How the Media Works Nowadays

...Following September 11,2001, the narrative changed again...

...Compare this to a 1 -in-400 probability of someone in the same area dying of a heart attack during 2002, a l-in-5,300 chance of death from a fall, or a l-in-81,000 chance of being killed in a house fire...

...The media's over-thetop, unbalanced take on the serial shooting could have been used as a case in point...

...Who would reasonably argue against the assertion that "campaign rhetoric as currently practiced too often fractures the audience into enclaves that uncritically accept different sets of facts...

...At the second game of baseball's 2001 World Series, a newly energized and courageous President Bush threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium-a perfect strike...

...Led by the New York Times, a rejuvenated press corps, having regained its reportorial composure, its analytical bearings and its moral compass, once more is playing the essential watchdog role the authors so admire and desire...

...They show how journalists, in tandem with late-night TV comics Jay Leno and David Letterman, mostly portrayed Al Gore and George W Bush as caricatures rather than nuanced figures...

...Actually, Gore never made that claim...

...As they put it, "reporters should help the public make sense of competing political arguments by defining terms, filling in needed information, assessing the accuracy of the evidence being offered, and relating the claims and counter claims to the probable impact of the proposed policies on citizens and the country...

...To many veteran practitioners of the craft this will not come as news...

...It is of little consequence that some journalists still prefer to work to the higher standards of their craft...

...Why, then, were those truths withheld from the public...

...Jamieson and Waldman add value to their undertaking by revisiting the parallel story lines of the 2000 Presidential campaign, cast by the media as a race between Pinocchio and Dumbo...

...And, yes: "This minimizes not only the sense that we are one community, but also our commitment to governance and the ability of citizens to engage each other in debate and discussion about public affairs...

...As Jamieson and Waldman observe: "In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, the press performed admirably, providing citizens with reporting that was informative, accurate, and compelling...

...About the only angle missing in the hysterical and often misinformed coverage was one that might have helped the frightened public to cope better: a sobering dose of statistical reality...

...Leno and Letterman would not have been so amusing if they didn't chide Bush for using the word "misunderestimate" or ridicule Gore for saying he "invented" the Internet...

...Through careful reporting, the authors further demonstrate how this cartoonish approach strongly influenced voter attitudes...

...A month after the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon smoldered, it no longer seemed to matter to editors and reporters that the President could say: "The greatest generation was used to storming beachheads...

...George Gray, acting director of the Center for Risk Analysis at Harvard, noted that there was approximately a 1-in465,000 chance of being the next sniper victim, based on the number of shootings and the population base...

...Nor is the sometimes stiff-necked Gore an unprincipled politician, let alone a congenital liar...

...Such reports would have revealed that the likelihood of being shot by the sniper was not only extremely slim, but that some more prosaic causes of death posed a far greater hazard...

...It is rarely that simple, of course...

...To pick a nit, at times Jamieson and Waldman put the real world aside in search of Good Conduct Medals for themselves...

...Local TV and radio stations everywhere also discussed in minute detail what was dubbed, at usually unilluminating briefings, as "this situation...

...Toward the end of the killing spree, the national cable news channels devoted virtually all their resources to the story...

...With Gore, however, the rap was: Once a liar, always a liar...

...Jamieson and Waldman not only explore in depth the shameful events of Election Night 2000, paying homage solely to the cautious Associated Press, but also study the subsequent 36 days when the Presidency hung in the balance...

...On divisive matters, including Presidential races, many citizens are absorbed in defending their man and attacking his challenger...

...26.00...

...Until the police caught two suspects and (initially) charged them with 10 murders, the widespread tension mounted, especially affecting relations between law enforcement officials and the mass media...

...The paralyzing spate of murders came a few months after Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman completed The Press Effect, their fresh look at a familiar topic: that journalists arrange (and often rearrange) information to the detriment of the public good...

...He was courageous because, as we knew from calculated leaks, the Secret Service adamantly urged him to stay away for fear of assassination...

...You have to push the story line or you lose the spotlight...

...Ultimately, they conclude, the media's seemingly evenhanded critique favored the Republican candidate because citizens deduced that Bush, despite his supposedly limited intellectual means, could go out and hire a smart staff if he won...

...Bush won, they find, largely because reporters like ABC television's Dean Reynolds spoke of Vice President Gore as trying to "overturn the results of the election," and skillful Republican massaging of the narrative thread sealed his fate...

...The authors want journalists to function as custodians of fact...

...But it hardly mattered because most people, including Bush, said he did...

...Based on meticulous research and pretty well scrubbed free of bias, this highly readable book is the latest work in an established vein of media criticism aimed at telling us why we are getting shortchanged and telling reporters how to improve...

...Baby boomers such as myself was used to getting caught in a quagmire of Vietnam where politics made decisions more than the military sometimes...

...The problem with such formulations is that quite a few people do not have the slightest interest in turning to "vigilant, knowledgeable reporters" who provide "a facility for using common standards of judgment and assessment...

...From the few remaining elite newspapers to bottomdwelling tabloids, they say, the press seeks to form coherent structures and compelling chronicles...

...Reviewed by Andrew J. Glass Senior editor, "The Hill...

...Fortunately, such mindless cheerleading has not extended to Bush's Iraq policy...

...Overall, though, this wide-ranging critique of the press and its pervasive role in American democracy makes a valuable contribution to the genre...

...News junkies will doubtless enjoy being reminded, for instance, how in 1972 Edmund S. Muskie's Presidential ambitions were done in on the steps of the Manchester Union Leader when the Washington Post's David Broder saw tears of rage in Muskie's eyes-while the Senator from Maine thought he was wiping away snowflakes...

...But as the conflict in Afghanistan began, some in the news media apparently concluded that traditional journalistic standards would lead to coverage insufficiently supportive of the American effort...

...Just hours before the arrest, the cops had sought to keep from the press the information that enabled a truck driver to spot the alleged perpetrators...

...former Washington bureau chief, Cox Newspapers During the first three weeks of October, normal life in metropolitan Washington, D.C., home to some 4 million people, was ground nearly to a halt by a series of seemingly unstoppable sniper attacks...

...Yet even moderately informed journalists in Washington, not to mention insiders, know that Bush, for all his evident flaws, is not a dim bulb...

...Reporters who accept their worldview are embraced, while all others are ignored or derided...

...Well, that's the way the media works nowadays...

...It is akin to a (perhaps apocryphal) headline in the Real Estate section of the New York Times: "Stairs Seen As Useful in TwoStory House...

...The authors-widely respected political scientists at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication-contend it is no accident that journalists invariably refer to their output as "stories...

...Nevertheless, the book's analysis of what has gone wrong and what is likely to go wrong in the future constitutes a welljudged and useful dissection of our flawed media...

...This encourages those mainstream stories that employ the kind of heated and manipulative shorthand the authors deplore...