Category: mediawatch

New kid on the mediawatching block is the neutrally-titled Kiwis for Balanced Reporting on the Mideast. KBRM’s website says it started during the Israel-Lebanon war in response to what it saw as heavily biased reporting. It now exists to monitor New Zealand news media (in particular daily newspapers) and call them to task when necessary, and to promote ‘the other side of the story’.
Long-time readers of this blog will know that my sympathies for the state of Israel are limited. Some of you won’t share this view. I’m going to try and approach KBRM without relying on assumptions you might not share; you should know where I’m coming from in case I don’t succeed.

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Front-Page Rhetoric
There are two things I wish to address. First is a chunk of rhetoric on the front page of the website, talking about the reportage of the Israel-Lebanon war:

While anti-Israel bias may have been in existence earlier, the problem was exacerbated during the war to the point where Israel was portrayed as cruelly causing devastation to innocent neighbors, rather than as a country which wants peace with its neighbors but is forced to fight for its life.

This text points out two ways of portraying Israel: one which is wrong and biased (cruelly causing devastation to innocents) and another that is truthful (wanting peace but forced to fight for its life).
The second view, the “truthful” view in this construction, is clearly mythologising. The language “forced to fight for its life” has no place in discussion of inter-state relations. Furthermore, it simply isn’t possible to claim with a straight face that Israel is simply innocent with no case to answer; the amount of international consternation isn’t all the result of biased media reporting and anti-semitic conspiracy. They are promoting a mythology.
Of course this might just be bad copywriting, and not reflective of the complexity of their actual activities. Clearly it’s a signal for concern, but of itself it is hardly reason to ignore the group. Sometimes organisations can be far more complex and reasonable than their written charter may suggest. (Indeed, buried in correspondence on the site is a more reasonable position: Of course Israel is not beyond criticism, but we believe that criticism should be “balanced and proportionate”.)

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Scoring and Balance
The second, and more important, thing I wish to address is the ‘scoring’ process for evaluating balance in newspaper reporting. This is discussed here. Note that significant emphasis is placed on the objectivity of the method:

Articles and cartoons that deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict are rated for balance by a simple objective criterion. If more space is given to description of damage or hardship suffered by Arabs and to statements or quotes that blame Israel, the rating is P. If the reverse, the rating is I. If the space is the same, position and emphasis (including headlines and photos) become the determinant. If there is no imbalance in space or emphasis, the rating is 0. Thus a rating of P or I can indicate anything from small imbalance within an article to a full-page propaganda piece.

This methodology fills me with trepidation. This is not due to the claims for objectivity. It is, for amateur media analysis, a relatively objective approach; counting paragraphs that mention either suffering or blame isn’t too bad, although it obviously isn’t up to academic standards. Where it runs into trouble is its construct validity. Does this counting-and-comparing technique actually tell us anything about the balance of the articles, as it claims to?
Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that it tells us whether an article has more A than B in it, or vice versa. In a certain sense, that could be read as “balance”. But take the methodology one step further and it all falls apart. The scoring methodology is founded on the notion that “more A than B” tells us something useful about balanced media coverage, but it doesn’t tell us anything of the sort.
Descriptive Information Gets Us Nowhere
The data gives us information on the frequency of A and B. Completely missing from the picture is any indication of the correct frequency for A and B. In other words, we are asked to draw conclusions about balanced coverage without reference to what is actually going on.
The data is, in fact, entirely useless for its stated purpose of telling us about balance.
Consider a situation where A commits 75 horrific acts against B, and B commits 25 horrific acts against A, and each is reported once. If this scoring process was used on the newspaper doing the reporting, it would come up with a dataset in which 75% of articles condemn A and 25% of articles condemn B. Does that mean there is a bias against A?
Reverse it. If there is a dataset in which 75% or articles condemn A, and only 25% condemn B, what conclusion are you meant to draw? That the coverage is accurate and A caused three times as much misery as B? That the coverage is biased against A because the articles should show a 50/50 split? That the coverage is biased against A because B is in fact the source of most of the misery? In fact, there is no conclusion you can draw. All you have is a stack of coded data that doesn’t turn into information, because it doesn’t tell you anything.
The only way this data is useful is if it is contextualised by external knowledge. If you know that Israel and Palestine are roughly equal in responsibility for the conflict and its attendant suffering, then you can draw useful conclusions about media balance from this data. Or, say, if you know that Palestine bears most of the responsibility while Israel is fighting for its life, then you can draw useful conclusions. You need to know something outside in order to make sense of the data. The only problem is, as soon as you draw in external knowledge, you’re back in the realm of the subjective. How do you know who bears the most responsibility?
So this scoring method doesn’t in fact measure “balanced reporting”; it is purely descriptive, describing what was reported but not giving any information about whether this was balanced reporting or not. The only way you can get any knowledge about balance is by applying your prior assumptions about what the balance should be to the overall distribution of results.
The scoresheet is worthless on its own terms as an indicator of balanced reporting. The KBRM are, apparently, blind to this. There is nothing on the website to tell us how they expect us to interpret their results. I can only presume they think it is self-evident; they explicitly state the purpose of KBRM is to oppose a prevalent anti-Israel bias in reporting, so presumably they see the results as evidence of anti-Israel bias. In fact, they aren’t evidence of anything much at all.
What Is Balance, Anyway?
The “scoresheet” approach presumes that balance can be addressed by tallying how many bad stories are told about each side. We’ve already seen that these tallies are useless without external knowledge; they don’t tell us anything directly about the idea of balance.
However, these tallies fail in another way as well – they ignore other aspects of balance.
I talk here about just one such aspect, of particular relevance to the Israel/Palestine situation. There are other aspects which are also left unconsidered by the scoring data and by the KBRM.
Balance also means that all material necessary to understand the facts is being fairly presented.
The Israel/Palestine conflict is a profoundly unequal one; Israel is very strong, and Palestine is very weak. This is crucial contextual information in order to understand the nature of the conflict. Balanced coverage of the conflict would inform readers of the power differential between the two parties. This is almost never done.
For example, the state of Israel makes a careful point of obscuring the power differential. It always insists that peace can only achieved if both parties make sacrifices, emphasising an implied equality. (And, in fact, it always insists that Palestine must make the first sacrifice in spite of its vastly inferior position in the power balance). The uncritical reporting of this act of spin unbalances media coverage in favour of Israel.
This imbalance is present in the KBRM material. The persistent and crucial failure to convey the power differential between Israel and Palestine is unbalanced reportage, and yet is completely ignored by the scoring system used by KBRM. In fact, the KBRM and its scoring methodology implies that Israel and Palestine are at least equal in power, and that balance in reporting is presented as entirely a matter of “evening out A and B”. This implication is misleading.

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Sides of the story
There is a trend in both Palestinian and Israeli camps to criticise media coverage. This discussion indicates part of why – different understandings of what constitutes balanced coverage.
Both sides can feel they are victims of unbalanced coverage; the Israel side, that its bad acts are mentioned much more prominently than the bad acts of the Palestinians; and the Palestinian side, that its true situation is not reported at all. Both concerns can be true at the same time.
The failures of the KBRM are many and serious. The website and scoring methodology reveal a lack of understanding of what constitutes balanced coverage; the clear bias on display further torpoedoes their work. The KBRM’s commentary only makes sense within a particular worldview; as a general outlet for mediawatching, the KBRM is simply not a credible source.

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For the interested, more thoughts about Israel/Palestine can be found here, in an account of a trip to Israel and Palestine made by Cal and me three years ago. There are photos.

Time’s U.S. cover is the bible should be taught in our schools while Time’s international cover is we have screwed up Afghanistan too.

c.f. Newsweek, last September.
[Edit: since this has just been ScoopIt’d, courtesy fellow Lower Huttian Lyndon, I must hat-tip in the direction of GMS who was the first person to post this that I saw. The image, and I presume GMS’s post, originates at HuffPo. ]
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If you are reading this, even if I don’t know you, you should be aware there are no birthday drinks.

The New Zealand Listener has been such an important part of my NZ media intake that for the first year I was living in Scotland I asked my family to post it over to me. However, the magazine has come in for some stick under new editor Pamela Stirling. Stirling has shifted the magazine’s politics into the centre (as opposed to more-or-less leftie, as it used to be) and shifted its target audience from those concerned about society to those concerned about themselves.
However, it’s nice to see that the old Listener hasn’t completely disappeared. The Feb 24-March 2 issue, available now, might have a garish piggy-bank cover titled ‘Saving: The Facts you can bank on, but inside is an absolute gem of journalism: The Killers Among Us.
The article begins:

In the aftermath of the recent actions of murderer Graeme Burton six months after his parole from prison, many people have wondered how the Parole Board could have got it so wrong. Some politicians have even advocated an end to parole for violent offenders. And yet, of those 226 killers, more than 90 percent have not re-offended. These are three of them.

The article goes on to extensively profile three murderers who are now out in society and have not re-offended. Each of them gets plenty of opportunity to speak, candidly, about their experiences, about what in the system didn’t work (lack of support, lack of training, lack of options once out) and what did (two of them mention the volunteer-driven Prisoners Aid and Rehabilitation Society as a lifesaver – I’d never heard of it). These aren’t heartwarming sentimental stories. The article isn’t trying to sell us a fairy tale. These three sound just like I would expect a reformed murderer to sound like. I’ll go further – they sound like I would *want* a murderer to sound like, down the line.

People ask me if I’ve got a criminal record and I always tell them, ‘Yes, I have.’ They have every right to ask. But I’ve been out 12 years. No one’s got the right to forever judge us as criminals… we’ve done our time and we want to change. I can’t undo what I’ve done… But you don’t look at the past, you look at the future…. It’s going to be hard. But I’m going to keep trying.

If we believe at all in the idea of rehabilitation, then surely this is exactly what we’re aiming for?
Of course, part of the problem with discourse around this issue is that people don’t believe in rehabilitation. The Sensible Sentencing Trust people vilify criminals as the Other, a different kind of human to me, and their crimes arise inevitably from their twisted nature. Many in politics are eager to adopt this troubling narrative, because it is an easy sell to a voter troubled by crime in the community. I would not commit crime, the logic goes, but these people did, so they are not like me, and therefore we must be protected from them.
The article gets to the root of this as well. Devon Polaschek, criminal psychology lecturer at Victoria University, is interviewed and given plenty of room to tear that idea to shreds.

And, says Polaschek, almost anyone has the capacity to kill. “We think that if you have regard for human life, it provides a barrier to taking it. But most of us can suspend that regard. We may care a lot about that person, but when we’re very angry we have the capacity to hurt.

While she’s at it, Polaschek briskly demolishes the perception of murderers as likely to reoffend, and attacks the lack of support for offenders within prison and after they leave it. It’s a splendid platform for ideas that seem like common sense to me, and yet are so often entirely missing from public discourse. Some may level charges of “ivory tower academics” who are “out of touch”, but such charges rely on exactly the same magical thinking that believes crime reveals criminals to be inhuman beasts. Polaschek is right.
But it is the murderers themselves whose words resonate. Murder has always been with us, and presumably always will be. There will always be murderers in our society. This article shows us why we should not give up on them.
Good work, Listener.

Does the New Zealand media even have pundits? Well, we have the curmudgeon columnist crowd, all too ready pass judgement on the politics of the day; but pundits who get TV talk time to give their take on what is driving our political system?
This is a serious question. I don’t really watch TV that isn’t make-believe, and my print media intake is all second-hand copies of the Dominion Post and the Listener and occasional moments of other material. (Yes, I know this makes my fascination with media and this ‘mediawatch’ series quite silly, but it’s my blog and I can be silly if I so choose.) So, do we have pundits?
Reason: I was just skimming through my bookmarks list and found an article I’d bookmarked nearly 3 weeks ago. From Radar Online, it’s called ‘The Iraq Gamble‘ and it profiles eight pundits and shows how their stars have risen and fallen since the Iraq war. All the pundits who predicted quick success have risen to even greater media prominence; the ones who predicted a difficult quagmire have, er, not. (Sure, it’s unscientific, but I give Radar points for trying not to stack the deck too much by avoiding conservatives entirely – all their pro-war voices are at least moderates if not “liberal”. As much as that counts for anything.)
(See also: Kevin Federline appearing in advertisements making fun of his own life; as Fametracker noted, another example of the disturbing U.S. cultural phenomenon known as ‘failing upwards’.)
Anyway, it’s snappy and pithy and worth a read, and I find it important to remember that these guys have influence in the US – because I can’t think of a comparable class of folks here in NZ. Am I missing something obvious, or are we just too small for such people to make a living?

Me, November 27:

I’m childishly excited by the possibility that Bassett will get slapped down, hard.

Letter to Michael Bassett from Tim Pankhurst, editor of the Dom-Post:

…we no longer wish to continue your column… It has also been suggested by several readers that you are compromised -one suggested your column should be renamed fifth- in view of your undeclared advice to Don Brash on his pivotal Orewa speech. I note that you do not dispute this and that you have also given advice to other political leaders. In that case, I believe this should have been declared and both you and The Dominion Post are exposed to duplicity.

*dances*
And while I’m at it, Russell Brown expresses things nicely:

Like, seemingly, everyone who claims to be rebutting Nicky Hager’s The Hollow Men, Bassett basically ignores the substance of the book. Bassett simply contrives to be more odious and abusive than everyone else. He basically calls the editors of the Dom Post idiots and implies that TV3 has been dishonest in its presentation of the facts. He slings off at the “hacks” so “easily beguiled” by Hager, who he compares not only to David Irving but to – get this – Stalin. He pretends his own conflict of interest – that he posed as an independent commentator on matters in which he was directly involved – doesn’t exist… Really, what a dreadful man Bassett is.

On Christmas day I’m going to raise a glass to the downfall of the dreadful Mr Michael Bassett. Heck, why wait? I must have some whisky around here somewhere.
Justifiable schadenfreude, I love it so. (See also: Dick Cheney’s daughter is pregnant.)
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On the flip side is the genuinely sad news that chief curmudgeon Frank Haden has prostate cancer and has stopped writing. Damn.

International treasure Andrew Rilstone has been writing regularly on the dire UK paper the Daily Express. He has a particularly good line in dissecting the rhetoric to get at the transactional impact underneath.
In this post, which I’ve been meaning to link to here for several weeks, he digs into the 2006 installment of that hardy Christmas perennial in UK journalism, Political Correctness Has Gone Mad And Is Stealing Our Christmas. It is a classic example of Rilstone’s biting, deadpan analysis and bitter humour, but then it goes the extra mile in quite a surprising and splendid way and puts the whole thing in a broader context. Check this out:

I think that the Express is engaged in a pretty transparent attempt to radicalize the White community. It is systematically running news stories which conflate Christianity with Englishness;and that equate Islam with foreign-ness. If the English can be persuaded to use Bibles, Stamps, Prince Charles, Silver Crosses and very occasional church-going as signifiers of national identity, then they will start to perceive themselves as part of White Community. If they perceive themselves as part of a Community, then they will also perceive themselves as different from members of the Veil-Wearing Community. If ‘England’ is defined as ‘a Christian Country’ and dark skinned people are defined as ‘Muslims’, then dark-skinned people are outsiders, full stop.

If you are in the UK, go read the whole post, and then bookmark Mr Rilstone and read him regularly. You won’t regret it.
(If you are not in the UK, you really should do exactly the same thing. It’s just that good.)

International readers will be in ignorance of the interesting week in NZ politics. Don Brash, the leader of our right-wing opposition party National, resigned. (To my immense satisfaction; I’ve sent hate in his direction before, more than once, mostly for his eagerness to deploy racial division as an election strategy.) His resignation was clearly a pre-emptive response to the pending publication of a book he had tried to suppress, and which was widely expected to bring down his leadership. Brash claims the events are unconnected, of course.
(Aside: claiming the events are unconnected is an interesting demonstration of the Bush-junta style of spin – just come up with an alternative explanation, no matter how unlikely it may be; the objective isn’t to actually convince anyone, it’s to give a narrative to people already on your side. If you already have a narrative, you resist a damaging counternarrative much more easily.)
The book, indie journo Nicky Hager’s ‘The Hollow Men’, does appear to contain much damning revelation about activities within National. What first intrigued me, however, were the accusations leveled at Michael Bassett, an ex-politician and newspaper columnist, that he was secretly advising and stagemanaging many of the things Brash did that he would then put over in his newspaper columns as evidence of supreme common sense. Hager’s accusation is that Bassett was claiming to be an independent and impartial analyst of current events in his column, when secretly he was hip deep in the political machine.
Even if true, I’m not sure how damaging a claim this is. (The fact that Bassett denies it strenuously suggests that it is quite damaging.) Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to going over the accusations in a bit more detail and I’m childishly excited by the possibility that Bassett will get slapped down, hard.
I don’t like the man, not at all. He’s a horrific example of the ‘curmudgeon’, that species of opinion writer so beloved of New Zealand’s/the world’s print media. And this event gives me the motivation to dig up and present a blog post begun but left unfnished back in February or so. Here it is:

Curmudgeons. Why do newspapers have these people? You know, the grumpy old male right-wing voice of ‘common sense’, whose opinions often turn on thinly veiled bigotry and usually amount to no more than that?
Karl du Fresne’s column in the Dom Post is even named ‘curmudgeon’. He’s not the worst offender – Michael Bassett and Frank Haden both fill the same role in the same paper on different days. Bassett even had a full day’s editorial piece devoted to defending him from criticism after he wrote an incredible column about the lower class’s habit of irresponsible breeding. He ‘asks the tough questions’ or some such nonsense.
(Aside: Tired curmudgeonry is never a ‘tough question’. It plays to people’s stereotypes and bigotries. Anything that encourages reaction without reflection is the very opposite of a tough question. The liberal movement in society in the last few centuries has been built on asking the actual tough questions. The banalities of curmudgeons and right-wing pundits the world over can only be spun as ‘tough questions’ because they are so out of step with the difficult, complex, intelligent questions at the heart of liberalism. What they perceive as horror at asking a question so challenging is in fact horror at the degree of wilful and damaging ignorance on display.)
Okay, I know why newspapers have these people. They get people reading. They get grumpy curmudgeons to say, “hah! That’s telling it like it is!” And they get idealistic lefties to say, “oh noes! Why is he brimming with such hatred?” And so everyone reads. And no, I don’t want all newspapers to become voices of the One True Liberal Way, etc etc. But the reification of the grumpy old man columnist to become the Grumpy Old Man Columnist Position is, I think, of note. There’s a self-awareness to it that didn’t used to be there when Frank Haden was pissing me off ten years ago.
Newspapers have created these little performance spaces, and the curmudgeons are more than eager to throw a little moronic bile around to live up to their billing. It’s a vicious cycle in action, and it makes me a bit sad.

And, yes, it does make me a little sad. There is a lot of prominent media space given to the curmudgeon voice; precious little given to any other voice than the grumpy old white man. (The presence of Tze Ming Mok in one major paper is so unusual that it only serves to show up how pervasive this trend is. That the only other prominent young woman with a voice is the curmudgeon-in-a-mini-skirt Cactus Kate rather undermines the whole enterprise, too.)
Oh, for a world where the barmy curmudgeons would be fenced in with all the lunatics in the letters to the editor, where they rightfully belong.

(It’s taken me a while to get around to this one.) On October 25, on page A13 (thus squarely in the news pages, right above ‘Petrol theft gang leader jailed’), the DomPost published a profile of Valerie Morse.
Valerie Morse is heavily involved a large number of protest/activism groups in Wellington. Most recently, she appeared in the news as spokesperson for Peace Action Wellington which opposed the arms conference at Te Papa.
The title of the article is Doth she protest too much?, which signals some of what is to come. Check out sentence four in the article:

“Kia ora,” she says, answering the phone in a syrupy American accent.”

Syrupy? Syrupy? The contempt just drips off the page. But look a bit deeper – what is the reason for this sentence? Why is it there? How many other profiles quote the person answering the phone? No, clearly we are meant to draw some conclusions from this. She’s effectively American, and she answers the phone with Kia Ora – that puts her in the negative categories of ‘interfering foreigner’ and also ‘politically correct do-gooder’. These categories are invoked beneath the surface of the text and colour everything that follows.
And. incredibly, that kia ora is is the only direct quote from Morse in the entire article.*
It gets even more amazing later on:

She is what is known in the wider world as a rent-a-protester and what is known in journalism as a rent-a-quote: she will talk and be photographed every time, naked or clothed.
But last week she would not talk about how she makes a living, or whether her pay packet consists solely of payments from organisations funded by government grants.

This ties in to an earlier mention that her Masters thesis was paid for by a government grant. Clearly the intent is to put Morse in the category of “living at taxpayer’s expense”, much like the hated dole bludger.
In the whole article, headlined as it is, and with the rent-a-protestor bit given boxout treatment to draw the eye, Morse is given precisely 13 words** in which to defend herself:

Her response is that her passions are all joined by a common struggle against domination and power.

Naturally, this rather sensible explanation is buried in the second half of the article and never referred to again.
Think what you will of Morse’s causes, and her behaviour in championing them, but this article is nothing but an outright personal attack. And, I reiterate, on the news pages, right above “Petrol theft gang leader jailed’.
Incredible.
* Well, there is the sentence She would say only that she worked with a number of “community collectives”, and technically that is a direct quote. But, come on.
** By comparison, a police inspector who sees her at protests gets about three times as much space to talk about her.

Courtesy NikChick.
Link to official Newsweek site showing this ain’t a hoax here.
What interests me is the specific process where a different cover was chosen for the U.S. edition. There must be one person (the US editor perhaps) who made the turning-point decision. What, exactly, were their reasons, one wonders?

This is from Robert Fisk’s ‘The Great War For Civilisation’, p767. He’s writing about the 1991 Gulf War.

But long before this war had concluided with the wholesale slaugthter of fleeing Iraqi troops – and in the disgrace of our betrayal of the hundreds of thousands of brave Iraqis who rose against Saddam at our request – journalists had become mere cyphers, mouthpieces of the generals, discreetly avoiding any moral questions, switching off their cameras – as we would later witness – when the horrors of war became too obvious. Journalists connived in the war, supported it, became part of it. Immatuirty, inexperience, upbringing: you can choose any excuse you want. But they created war without death. They lied.

I love this book.