Breakfast with Brooke

Last week I had breakfast with Brooke Gladstone, who hosts the NPR show, “On the Media.” Now, when I say “I had breakfast with Brooke,” I mean, “I paid 20 dollars to eat a mediocre breakfast in a fancy room in which Brooke waxed critical on the media into a microphone and even answered one of my questions.” Just thought I’d clarify that.

The event was on a Tuesday in Salt Lake City, which worked well for me because it meant I had a “professional” excuse to get a day off work.

Angela Brown, the owner/operator of the auspicious and legendary SLUG Magazine, invited me to come with her to the event. In return, I brought her a most sought-after (in Utah) gift: Wyoming beer.

Erik Lopez, the associate editor of SLUG, also came along. The invitation we received instructed us to dress in business casual attire. Erik apparently has a different definition of what the term “business casual” means than most of us.

The event was early in the morning and we were tired, but luckily SLUG is sponsored by the American Liquid Crack Corporation, so we were all jittery and yippy in no time.

This is where rich people live.

This is what rich people eat. YUM!

This guy was from PBS in Salt Lake. He introduced Brooke. He is a total douche.

It was both heartening and disappointing that, in her hour-long spiel session/Q&A with Utah’s media elite, Brooke could not teach me anything about the media I either hadn’t already learned or thought about in the course of earning my Master’s degree in journalism. On the one hand I was happy my education (and tuition money) wasn’t a waste and had, in fact, prepared me to think critically about most of the pressing issues facing American media (and media consumers) today. On the other hand, the only thing supremely enlightening about this event was the orange juice — it was fantastic. I drank my glass and then all the glasses at the empty seats at our table.

I agreed with Brooke’s primary contention of the morning: One should not be concerned about media bias, not because media bias does not exist, but because it is impossible to communicate anything to anyone without attaching your own personal bias. She mentioned a site she reads about media bias written by a journalist/scholar called Rhetorica.com, which I found interesting.

I, however, distinctly do not agree with Brooke’s second contention: That we should not worry about media bias because the American public is smart enough to see through bias to get the real story.

“I think the average American is quite capable of determining these things for themselves,” she said.

I do not agree with this contention because I have no faith in the intelligence of the average American. Do I think most of my friends can see through media bias? Maybe. Do I think most people I know can see through media bias? Not hardly. It took me a graduate education to understand most of the types of bias that Brooke listed, and last time I checked less than ten percent of Americans have graduate degrees (not to say, of course, that a graduate degree or any type of formal education is required to see through media bias — it just helped me immensely).

Types of bias, according to Brooke:

Commercial bias: Media are biased toward business (because they are businesses, duh.)

Temporal bias: Media are biased toward the immediate and fresh (there’s no “news” without “new”)

Visual bias: Media are biased toward stories that can be presented visually. Those that cannot are often ignored or stuffed on page R56.

Bad news bias: Media are biased toward stories that make the world seem like a dangerous place (this was one of Michael Moore’s contentions in Bowling for Columbine, which I admit I liked: Media make the world look scary so your brilliant average Americans become defensive, value security over liberty, etc.)

Narrative bias: Media are biased toward stories that have a narrative-style plot with protagonists, antagonists, cause and effect, etc.

Status quo bias: Media never question the fundamental institutions of the American sociopolitical system — If the president is screwing up, the checks and balances outlined by the Constitution will allow the other two branches of the federal government to keep the executive branch in line, which we can see working well before our eyes today.

Fairness bias: Media make sure “both sides” of every story are represented, even if one or the other is absolutely ludicrous and has no place in serious discourse.

Glory bias: Reporters love to make themselves the story, like those who cling to trees and report during hurricanes (another example is one television show I have watched and liked several times: No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain; it’s utterly egotistical and often pandering liberal nonsense, but I like it nevertheless; the first episode I watched was about his trip to Beirut to document its culinary scene that turned into a GLORIOUS account of the attacks on Syria by Israel in summer 2006).

Yes, with just a bit of attentiveness to news stories’ contexts and inquiry into the sociopolitical positions of the reporters, subjects, and sources in a story, one can pretty well determine from which angle a story is being presented and can understand much of its bias. However, most average Americans I know are not attentive to the contexts in which news stories are presented. They are attentive to Halo 3. A guy in the print room at my newspaper told me over 1 million people were playing Halo 3 online in America all at once last Friday. He then proceeded to show me a number of screen shots he had taken of his latest mission, like when he killed two aliens with one laser shot, and when his brother hit a person who was flying through the air with a grenade. I have a hard time believing he watches the news and peers with a steely gaze right through the hidden agendas of pundits. The most depressing part is that he’s a reasonably intelligent person.

So, after Brooke’s initial banter she opened up to questions and, of course, some young liberal steered the discussion toward American media’s love affair with invading Iraq. Fair enough, but unoriginal (my temporal bias seeps through). I could not get over Brooke’s assertion that Americans are much smarter than I think they are, so I squeezed my contention into the context of the conversation:

“Doesn’t the waning public support of the Iraq war, which has declined almost one-to-one with mainstream media’s support of the war, indicate that, in fact, the American public was not able to see through media bias in this case?” I said.

“Well, Nate” (Brooke and I had met earlier in the lobby and chatted for a bit while we both walked around lost, looking for the correct conference room; her addressing me by name from the podium made us seem like we were old cronies, and almost like we had had this same old bias conversation a million times in D.C. bars over martinis), she replied, “I think that what actually happened was that the American public could see for themselves that the war wasn’t going well and decided to stop supporting it on their own alongside mainstream media.” (paraphrase)

She then moved on to the next question. I was dumbfounded but gratified. I knew, from my hoighty-toighty education, that people can’t know anything about an issue happening thousands of miles away and that the only reason anyone knew anything about the condition of the Iraq war was from the media. Considering media’s almost singular viewpoint (in times of war, mainstream media often meld into one homogeneous stream of status-quo support), I do not accept that the so-called “liberal media’s” shift from unquestioning support of the war to a more critical stance was coincidentally mirrored by declining public support for the war. Even today the more conservative media rest on many of the same arguments they had at the start of the war, and it is the “liberal” media, which supported the war right along side Fox News at its inception, that have changed stances. It’s the consumers of these liberal media that were pivotal in providing enough public support for the invasion to go forth (you remember them — “Well, I don’t support war in general and I was against the invasion at first, but now that we’re going for it I support the troops” — or whatever). And now they hope their limp-wristed Democrat representatives can get the U.S. out of the mess.

The consumers of “liberal” mainstream media followed their news sources into supporting the Iraq war in its beginning precisely because they could not see through the biases of the people who reported it.

(my camera had a few mimosas at breakfast so this picture with Brooke is a bit blurry)