Readers of the Baton Rouge Advocate/New Orleans Times-Picayune received an excellent reminder of how the media try to promulgate their political agendas with a story about one of the state’s leading talk show hosts as a stalking horse.
Written by veteran political reporter Tyler Bridges, it examines Jeff Crouere’s multifaceted professional career, which at present includes radio station owner and manager, talk show host, online columnist both in print and video, political consultant, entertainment master of ceremonies, and communications director for Republican state Treasurer John Fleming. In the past, he also worked as a GOP functionary and political organizer. (As a side note, we attended Vanderbilt University at the same time and I’ve known him since his return to the New Orleans area upon our graduations, having over the years on a few occasions appeared on his radio show.)
As part of his political communications, he has been stumping for his boss’ run for U.S. Senate against incumbent Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy. Crouere, like Fleming, was on the GOP Pres. Donald Trump bandwagon well before most Republicans and never has been shy about enunciating his support of Trump. Nor has he in recent years been shy about criticizing Cassidy who famously tried to convict Trump of bogus crimes.
Which has gotten up somebody’s, or somebodies’, dander at the Advocate. What follows is a refresher on media behavior that begins with the admonition not to fall for what many in the media try to have the public buy into: that the media report the universe of relevant news in an almost-entirely neutral, comprehensively factually-sourced manner.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, you must begin with, end with, and never forget it that the media have a political agenda, based almost in every case on political leftism, that it seeks relentlessly to propagate, whether that includes any attempt to be factually fair and balanced. Any story that has any relationship to politics, no matter how tangential, appears because of this agenda.
Typically, it is not the collective of each raw fact individually where this bias appears. Particularly scaling higher in prominence of media outlet, stories themselves don’t often contain erroneous information, and, if so, should be corrected immediately.
Where bias does become injected is over the issue of selection: what facts to include, what stories to cover, what kind of headline appears, and where the story appears with how much space it takes up. In explaining the above, I will use print (whether electronic) as a baseline for expository purposes, but this applies as well to sonic and video communication.
For a story to appear, it has to be selected from the universe of news. That relies on someone’s judgment, usually an editor’s, or it could be a reporter’s, but often it’s both in a collaborative process. They have to think it’s important – but “importance” very much is a slave to their own personal political ideologies. And, almost always, stories that they think can confirm or lead to advancement of their ideologies receive preference because these seem obvious or self-evident in content and implications to them, whereas stories that cast doubt on their beliefs they see as aberrations that could be explained away but which would require much more effort to “unravel,” leading them to dismiss these.
Then, facts are selected to shape the story. A distinct minority of reporters are not so intellectually lazy and dullard enough to attempt a comprehensive investigation of their topic and include all of that in their piece. Most of the time, that doesn’t happen, for any of several reasons: they are intellectually lazy in not seeking all facts but just the “easy” ones congruent with their ideologies; they aren’t that knowledgeable to begin with to know all the nuances concerning an issue and what is quality or sloppy research and analysis; they don’t know what they don’t know or, worse, are dishonest in presenting only those facts congruent to their beliefs and deliberately discarding ones known not to be; or, they are under orders from an internal authority to write a piece a certain way.
Related to this is the concept of “framing.” Media often engage in this as a shortcut to make a complex subject understood simply enough to think it will attract readers, by taking a particular aspect of it and using that as the backbone narrative around which to organize the disparate parts. Headlines often give away the frame applied, which depends considerably on biases in beliefs by story authors and headline writers.
However, headlines are more important than just that. Their actual size and length, along with content, create a narrative the reader is hoped to follow but, perhaps most importantly and assumed along with story selection, is designed to tell the reader that not only is the story content something to care about but also that the reader should and must care about it.
Finally, placement/length’s role is somewhat self-explanatory and easily understood. The most important items appear on the front page and as you proceed through the lesser ones appear. Plus, the more important are longer and in bigger type (where applicable). Again, the goal is to have the reader agree with the media on the degree of caring he should have about a story – again, something captive to the own attitudes of those in the media responsible for the assigning, writing, editing, and placement of it.
In short, even for those in the media striving their level best to present a fair and balanced story, some bias likely will filter through. And then there are those who don't give their best effort on this score, for any number of reasons such as they see some kind of moral imperative driving story content.
With this brief lesson concluded, let’s turn to how the Crouere story exemplifies how the media uses the news it chooses to present and how it does as a means of fulfilling its agenda. The first red flag comes from the headline: “Radio host, political player, Louisiana state worker: Does Jeff Crouere wear too many hats?”
And the obvious question follows: why? Why is this a story? Why should we care if some guy in politics works for the state and hosts a radio show? And, more to the point as you go further into the article, why are you giving this to us now? Crouere has been a host as far back as last century and been involved in politics longer still, but also has been working for Fleming for almost 18 months. Why wasn’t it a story the when he started, if it’s supposed to be now? Nothing has changed since about him.
The text then starts leading you to its explanation. Crouere is critical of Cassidy but works for Fleming. And we have trotted in front of us a present and a former academician and a jilted caller to the radio show (which shows Bridges put in quite a bit of effort on this story, not only to engage with this trio but also in discovering about and tracking down the aggrieved listener) who make disapproving clucking noises about Crouere’s exercise of free speech, who say those in the media should “avoid conflicts where possible, but at least let [consumers] know about the conflict,” and “[t]he lines are blurred, and they’re not understood by listeners,” and it’s all a “campaign ad at taxpayer expense, which I believe is a violation of federal campaign law.”
What Bridges is trying to get readers to accept unthinkingly and uncritically is there’s something unethical about all of this. Except that it’s not: Crouere is commenting on a campaign, not writing stories on politics. Those rules about how somebody presenting “news” should avoid be perceived as favoring a particular person or issue (even if a reporter does and finds more surreptitious means to insert bias into what is presented as a straight news story) don’t apply. Crouere doesn’t pretend on the air he’s a news presenter or reporter. He has biases that he promotes, he doesn’t hide it (indeed, from time to time he’ll mention his outside employment), and anybody who can’t tell the difference between that and news presentation probably shouldn’t be allowed near a voting machine.
What if Crouere wasn’t a state employee (as an unclassified employee like me, he can make comments about electoral contests; if we were classified employees, we couldn’t) whose boss is running for the Senate? So what? His arguments against Cassidy stand on their own and don’t depend upon whether he works for a guy running against the object of his criticism. It’s just not a convincing line to run, especially since Crouere was critical of Cassidy years before Fleming ran for treasurer, much less before Fleming hired him.
But that’s because that’s not exactly what’s going on here. Instead, the crux of Bridges’ attempt comes with this: it’s not so much Crouere, likely unknown to 99 percent of those who chose to read the story before they laid eyes on it, that is implied to have “ethics” problems, but Fleming. The dots the story hopes to connect in people’s minds leads to concluding that Fleming hired Crouere to facilitate his being a mouthpiece for the Senate campaign, which should be unsavory behavior disqualifying a candidate.
It's Fleming, not Crouere, who the Advocate really is after. Of course, it would prefer a Democrat in the Senate as a result of next year’s election, but that’s a pipe dream. It can live with Cassidy if it has to. But it definitively would not want any of the three major GOP alternatives, and perhaps, according to its own account, the least of all Fleming because of his association with Trump Republicans. Especially if Fleming is showing electoral strength against Cassidy?
And this explains why it’s a “story” now, rather than, say, several months ago when Fleming became the first major candidate in the race, for Crouere has been bashing Cassidy all along. With the race in its embryo stage and months more distant from qualifying at the start of next year for primary elections only weeks later, the trenchancy of the present had yet to form.
That leads to a final question: where did it come from it, this entirely discretionary and unprovoked piece? Did some Advocate mandarin wake up one morning and decided Fleming was becoming too big of a threat and/or Cassidy needed a shot in the arm? Or, did some backchannel Cassidy connection put a bug in the ear of someone at the Advocate, from the owner all the way down to reporter? Inquiring minds would like to know, but surely we’ll never find out.
No comments:
Post a Comment