Sharyl Attkisson

Sharyl Attkisson's book, "The Smear: How the Secret Art of Character Assassination Controls What You Think, What You Read, and How You Vote", makes clear that Politics is a dirty business. Anyone who has seen election campaign commercials or mailings ​won't be surprised to hear this. Campaigns pay consultants to dig up negative information on the their opponents, distort the facts, and deliberately mislead to make their candidate appear more favorable.

And, as the book's title suggests, Attkisson offers plenty of examples of the above. She​ details examples of how political consultants, campaign advisors, and the media smear opponents​, and really shouldn't be taken at face value without doing some critical thinking and checking the information very carefully.

​Attkisson focuses heavily on ​the Clintons and ​liberal media outlets, and especially ​on the likes of Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthall, David Brock​,​ and his left-leaning organization, Media Matters. ​But for every Sidney​ Blumenthall or David Brock​, there's a Karl Rove or a Charles Koch. And for every political organization such as Brock's American Bridge 21st Century or MoveOn.org, there's a corresponding American Crossroads PAC​ or CATO Institute or Americans for Prosperity ​PAC.

All of which made me wonder if there was a particular reason Attkisson focused so heavily on Hillary Clinton. ​Since Hillary was defeated in her run for the Presidency in 2016, I had been thinking of her as "old news". But one explanation for that focus on the Clintons ​made more sense after seeing an April 23rd Associated Press article in my local newspaper with the heading "GOP Midterm Plan: Revive Ghost of Clinton"​. That article explained that Hillary and her associates will be very much in play during the upcoming mid-term election cycle. The article pointed out that while Hillary lost her bid for the Presidency, holds no position of power in government, and is not expected to run for office again, she still will be a major factor in the Republican Party's 2018 political strategy. ​According to that newspaper article, the plan will be to feature Hillary as a central villain in attack ads against vulnerable Democrats nationwide, which indicates how strong her dislike remains among ​likely voters.

​Sadly, one other impact of all the smears and half-truths or outright distortions common in campaigns is the affect on voters. A recent ​ Suffolk University / USA Today survey ​noted that ​an increasing number of​ Americans do not plan to vote in the upcoming 2018 mid-term elections because they are fed up with a political system they feel is too "corrupt". The survey found that "Nearly two-thirds of adult U.S. citizens will stay away from the polls during the coming midterm elections, and they say they have given up on the political parties and a system that they say is beyond reform and repair. And perhaps that's exactly what these political operatives want, e.g., turn off the independent voters, knowing that they will be able to motivate their true party loyalists, who are most likely to believe anything that's written which supports their candidate and vote that Party line.… (más)

I read the first 50 pages last night and there are a few problems. The author's premise is that the news is manipulated to serve the purposes of a given news organization. The tenor of that purpose is what's referred to in the business as the Narrative. Her intention is to show, through anecdotes of her own experience, how news is thus manipulated. She is an award-winning journalist whose work is held in high esteem, but right at the outset she has roused my suspicion.
One of her first observations is that there is often implicit bias in the way stories are assigned to reporters. The reporter is often asked to justify a presumed premise. She cites an assignment she was given in which she was asked to document the hardships faced by parents who are trying to raise a family while working jobs that pay the minimum wage. After a diligent search, she could find no families that were operating on minimum wages. As a last resort, she visited a McDonald’s where she figured she would be able to find people working for the minimum wage, but she found that every three months workers were given a raise of .25 an hour, so virtually no one was being paid the minimum wage. She notes the fact that in many places the local minimum wage is higher than the federal mandate. And here, only five pages in, she betrays my trust. As an example of the difference between the local and federal minimum wage she cites the fact that “(In 2020, for example, the Washington D.C. minimum wage was $15.00, more than double the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.)” The problem with that little factoid is that she worked on this story in the late 1990’s, at which time the federal minimum wage was $5.15 and the DC wage was $6.15 an hour. Her conclusion was that what was interesting about the story was that it was “difficult to find anyone raising children on minimum wage”. It may have been equally interesting to find out whether people were struggling despite making more than the minimum wage; to find out what kind of wage it actually takes to rise out of poverty.
There is a certain arrogance in not acknowledging her own bias in this regard, and I suspect that that arrogance may have contributed in part to the dissension between her and here producers.
A little further on she defends Trump against accusations of racism and misogyny by saying that he is equally offensive to members of his own race and gender. What an embarrassing argument.
It’s not a long book and a breezy read, so I’ll continue with it for the sake of the inside story of the news business and the promised attestations of other journalists, I have no doubt that the news is influenced by monied interests. It’s not useful though to make specious claims and faulty arguments that arise from a surprisingly facile intellect motivated in no small part by retribution for what she perceives as her victimization. She is outraged that editors get to decide what will or will not be reported. That is, in fact, the definition of an editor. It would be more useful if she focused her outrage on the corrupt influences.
Somehow she thinks that the corruption she has encountered in the news business justifies Trump’s claims that the mainstream media is all “fake news”. There is an important distinction between quashing a story for political reasons and claiming that the press lied about you having had the largest inauguration crowd in history. How can I trust her if she can’t or won’t see that difference?… (más)

There is an important discussion to be had about journalistic ethics in this hyper-partisan age, but I don't think this book is it. The book is well-written, as you'd expect from a former national reporter. But the content is problematic. It reads like a long bitter rambling rant from a propagandist at a conservative TV or radio network: conspiracy theories, extended airings of grievances, revenge screeds against those who the author feels have done her wrong, victimization claims, head-scratching analysis. I found lots of individual bits that I agreed with, but the idea that journalists shouldn't push back against deliberate misinformation from politicians, that they should, in order to be "fair", treat conspiracy theories with the same weight as serious policy debates, is quite dangerous. I don't know what the right answer is, but when one side is dealing more-or-less in reality and the other in operating in a universe of "alternate facts", journalists can't just treat the resulting discussion as if both perspectives were equally reasonable. The old adage that "facts have a liberal bias" generally bears out, and I don't think "Slanted" really comes to grips with that. This book was not a pleasant read, but it does provide lots of challenging opinions to think about, which does provide some value.… (más)

Never have I worked harder to keep myself informed as to what is happening in this country and around the world. And never in my adult life have I been so misinformed about what is happening in this country and the rest of the world. I know whose fault that is - and it is not mine.

Sharyl Attkisson’s Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism does an admirable job of explaining the problem. What she has to say in Slanted will horrify any reader who is concerned about the future of this country, but the scariest thing about the current state of journalism in this country and the rest of the world is that it has been so bad for so long that a whole generation of young adults now considers it all to be normal. But, of course, the first thing that readers need to know about the book is exactly who its author is. Is Sharyl Attkisson an honest broker of the book’s message or does she have an axe of her own to grind?

So, let’s begin with Attkisson’s background. She is a veteran news reporter who has won five Emmy Awards and an Edward R. Murrow Award for her investigative reporting at networks like CNN, CBS, and PBS. She is an old-school journalist who believes in following the truth no matter where it leads her or whom it embarrasses. She most definitely does not believe, and never has, in mixing her personal opinions into the news she reports. And that’s why she walked away from a successful career at CBS News when she discovered that her producers were more interested in pushing an approved “narrative” than they were in telling the truth. Gradually, over a number of months, she came to the realization that her stories were being censored out of existence because of pressure from politicians and corporate sponsors. She had the courage - and the support of her family - to walk away from a job she found as humiliating as it was frustrating. Now, she has a nonpartisan Sunday-morning news show on the Sinclair network called Full Measure with Sharyl Attikisson and produces some of the most informative podcasts anywhere. In other words, her bonafides are the real deal.

As Attkisson sees it, journalists “have blended opinion and reporting. We’ve self-censored people and topics. We’ve stepped in to try to shape public opinion rather than report the facts. It is only with this recognition of the fact that we have a problem that well-intended, serious journalists can begin to solve it.” The problem is that the vast majority of the news media have an agreed upon narrative to sell to the public and they get away with lying or distorting the truth all too easily. So why should they reform themselves when their propaganda is so successful? And they have been so successful that Attkisson says, “The information landscape becomes ever narrower, squashing diversity of thought and facts. Pretty soon, we won’t know what we don’t know. And that will be that.”

And it gets worse because pollsters have now transformed a once-enlightening tool into just another propaganda technique to sell the “The Narrative.” According to the author, “Just as The Narrative calls upon the news to codify certain story lines, political polls are now widely used for the same purpose. Polls have morphed from providing a snapshot of pubic opinion at a moment in time into being an indispensable tool used to shape voter opinion.” They simply cannot, and should not be trusted, any longer.

I’m going to end this with a long quote from Chapter 10 of Slanted because I believe that it perfectly captures the dangerous world we are living in today, a world in which we can no longer trust the news that we hear all day long, every day of the year - those same two or three stories that are pushed at us over and over again so steadily that we cannot avoid them even if we want to. Even if they are largely little more than outright lies, distortions, and omissions:
“The trend of mainstream media outlets actings as police and enforcers over other media is a shocking change in our news landscape. Reporters are now less concerned with facts and more with demanding adherence to The Narrative. They determine the position that is to be taken on issues or the facts that can be written about. They use their platform to insist that theirs is the only right and correct view. They convince their colleagues that the job of a reporter is not to be neutral or fair but to take the ‘correct’ position. They define the parameters of the language deemed acceptable or unacceptable for the media to use when covering an issue. They punish, cajole, and threaten those who do not comply. In other words, instead of covering the news, they attack those who are off narrative and cover that as if it is big news. Their goal is to stop the freethinking, independent interlopers. To make it where nobody dares to go off script or disclose the facts or ask questions that the media bullies want to keep hidden.”

Thank God, they could not “stop” Sheryl Attkisson.

On a more hopeful note, Attkisson closes Slanted with a list of reporters and organizations that also refuse to be stopped. The list includes reporters from NBC, CBS, ABC, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, Sinclair, and ESPN. Among them are people like Howie Kurtz, James Rosen, Pete Williams, David Martin, Peter Schweizer, Lara Logan, Greg Jarrett, and John Solomon. Listed organizations include: The Epoch Times, RealClearPolitics, Just the News, The Hill, Wikileaks, the Wall Street Journal, and business news channels like CNBC, Fox Business, and Bloomberg. Conspicuous by their absence are the New York Times, CNN, PBS, and the Washington Post.

If you’ve had the patience to read to this point, this book is for you. You are someone willing to make the required commitment to thinking for yourself. You are not one of the millions who have simply tuned out because the static is just too much to deal with. Sharyl Attkisson is a name you need to remember, a journalist who will help you find the truth. You need to read this book.… (más)