Commenting on the mainstream media's lack of coverage of the nationwide antiwar protest that took place on Sat., Oct. 27, 2007, a former newspaper editor asked in the Christian Science Monitor on Monday:  "Are the media ignoring rallies against the Iraq war because of their low turnout or is the turnout dampened by the lack of news coverage?"[1]  --  "[I]t seems remarkable to me," wrote Jerry Lanson, who now teached journalism at Emerson College in Boston, "that in some of the 11 cities in which protests were held — Boston and New York, for example — major news outlets treated this 'National Day of Action' as though it did not exist.  As far as I can tell, neither the New York Times nor the Boston Globe had so much as a news brief about the march in the days leading up to it. . . . I was most taken aback by the silence beforehand.  Surely any march of widespread interest warrants a brief news item to let people know that the event is taking place and that they can participate.  It’s called 'advancing the news,' and it has a time-honored place in American newsrooms."  --  Noting that Lanson did not really answer the question of why the media failed to cover the protests, Matthew Felling interviewed him for his CBS News blog.  --  In the interview, Lanson said that he was not a "conspiracy theorist" who thought that "there’s a mainstream press that’s owned by large corporate giants and therefore they won’t go anywhere near an anti-war rally.  I think that it’s subtler than that and I think it’s subversive."[2]  --  Felling asked Prof. Lanson:  "What's to stop someone playing Liberal Bias Bingo, filling their game board and tossing you into the lefty academic pile, ignoring what you have to say?"  --  Lanson's response:  "I guess I'd tell them that when I was in college in the '60s I had friends who sneered at me for not being left enough.  I went to a Quaker college, Haverford, and though my politics have always been liberal, they’ve never been left.  I believe in public discourse.  I believe that we cannot govern without coverage of different points of view and discussion about them.  And I believe this country is in trouble because it’s becoming more and more fractured.  People don’t discuss their differences, listen to others' points of view, read articles that make them think, etc.  --  The news industry, in my view, shouldn’t be a place where people only read and watch things that reinforce their viewpoints.  It should be a marketplace of ideas.  But that marketplace is becoming so fractured it’s becoming a boutique." ...

1.

Commentary

WAR PROTESTS -- WHY NO COVERAGE?
By Jerry Lanson

Christian Science Monitor
October 30, 2007

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1030/p09s02-coop.html

Coordinated antiwar protests in at least 11 American cities this weekend raised anew an interesting question about the nature of news coverage: Are the media ignoring rallies against the Iraq war because of their low turnout or is the turnout dampened by the lack of news coverage?

I find it unsettling that I even have to consider the question.

That most Americans oppose the war in Iraq is well established. The latest CBS News poll, in mid-October, found 26 percent of those polled approved of the way the president is handling the war and 67 percent disapproved. It found that 45 percent said they’d only be willing to keep large numbers of U.S. troops in Iraq “for less than a year.” And an ABC News-*Washington Post* poll in late September found that 55 percent felt Democrats in Congress had not gone far enough in opposing the war.

Granted, neither poll asked specifically about what this weekend’s marchers wanted: An end to congressional funding for the war. Still, poll after poll has found substantial discontent with a war that ranks as the preeminent issue in the presidential campaign.

Given that context, it seems remarkable to me that in some of the 11 cities in which protests were held -- Boston and New York, for example -- major news outlets treated this “National Day of Action” as though it did not exist. As far as I can tell, neither the New York Times nor the Boston Globe had so much as a news brief about the march in the days leading up to it. The day after, the Times, at least in its national edition, totally ignored the thousands who marched in New York and the tens of thousands who marched nationwide. The Globe relegated the news of 10,000 spirited citizens (including me) marching through Boston’s rain-dampened streets to a short piece deep inside its metro section. A single sentence noted the event’s national context.

As a former newspaper editor, I was most taken aback by the silence beforehand. Surely any march of widespread interest warrants a brief news item to let people know that the event is taking place and that they can participate. It’s called “advancing the news,” and it has a time-honored place in American newsrooms.

With prescient irony, Frank Rich wrote in his Oct. 14 Times column, “We can continue to blame the Bush administration for the horrors of Iraq. . . . But we must also examine our own responsibility.” And, he goes on to suggest, we must examine our own silence.

So why would Mr. Rich’s news colleagues deprive people of information needed to take exactly that responsibility?

I’m not suggesting here that the Times or any news organization should be in collusion with a movement -- pro-war or antiwar, pro-choice or pro-life, pro-government or pro-privatization.

I am suggesting that news organizations cover the news -- that they inform the public about any widespread effort to give voice to those who share a widely held view about any major national issue.

If it had been a pro-war group that had organized a series of support marches this weekend, I’d have felt the same way. Like the National Day of Action, their efforts would have been news -- news of how people can participate in a democracy overrun with campaign platitudes and big-plate fundraisers, news that keeps democracy vibrant, news that keeps it healthy.

Joseph Pulitzer, the editor and publisher for whom the highest honor in journalism is named, understood this well. In May 1904, he wrote: “Our Republic and its press rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press . . . can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. . . . The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”

It’s time for the current generation of journalists -- at times seemingly obsessed with Martha Stewart, O.J. Simpson, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and the like -- to use that power more vigilantly, and more firmly, with the public interest in mind.

--Jerry Lanson is a professor of journalism at Emerson College in Boston.

2.

[CBS News blog]

PROTEST VOTE
By Matthew Felling

Public Eye
October 30, 2007

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2007/10/30/publiceye/entry3432008.shtml

Carl Van Clausewitz famously observed that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.”

But oftentimes, so is media criticism. It’s not always a professional exercise as much as it is a political one.

That came to mind today when I saw an op-ed published in the Christian Science Monitor by an Emerson College professor. The professor, Jerry Lanson, asked a rhetorical question in his piece: Why did the media largely ignore some anti-war rallies over the past weekend? A participant in the Boston rally, Lanson wanted to know why it didn't warrant some attention. "I'm not suggesting here that the [New York] Times or any news organization should be in collusion with a movement -- pro-war or antiwar, pro-choice or pro-life, pro-government or pro-privatization. I am suggesting that news organizations cover the news -- that they inform the public about any widespread effort to give voice to those who share a widely held view about any major national issue."

The piece seemed to open some doors without necessarily walking through them, so I decided to talk with Professor Lanson about his points. While I can’t say that I’m on-board with some of his views or perspectives, in the interest of transparency, here is our conversation.

Matthew Felling: It’s a point of conjecture, to be sure. But why do you think the media failed to cover these rallies, beforehand or afterwards?

Jerry Lanson: I wish I knew the answer to that. It perplexes me to a large extent. We can all come up with theories or guesses having to do with the economics of newspapers today, that their staffs are smaller; they’re doing the safe thing; they’re piling on the big celebrity story; they’re piling on the big sports story. But by doing so, they’re running away from their responsibility as I see it -- which is to inform the public.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, if that’s where you’re pushing me. I don’t believe that there’s a mainstream press that’s owned by large corporate giants and therefore they won’t go anywhere near an anti-war rally. I think that it’s subtler than that and I think it’s subversive.

Matthew Felling: I’m not pushing you towards any conspiracy theory, by the way. But do you chalk up their reluctance to the hyperpoliticized media climate, where charges of bias are everywhere?

Jerry Lanson: Sure. I do think the news media today are pulling their punches. And if you compare that to the Vietnam period, and the Pentagon Papers, there’s really no comparison.

If you look at the coverage of Iraq today, and compare it to the old CBS footage of Vietnam, the old footage showed the battle. I wrote something for the Christian Science Monitor at the beginning of the war, saying that if you go to war, you have to make the commitment to show the images of war. The images of war are bloody and ugly and I don’t think we show that today.

And it’s not just that the media doesn’t show them because George W. Bush says you can’t take pictures of the coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base. We don’t show that because we choose not to show them.

I know what the reaction to those are, because I was on the desk at the San Jose Mercury News when we decided to run a photo of an American soldier getting dragged through the street in Somalia. That day, we lost several hundred subscriptions to the newspaper.

Matthew Felling: Let’s get back to the protests. Media criticism is politics by other means sometimes. Where would you draw the line to notify the public about these protests before or after? What’s the difference between ‘informing’ and ‘promoting?’

Jerry Lanson: I think you’re right. I got an e-mail today from a photo editor at a small Midwestern paper who was responding to my article. He said they had a memo at his paper saying “we don’t want any pictures of anti-war demonstrators if there’s a couple dozen people on a street corner.” I didn’t tell him, but I think that’s acceptable. That’s when it feels like you’re playing a promotional role.

But I think if you have a national day of protest -- which I read had a fairly modest turnout but still approached 100,000 when you combine the numbers for all the places nationwide -- planned for weeks in advance. And when it’s been written about in alternative media sites like commondreams.org. It’s a bit eerie when there’s absolute silence in the traditional media about it. How can people make a decision without information? How can people, if you will, even counter-demonstrate if no information is out there?

How can the traditional newsmedia complain and whine that they’re losing their readership and viewership if they’re not covering news that (A) affects a lot of people and (B) a lot of people are participating in?

Matthew Felling: Well, here’s my “Blues Brothers” argument, then. What’s to stop 100 Illinois Nazis from complaining about lack of attention to their event, provided they can gather a cluster of people?

Jerry Lanson: The Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois, was certainly covered and the ACLU went to court to support their right to march.

Comparably, I’m a reasonably informed person. I look at 4-5 newspapers daily and some other sites. I was on sabbatical in Europe for 5 months, but I did not know about the Jena Six story until two days before it happened.

I was marching this weekend with my cousin who reads the New Yorker -- which covered this weekend’s rally -- and he’d never heard of Jena Six until I told him about it. That’s a pretty interesting story about race relations in this country, and it came and left in a day . . .

But when I got back from France, I had a week of Paris Hilton and how much time she was going to have to spend in jail. I don’t give a damn. That’s the easy story. It’s something that TV can cover cheaply that gets ratings. But it’s not something that informs the public dialogue. And it ends up with a public that’s not very well-informed.

I teach graduate students at Emerson College. And I spent an hour in class the other day, talking about the structure of the United States Government and how the United States Congress was *not* the same as their state legislature. Now, I’m not making fun of my students -- they’re very bright young men and women. They’re just not getting the information they need from their schools or the media, the information you need to have a democracy that actually functions.

Matthew Felling: Wait. Aren’t you basically telling the news media to commit financial suicide, by running information that you admit doesn’t draw ratings, and even costs newspaper subscribers?

Jerry Lanson: Four paragraphs. That’s all it takes. Run a calendar item. It seems to me that’s not going to kill your newspaper. To include a mention of demonstrations on a day when it rained and the Red Sox were the only topic in town -- which they should have been, mind you -- the Globe put the estimate at 10,000 people, I would say that’s generous.

But it’s a lot of people in the center of the community despite there not having been anything out there -- I checked Lexis-Nexis, the Globe’s online archive, Google News -- the only thing I saw anywhere in Boston about this particular event was a little blurb in a free alternative paper.

There’s a lot of news outlets here, and newspapers have a public role that doesn’t take away from their writing compelling reads, covering entertaining stories, investigative pieces. Just give us some basic information telling the public ‘here’s something that’s happening. It’s been planned nationwide for a long time.’

Let me go back to your question. I don’t know what the threshold is. I don’t know if it’s 500 people or 1,000. But if you’ve got a significant number of people -- not 25 people marching for nudity in Boston parks -- it deserves some attention. It’s trying to address a serious situation.

Matthew Felling: Professor Lanson, with all due respect. In this conversation, you've tossed out asides about "when I was in France" and "my cousin who reads the *New Yorker*" . . . What's to stop someone playing Liberal Bias Bingo, filling their game board and tossing you into the lefty academic pile, ignoring what you have to say?

Jerry Lanson: I guess I'd tell them that when I was in college in the '60s I had friends who sneered at me for not being left enough. I went to a Quaker college, Haverford, and though my politics have always been liberal, they’ve never been left. I believe in public discourse. I believe that we cannot govern without coverage of different points of view and discussion about them. And I believe this country is in trouble because it’s becoming more and more fractured. People don’t discuss their differences, listen to others' points of view, read articles that make them think, etc.

The news industry, in my view, shouldn’t be a place where people only read and watch things that reinforce their viewpoints. It should be a marketplace of ideas. But that marketplace is becoming so fractured it’s becoming a boutique.