fell 30% from 2007 to 2012 while interview segments, which tend to take fewer resources and can be scheduled in advance, were up 31%.

Under new leadership, CNN has cut packaged stories even further. According to one observer, the network: 35

has been placing more emphasis on live coverage of breaking events as well as documentaries, leaving less room for the creation of pre-taped video packages that had been more of a staple on the network.

Of course, such changes are by no means limited to CNN; they run the media gamut. That means that there’s both a decline in reported stories (no doubt including some accountability journalism) and an easy opening for power brokers to help mold public opinion to their liking. There’s even a side benefit of opting for interviews over reported stories: it removes some of the accountability. If a guest says something inaccurate, a news outlet can lay blame on the guest instead of its own in-house reporter.

While several of the networks have acknowledged the problem and attempted to modify some of their disclosure policies, the issues catalogued above are, minute by minute, buried under an avalanche of pressures, as The Nation found. Clearly, power brokers can easily take advantage and appear to be increasingly doing so. The former TV news producer quoted above believes that most reporters “want to do the right thing” but that the system just doesn’t allow the time needed to really figure out a power broker’s affiliations.

Producers also have to wrestle with the mushroom-like proliferation of amorphous political-influence groups. Getting to the bottom of who’s responsible for something is a signature challenge of the shadow-elite era. This has become even more difficult to discern in the United States since 2010, when The Nation conducted its investigation. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in January that year muddied the waters further by spawning a huge number of new political-influence groups. 36Add to this the growing number of advocacy groups that parade as “think tanks” and with which power brokers now frequently affiliate. These entities also sometimes have murky sponsorship.

And PR firms take full advantage of all this. Qorvis, about which we will hear more shortly, executed a scheme in 2004 on behalf of a client, AIG, which claimed to know nothing of the plan. Qorvis had contacted a booking agency, hoping to find influential voices in finance that might be paid to criticize New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who was probing the industry. According to PR Week and the New York Times , the e-mails mentioned a possible “$25,000 retainer, and $10,000 for opinion articles or TV appearances” for willing hands. 37

An outlet as eminent as the New York Times may still have the wherewithal to get to the bottom of sponsorship in its reporting, but one can only imagine the struggle for a typically more harried and far less experienced television news team, whose daily job entails many other tasks beyond the actual reporting of a story or the vetting of a guest. It is easy to see why seasoned power brokers can so easily, and so frequently do, exploit the TV airwaves.

GUTTING ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

TV, like the entire old-media universe, is being slammed by the advent of the Internet. The entire field of journalism has been severely weakened by the emergence of cheap digital content.

What not long ago in the United States was a profession dominated by, say, a few dozen well-respected institutions (even though some may have had a partisan slant) has become atomized and fractured. The global rise of the Internet allowed a profusion of low-cost content to crowd out investigative reporting—not only at national levels, but at local ones as well. Ad revenue fell as the defection from print to Internet accelerated, and media companies began contracting. This trend predated the financial crisis of 2008, but when the economy detonated that year, layoffs in “old media”—television, newspapers, and magazines—exploded. There has been a steady hemorrhage of talent even at outlets with venerable histories.

Tellingly, the four reporters with sizable Twitter followings mentioned earlier have more followers than the entire daily print readership of the New York Times , which in 2013 stood at around 732,000. 38

We should indeed be concerned about this bloodletting. The quality and integrity of traditional media still matters, even if it might seem that new media prevails. Even if consumers get their news through digital means, whatever device they use, they still tend to choose and share news stories that originate from mainstream or “legacy” outlets, according to the Pew Center’s survey of 2012 news habits. But digital doesn’t pay the newsroom bills, and these organizations are cracking at the seams. 39

A related problem is that digital consumers can pick and choose what news they want to read and can ignore—even miss noticing—what might not be of interest to them but is nonetheless important. The old journalistic formula—who, what, where, when, why, and how (space permitting)—has yielded, at least on television news and sometimes in newspapers, to something far simpler: who and what. Where, when, and why take up too much space (or time) and, anyway, are presumed to be common knowledge because of social media. How is seldom covered anymore. It requires investigation, sourcing, fact-checking.

Just how dire is the state of American journalism, especially investigative reporting? Apparently it is a tragedy now worthy of farce. In 2012, on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show , “correspondent” John Oliver set out to investigate the state of investigative journalism. He met reporter Kaj Larsen, a casualty of the near-abolition of CNN’s investigative unit. Larsen, who had reported from various global hotspots and showed himself being waterboarded on television (the point of which was to describe what it felt like—that is, whether it was torture or not, the subject of huge debate at the time), is shown in a new job—a trainer at a Crossfit gym. But it is his second job that is most telling. Larsen is now pitching stories to a fake newsroom, as a consultant to the HBO drama The Newsroom. 40This is, unfortunately, an apt commentary on journalism today.

The massive layoffs and shutdowns in journalism overall in just more than a decade are staggering. As the Pew Center recounts in its 2013 State of the Media Report: 41

Estimates for newspaper newsroom cutbacks in 2012 put the industry down 30% since its peak in 2000 and below 40,000 full-time professional employees for the first time since 1978 . . . Time . . . the only major print news weekly left standing, cut roughly 5% of its staff in early 2013 as a part of broader company layoffs.

A rebound is not expected. The Bureau of Labor Statistics assesses that the ranks could fall another 13 percent over the next decade. 42

Some journalists have even been rendered obsolete by computers. The Pew Center notes in its 2012 report that “A growing list of media outlets, such as Forbes , use technology by a company called Narrative Science to produce content by way of algorithm, no human reporting necessary.” 43That means the company will use what they call “Artificial Intelligence” computer programs to amass and assess data, and take it a step further and actually create the narrative from the data. When you read something and think “a virtual robot could have written this,” these days, you might actually be right.