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 Schadenfreude  |
Posted on 05/14/2003 6:10:16 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Why Americans watch the BBC
Paul Krugman IHT
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Media and government
PRINCETON, New Jersey A funny thing happened during the Iraq war: Many Americans turned to the BBC for their television news. They were looking for an alternative point of view - something they couldn't find on domestic networks, which, in the words of the BBC's director-general, "wrapped themselves in the American flag and substituted patriotism for impartiality."
Leave aside the rights and wrongs of the war itself, and consider the paradox. The BBC is owned by the British government, and one might have expected it to support that government's policies. In fact, however, it tried hard - too hard, its critics say - to stay impartial. America's television networks are privately owned, yet they behaved like state-run media.
What explains this paradox? It may have something to do with the China syndrome. No, not the one involving nuclear reactors - the one exhibited by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. when dealing with the government of the People's Republic.
In the United States, Murdoch's media empire - which includes Fox News and the New York Post - is known for its flag-waving patriotism. But all that patriotism didn't stop him from, as a Fortune article put it, "pandering to China's repressive regime to get his programming into that vast market." The pandering included dropping the BBC's World Service - which reports news China's government doesn't want disseminated - from his satellite programming, and having his publishing company cancel the publication of a book critical of the Chinese regime.
Can something like that happen in the United States? Of course it can. Through its policy decisions - especially, though not only, decisions involving media regulation - the U.S. government can reward media companies that please it, punish those that don't. This gives private networks an incentive to curry favor with those in power. Yet because the networks aren't government-owned, they aren't subject to the kind of scrutiny faced by the BBC, which must take care not to seem like a tool of the governing party. So we shouldn't be surprised if America's "independent" television is far more deferential to those in power than the state-run systems in Britain or - for another example - Israel.
A recent report by Stephen Labaton of The New York Times contained a nice illustration of the U.S. government's ability to reward media companies that do what it wants. The issue was a proposal by Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to relax regulations on media ownership. The proposal, formally presented on Monday, may be summarized as a plan to let the bigger fish eat more of the smaller fish. Big media companies will be allowed to have a larger share of the national market and own more television stations in any given local market, and many restrictions on "cross-ownership" - owning radio stations, television stations and newspapers in the same local market - will be lifted.
The plan's defects aside - it will further reduce the diversity of news available to most people - what struck me was the horse-trading involved. One media group wrote to Powell, dropping its opposition to part of his plan "in return for favorable commission action" on another matter. That was indiscreet, but you'd have to be very naive not to imagine that there are a lot of implicit quid pro quos out there.
And the implicit trading surely extends to news content. Imagine a television news executive considering whether to run a major story that might damage the Bush administration - say, a follow-up on Senator Bob Graham's charge that a congressional report on Sept. 11 has been kept classified because it would raise embarrassing questions about the administration's performance. Surely it would occur to that executive that the administration could punish any network running that story.
Meanwhile, both the formal rules and the codes of ethics that formerly prevented blatant partisanship are gone or ignored. Neil Cavuto of Fox News is an anchor, not a commentator. Yet after Baghdad's fall he told "those who opposed the liberation of Iraq" - a large minority - that "you were sickening then, you are sickening now." Fair and balanced.
The United States doesn't have censorship; it's still possible to find different points of view. But it does have a system in which the major media have strong incentives to present the news in a way that pleases the party in power, and no incentive not to.
Stop taking him seriously. Then his article becomes very entertaining!:)
"...both the formal rules and the codes of ethics that formerly prevented blatant partisanship are gone or ignored. Neil Cavuto of Fox News is an anchor, not a commentator. Yet after Baghdad's fall he told 'those who opposed the liberation of Iraq' ? a large minority ? that 'you were sickening then, you are sickening now.' Fair and balanced."
Richard Zimmerman, a FOX spokesman, told me that "Neal's statement was made during his daily 'Common Sense' commentary segment, and labeled as such." But Cavuto himself gets to the point just a bit more forcefully:
"Exactly who's the hypocrite, Mr. Krugman? Me, for expressing my views in a designated segment at the end of the show? Or you, for not so cleverly masking your own biases against the war in a cheaply written column? ...I'd much rather put my cards on the table and let people know where I stand in a clear editorial, than insidiously imply it in what's supposed to be a straight news story. And by the way, you sanctimonious twit, no one -- no one -- tells me what to say. I say it. And I write it. And no one lectures me on it. Save you, you pretentious charlatan. ...Now make I suggest you take your column and shove it?"
Cavuto could have rolled all the way to Baghdad. He could have -- and should have -- blasted Krugman for daring to preach about "codes of ethics" at a time when the New York Times' reputation has been shattered by revelations of pervasive negligence that permitted the journalistic fraud of its reporter Jayson Blair. And he could have -- and should have -- blasted Krugman for daring to preach about "blatant partisanship," when Krugman himself is easily among the most relentlessly partisan journalists in America.
Oh... and then there's that matter of Krugman's truthfulness, or lack thereof. Krugman began his column by stating that "during the Iraq war...many Americans turned to the BBC for their TV news. They were looking for an alternative point of view ? something they couldn't find on domestic networks."
The truth is that during the war many Americans turned away from the BBC. FOX's Zimmerman provided me with A.C. Neilson's authoritative television viewership statistics, which show that BBC-America's primetime audience actually fell from 93 thousand households in February to 88 thousand in March. At the same time, FOX TV's audience nearly doubled from 1.7 million in February to 3.2 million in March.
It wasn't just American households either. Matthew Hoy reminds us that "The crew of the British aircraft carrier Ark Royal turned off the BBC and switched to Rupert Murdoch's Sky News." That's right, the same Rupert Murdoch whose News Corporation owns FOX. "According to a 'senior rating' on the Ark Royal: 'The BBC always takes the Iraqis' side. It reports what they say as gospel but when it comes to us it questions and doubts everything the British and Americans are reporting. A lot of people on board are very unhappy.'"
Krugman not only lied about the growth of the BBC's audience, he omitted to mention the decline in the New York Times' own audience. According to a recent report by the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the Times' circulation has fallen 5.3% year-on-year for the six months ended March -- and that of its sister publication the Boston Globe has fallen 6.3%. For the same period, though, the New York Post -- yes, the newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch -- saw its circulation rise 10.2%.
Krugman's lies mask, in the short-run, the brute fact that the audiences are voting with their eyeballs. They're gradually beginning to turn away from the systematic liberal bias of the mainstream media -- and columns like Krugman's. But his long-run strategy is to take away the audience's right to vote, by converting media to state control like the BBC's. Here's his rationale:
"Through its policy decisions ? especially, though not only, decisions involving media regulation ? the U.S. government can reward media companies that please it, punish those that don't... Yet because the networks aren't government-owned, they aren't subject to the kind of scrutiny faced by the BBC, which must take care not to seem like a tool of the ruling party."
David Hogberg gets it right when he nails Krugman's twisted logic:
"The reductio ad absurdum of Krugman?s argument is a media organization that receives its funding from the government is freer from government influence than those media organizations that are merely regulated by the government. I?m not going to bother explaining what?s wrong with that as it should be obvious."
Yep. It's something only an Ivy League economist could have come up with. And something only the New York Times would be shameless enough to run.
Posted by Donald Luskin at 10:06 PM
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Schadenfreude |
GOVERNMENT HAS TOO MUCH INFLUENCE ON THE MEDIA, SO GOVERNMENT SHOULD FUND THE MEDIA
The following passage forms the crux of Paul Krugman's column today:
Through its policy decisions - especially, though not only, decisions involving media regulation - the U.S. government can reward media companies that please it, punish those that don't. This gives private networks an incentive to curry favor with those in power. Yet because the networks aren't government-owned, they aren't subject to the kind of scrutiny faced by the BBC, which must take care not to seem like a tool of the ruling party. So we shouldn't be surprised if America's "independent" television is far more deferential to those in power than the state-run systems in Britain or - for another example - Israel.
The reductio ad absurdum of Krugman's argument is a media organization that receives its funding from the government is freer from government influence than those media organizations that are merely regulated by the government. I'm not going to bother explaining what's wrong with that as it should be obvious.
Not surprisingly, Krugman's absurd theory yields myopic implications:
And the implicit trading surely extends to news content. Imagine a TV news executive considering whether to run a major story that might damage the Bush administration - say, a follow-up on Senator Bob Graham's charge that a Congressional report on Sept. 11 has been kept classified because it would raise embarrassing questions about the administration's performance. Surely it would occur to that executive that the administration could punish any network running that story.
Gee, is there anything a network could do in that instance? Hmm...let me think real hard...boy, this is tough...wait, just a minute...ah, there, I think I've got it: The network could run a prime-time story suggesting that the administration was engaging in petty payback! And, after that, they could run lots of other stories damaging to the administration. Boy, got a severe case of brain strain thinking up that one!
One last thing: Krugman uses media mogul Rupert Murdoch as an example of someone who is likely to be a victim of Bush Administration interference. Krugman notes that Murdoch owns "Fox News and The New York Post." Three days from now is the one-year anniversary of the New York Post running this image and headline on its frontpage. I wonder, has Murdoch yet felt the blowback from W. and Company?
P.S. If you want more, see Hoystory and Minuteman.
posted by DAVID HOGBERG
Posted 2:19 AM by The MinuteMan
Did You Know There Was A War On? (It's Over Now)
Television coverage of the Iraqi war was intense. Viewership was up. What does Prof.Krugman have to say about this?
A funny thing happened during the Iraq war: many Americans turned to the BBC for their TV news. They were looking for an alternative point of view - something they couldn't find on domestic networks, which, in the words of the BBC's director general, "wrapped themselves in the American flag and substituted patriotism for impartiality."
This article refers to comments made by BBC Director-General Greg Dyke, but lacks the specifc quote provided by the Earnest Professor. Are there any viewership figures?
BBC reports on the war were shown four times a day on the cable network BBC America, available in about a third of U.S. television homes. BBC America also ran about 100 hours of continuous news coverage when the war broke out.
The network can't say whether Dyke's anecdotes about U.S. interest are reflected in a larger audience; it has no ratings information for its news shows.
BBC World News coverage is also available on 220 public television stations in the United States. Ratings for its newscast increased by 28 percent during the war, according to the program's distributor.
During the war, viewership for Fox News Channel jumped by 207 percent, for CNN by 250 percent and for MSNBC by 294 percent, according to Nielsen Media Research.
So, an increase for the BBC of somewhere between "don't know" and 28%. Increases for the US outlets exceeding 200%. There was a war on, and a rising tide lifted all boats. Figures for Al-Jazeera not offered here.
As Prof. Krugman admits, and this story mentions, the BBC was, in the eyes of critics, less than impartial:
The BBC's own impartiality has been called into question, however.
Some conservatives nicknamed it the "Baghdad Broadcasting Corp." And one of the BBC's own correspondents, Paul Adams, accused the network of downplaying British military achievements in Iraq and exaggerating the impact of casualties.
Andrew Sullivan had some beauts about BBc reporting, but what is the point? Speaking of which, what is the point of this column? Privately held media may have an incentive to curry favor with the ruling administration - does the Times dare print this? Here is an odd hint of a possible direction for this column:
...Yet because the networks aren't government-owned, they aren't subject to the kind of scrutiny faced by the BBC, which must take care not to seem like a tool of the ruling party. So we shouldn't be surprised if America's "independent" television is far more deferential to those in power than the state-run systems in Britain or - for another example - Israel.
Hmm, a call for state ownership of broadcast media? Only a state run media can be truly free? Well, it is a pretty muted call. Maybe we should attempt to stabilize the regulatory regime? Well, it would be easier it we coul dstabilize the industry. Shouldn't this column mention the Capture Hypothesis? Here is a link to an article on business-government collusion, which I probably ought to read at some point. Feel free to tell me if you love it, or otherwise.
I suppose the Earnest Professor is warning us that bad things may happen under the evil Bush regime, or, hypothetically, any other. But I am not worried, not while Paul and Howell are on the job and Hillary! waits in the wings.
[A] funny thing happened during the Iraq war: many Americans turned to the BBC for their TV news. They were looking for an alternative point of view -- something they couldn't find on domestic networks, which, in the words of the BBC's director general, "wrapped themselves in the American flag and substituted patriotism for impartiality."
Leave aside the rights and wrongs of the war itself, and consider the paradox. The BBC is owned by the British government, and one might have expected it to support that government's policies. In fact, however, it tried hard -- too hard, its critics say -- to stay impartial. America's TV networks are privately owned, yet they behaved like state-run media.
What explains this paradox? It may have something to do with the China syndrome. No, not the one involving nuclear reactors - the one exhibited by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation when dealing with the government of the People's Republic.
In the United States, Mr. Murdoch's media empire - which includes Fox News and The New York Post - is known for its flag-waving patriotism. But all that patriotism didn't stop him from, as a Fortune article put it, "pandering to China's repressive regime to get his programming into that vast market." The pandering included dropping the BBC's World Service - which reports news China's government doesn't want disseminated - from his satellite programming, and having his publishing company cancel the publication of a book critical of the Chinese regime.
Can something like that happen in this country? Of course it can.
The same applies to the lies told by Blair and other NYT toadies -- most people don't read bylines on news stories, and won't remember that a certain slant, or a slew of lies, came from Blair. The damage has been done, and no list of retractions can undo it.
Really? What are the stats? Does Krugman even offer anecdotal evidence for this statement? The rest of the column precedes from a fact not in evidence. I suspect what Mr. Krugman means by "many Americans" is himself. The BBC is state owned by the British government as NPR is owned by the US government. Both are rabidly left wing since both are not exposed to competition or even held to any standard. The BBC was so blatantly and egregiously biased and riddled with bad reports that the Queen's navy got fed up and replaced the BBC with Sky News as the on board news service for it's troops and sailors. Krugman- has not a clue.
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