tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/television-news-15203/articlesTelevision news – The Conversation2023-04-17T12:43:03Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2037412023-04-17T12:43:03Z2023-04-17T12:43:03ZDefamation was at the heart of the lawsuit settled by Fox News with Dominion – proving libel in a court would have been no small feat<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/520935/original/file-20230413-20-sbbnce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Election workers in Detroit test their equipment made by Dominion Voting Systems in August 2022.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1242162041/photo/us-vote-election-machines.jpg?s=1024x1024&w=gi&k=20&c=T4CDKTWzYJiLY4tkXMkYIu9nzlRmx3JR9zKjyAo0AJU=">Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The aftershocks of the 2020 presidential election continue to reverberate in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/17/trump-research-voter-fraud-claims-debunked">politics and the media</a> with Fox News Network’s April 18, 2023, US$787.5 million settlement with U.S. Dominion Inc. The settlement puts an end to Dominion’s defamation suit against the network.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/13/media/fox-news-dominion-trial-jury/index.html">Ahead of opening arguments</a> that were slated to begin April 18, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion for alleged defamation. The lawsuit rested on whether false claims Fox hosts and their guests made about Dominion’s voting machines after President Joe Biden was elected were defamatory. <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/04/14/1169858006/the-math-behind-dominion-voting-systems-1-6-billion-lawsuit-against-fox-news.">Dominion sued Fox</a> for $1.6 billion. </p>
<p>Fox News hosts said on air that that there were “voting irregularities” with Dominion’s voting machines – while privately saying that <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fox-news-hosts-allegedly-privately-versus-air-false/story?id=97662551">such claims were baseless</a>. </p>
<p>The statements have already been proved false. Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis <a href="https://courts.delaware.gov/Opinions/Download.aspx?id=345820">ruled on March 31, 2023</a>, that it “is CRYSTAL clear that <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/31/dominion-lawsuit-fox-trial-00090034">none of the Statements</a> relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”</p>
<p>The question at hand was whether the statements harmed Dominion’s reputation enough to rise to the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/03/31/1167526374/judge-rules-fox-hosts-claims-about-dominion-were-false-says-trial-can-proceed">level of defamation</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://comm.osu.edu/people/kraft.42">I am a longtime journalist and journalism professor</a> who teaches the realities and challenges of defamation law as it relates to the news industry. Being accused of defamation is among a journalist’s worst nightmares, but it is far easier to throw around as an accusation than it is to actually prove fault.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/520937/original/file-20230413-18-yvvfzg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A blonde white woman stands facing an electronic voting booth." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/520937/original/file-20230413-18-yvvfzg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/520937/original/file-20230413-18-yvvfzg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520937/original/file-20230413-18-yvvfzg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520937/original/file-20230413-18-yvvfzg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520937/original/file-20230413-18-yvvfzg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520937/original/file-20230413-18-yvvfzg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520937/original/file-20230413-18-yvvfzg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A voter in Atlanta takes part in midterm elections in November 2022.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1244620086/photo/midterm-elections-in-us-state-of-georgia.jpg?s=1024x1024&w=gi&k=20&c=dPhcbNrHmc8c2rz3syqzycPN14uLGifdVdOz-DoR0cg=">Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images</a></span>
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<h2>Understanding defamation</h2>
<p>Defamation happens when someone publishes or publicly broadcasts falsehoods about a person or a corporation in a way that harms their reputation to the point of damage. When the false statements are written, <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/libel">it is legally considered libel</a>. When the falsehoods are spoken or aired on a live TV broadcast, for example, <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/slander">it is called slander</a>.</p>
<p>To be considered defamation, information or claims must be presented as fact and disseminated so others read or see it and must identify the person or business and offer the information with a reckless <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation">disregard for the truth</a>. </p>
<p>Defamation plaintiffs can be private, ordinary people who must prove the reporting was done with negligence to win their suit. Public people like celebrities or politicians have a higher burden of proof, which is summed up as actual malice, or overt intention to harm a reputation.</p>
<p>The ultimate defense against defamation is truth, but there are others. </p>
<p>Opinion that is <a href="https://www.rcfp.org/journals/news-media-and-law-summer-2011/opinion-defense-remains-str/%5D">not provable fact is protected</a>, for example. </p>
<p>Neutral reportage – a legal term that means <a href="https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1002/neutral-reportage-privilege">the media reports fairly, if inaccurately</a>, about public figures – can legally protect journalists. </p>
<p>But Davis rejected both of those arguments <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/03/31/dominion-fox-lawsuit-summary-ruling/">in the federal Dominion case</a>. </p>
<p>Davis determined Fox aired falsehoods when it allowed Trump supporters to claim on air that Dominion rigged voting machines to increase President Joe Biden’s number of votes. He also said that these actions harmed the Dominion’s reputation. </p>
<h2>Proving actual malice</h2>
<p>The primary question for the jury, which had already been seated, would have been whether Fox broadcasters knew the statements were false when they aired them. If they did, it would mean they acted with actual malice, the standard required to prove a case of defamation for a <a href="https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/proving-fault-actual-malice-and-negligence">public person, entity or figure</a>. </p>
<p>The U.S. Supreme Court established actual malice as a legal criterion of defamation in 1964 when L.B. Sullivan, a police commissioner in Alabama, felt his reputation had been harmed by a civil rights ad run in The New York Times that <a href="https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/educational-resources/supreme-court-landmarks/new-york-times-v-sullivan-podcast">contained several inaccuracies</a>. Sullivan sued and was awarded $500,000 by a jury. The state Supreme Court affirmed the <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1963/39">decision and the Times appealed</a>.</p>
<p>The U.S. Supreme Court <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1963/39">ruled in 1964</a> that proof of defamation required evidence that the advertisement creator had serious doubts about the truth of the statement and published it anyway, with the goal to harm the subject’s reputation. </p>
<p>Simply put, the burden of proof shifted from the <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/an-important-date-in-supreme-court-history-for-the-press">accused to the accuser</a>.</p>
<p>And that is a hurdle most cannot overcome when claiming defamation.</p>
<h2>Why proving defamation is so hard</h2>
<p>It is incredibly hard to prove in court that someone set out do harm in publishing facts that are ultimately proved to be untrue.</p>
<p>Most times, falsehoods in a story are the result of insufficient information at the time of reporting. </p>
<p>Sometimes an article’s inaccuracies are the result of bad reporting. Other times the errors are a result of actual negligence. </p>
<p>This happened when Rolling Stone magazine published an article in 2014 <a href="https://www.bustle.com/articles/74322-where-to-read-rolling-stone-uva-article-a-rape-on-campus-now-its-been-deleted">about the gang rape</a> of a student at the University of Virginia. It turned out that many parts of the story were not true and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/05/business/media/rolling-stone-rape-story-case-guilty.html">not properly vetted</a> by the magazine. </p>
<p>Nicole Eramo, the former associate dean of students at the University of Virginia, sued Rolling Stone, claiming the story false alleged that she knew about and covered up a gang rape at a fraternity on campus. They <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/04/12/523527227/rolling-stone-settles-defamation-case-with-former-u-va-associate-dean">reached a settlement</a> on the lawsuit in 2017.</p>
<h2>Not meeting the malice standard</h2>
<p>There are also some recent examples of a defamation lawsuit’s not meeting the actual malice standard.</p>
<p>This includes Alaskan politician Sarah Palin, who <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/business/media/new-york-times.html">sued The New York Times</a> over publication of an editorial in 2017 that erroneously stated her political rhetoric led to a mass shooting. The jury said the information might be inaccurate, but she had not proved actual malice standard.</p>
<p>Long before he was president, Donald Trump had a 2011 libel suit dismissed after a New Jersey appeals court said <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/donald-trump-loses-libel-lawsuit-232923/">there was no proof</a> a book author showed actual malice when he cited three unnamed sources who estimated Trump was a millionaire, not a billionaire. </p>
<p>It is so difficult for public figures to meet the actual malice standard and prove defamation that most defamation defendants spend most of their legal preparation time trying to prove they are not actually in the public eye. Their reputations, according to the court, are not as fragile as that of a private person. </p>
<p>Private people <a href="https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/proving-fault-actual-malice-and-negligence">must prove only negligence</a> to be successful in a defamation lawsuit. That means that someone did not seriously try to consider whether a statement was true or not before publishing it.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/520938/original/file-20230413-16-a8t6uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/520938/original/file-20230413-16-a8t6uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/520938/original/file-20230413-16-a8t6uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520938/original/file-20230413-16-a8t6uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520938/original/file-20230413-16-a8t6uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520938/original/file-20230413-16-a8t6uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520938/original/file-20230413-16-a8t6uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/520938/original/file-20230413-16-a8t6uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Protesters gather outside the Fox News headquarters in New York City ahead of the Dominion trial.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1247874462/photo/a-billboard-truck-seen-outside-fox-news-hq-members-of-the.jpg?s=1024x1024&w=gi&k=20&c=ntartb3dfI1g1-LfKcRYfnp37TM6EA82AW2Tg0nkSow=">Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images</a></span>
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<h2>Defamation cases that went ahead</h2>
<p>Some public figures, however, have prevailed in proving defamation. </p>
<p>American actress <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1981/03/27/us/carol-burnett-given-1.6-million-in-suit-against-national-enquirer.html">Carol Burnett won the first-ever</a> defamation suit against the National Inquirer when a jury decided a 1976 gossip column describing her as intoxicated in a restaurant encounter with former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger was known to be false when it was published.</p>
<p>Most recently, Cardi B won a defamation lawsuit against a celebrity news blogger who posted videos falsely stating the <a href="https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-music-arts-and-entertainment-lawsuits-celebrity-87ecf677d5bd7261d57dfd770ec139a9">Grammy-winning rapper used cocaine</a>, had herpes and took part in prostitution.</p>
<h2>The case of Dominion</h2>
<p>Fox’s payout to Dominion – though only half of what Dominion sued for – reportedly shows that the voting machines company <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/18/why-fox-news-had-to-settle-the-dominion-suit-00092708">put together a strong case</a> that Fox acted with actual malice.</p>
<p>But Fox pundits have helped the plaintiff’s case by acknowledging they knew information was false before they aired it and leaving a copious trail of comments such as, “<a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/03/31/1167526374/judge-rules-fox-hosts-claims-about-dominion-were-false-says-trial-can-proceed">this dominion stuff is total bs</a>.”</p>
<p>Fox’s position was that despite knowing claims made by guests about Dominion were false, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/11/business/fox-news-dominion-trial.html">the claims were newsworthy</a>. </p>
<p>Does this qualify as actual malice or simply bad journalism?</p>
<p>The settlement seems to imply actual malice – and this could send shivers through the political media landscape for years to come. </p>
<p><em>This is an updated version of an <a href="https://theconversation.com/defamation-is-at-the-heart-of-dominions-lawsuit-against-fox-news-but-proving-it-is-no-small-feat-203741">article originally published on April 17, 2023</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203741/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicole Kraft does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It’s far easier to throw around accusations of damage to one’s reputation than it is to actually prove it in court. A journalism scholar explains the criteria that must be met.Nicole Kraft, Associate Professor of Clinical Communication, The Ohio State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1430802020-07-23T12:19:37Z2020-07-23T12:19:37ZHow the images of John Lewis being beaten during ‘Bloody Sunday’ went viral<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348956/original/file-20200722-36-sql8fd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=23%2C5%2C3868%2C2579&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">John Lewis, in the foreground, is beaten by a state trooper during a civil rights voting march in Selma, Ala., on March 7, 1965.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-AP-A-AL-USA-APHS012559-Selma-Civil-Right-/ed93e73935e942bf9583cbe7512c1689/1/0">AP Photo</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers beat and gassed John Lewis and hundreds of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. </p>
<p>TV reporters and photographers were there, cameras ready, and the violence captured during “Bloody Sunday” would go on to define the legacy of Lewis, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/us/john-lewis-dead.html">who died on July 17</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_y0Sp9kAAAAJ&hl=en">I’m a media historian</a> who has written <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Equal_Time/wME0DVUFIrsC?hl=en&gbpv=0">about television and the civil rights movement</a>. One of the remarkable features of the era’s media environment, dominated by the relatively new medium of television news, is how quickly certain events could roil the conscience of the nation. </p>
<p>Confrontations between police and protesters happened frequently during the 1960s. But a particular set of circumstances ensured that the images coming out of Selma galvanized politicians and citizens with remarkable speed and intensity. </p>
<h2>A prime-time event</h2>
<p>Most Americans didn’t see the footage on the 6:30 nightly news. Instead, they saw it later Sunday night, which, like today, drew the biggest audiences of the week. That evening, ABC was premiering the first TV airing of “<a href="https://www.pastposters.com/cw3/assets/product_expanded/JamieF-BON/judgment-at-nuremberg-cinema-quad-movie-poster-(1).jpg">Judgment at Nuremberg</a>.” An estimated 48 million people tuned in to watch the Academy Award-winning film, which dealt with the moral culpability of those who had participated in the Holocaust. </p>
<p>News programs never got those kinds of ratings. But shortly after the movie started, ABC’s news division decided to interrupt the movie with a special report from Selma. </p>
<p>Viewers may have been peripherally aware of the marches that had been going on in the small city 50 miles from Alabama’s capital, Montgomery. Martin Luther King Jr. had kicked off a voting rights campaign there in January, and the media had been regularly reporting on the standoffs between Blacks who wanted to register to vote and Selma’s racist, volatile sheriff, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/us/07clark.html">Jim Clark</a>. </p>
<p>Two years earlier, footage and photographs of Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor loosing police dogs and high-powered fire hoses on nonviolent marchers so alarmed the Kennedy administration that the president felt compelled <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58O2De-iPOk">to finally put forth</a> a robust civil rights bill to dismantle Jim Crow segregation in the South. </p>
<p>But until Bloody Sunday, nothing had emerged out of Selma that gripped the nation’s attention. Even the Birmingham images didn’t have quite the immediate impact of those from Selma. </p>
<p>That’s largely because the special report interrupted a prime-time broadcast. But there was also the fact that the footage from Selma thematically complemented “Judgment at Nuremberg.” </p>
<p>In the days after the news film aired, <a href="https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/83agb8cf9780252036682.html">a dozen legislators spoke on the floor of Congress</a> linking Alabama Gov. George Wallace to Hitler and its state troopers to Nazi storm troopers. Ordinary citizens made the same connections.</p>
<p>“I have just witnessed on television the new sequel to Adolf Hitler’s brown shirts,” one anguished young Alabamian from Auburn wrote to The Birmingham News. “They were George Wallace’s blue shirts. The scene in Alabama looked like scenes on old newsreels of Germany in the 1930s.” </p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tVymzWrBTww?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The footage of protesters in Selma being beaten shocked the country.</span></figcaption>
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<p>In the ensuing days, hundreds of Americans jumped into planes, buses and automobiles to get to Selma and stand with the brutalized marchers. The landmark Voting Rights Act <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/bending-toward-justice">passed with remarkable speed</a>, just five months after Bloody Sunday.</p>
<h2>The spotlight finally shines on Lewis</h2>
<p>John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was at the head of the line of 600 protesters. Their plan was to march 50 miles, from Selma to Montgomery, to protest <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/jimmie-lee-jackson?gclid=CjwKCAjwx9_4BRAHEiwApAt0zvTzfw36EjSA3vkh0YFfBQ5zc0HtQhvpQrHpLLDdXZWe5mZqT_5brBoCtUgQAvD_BwE">the recent police killing of activist Jimmie Lee Jackson</a> and to press Gov. Wallace for Black voting rights. Next to him, representing King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/williams-hosea">Hosea Williams</a>. King was back in Atlanta that day. </p>
<p>Lewis, in particular, is quite visible in the news footage, with the camera zooming in on his tan coat and backpack as the troopers advance and then plow over him and the marchers behind him. </p>
<p>However, when CBS ran its story about the march Monday morning, Lewis wasn’t mentioned at all. In fact, CBS’ Charles Kuralt framed the story as a clash between “two determined men” who weren’t there: Wallace and King. “Their determination,” Kuralt continued, “turned the streets of Alabama into a battleground as Wallace’s state troopers broke up a march ordered by King.”</p>
<p>Other national news outlets also tended to focus on King, who was often the only Black voice given a platform to speak on civil rights matters. The marchers, including Lewis, were little more than stand-ins for the important political players. </p>
<p>In recent decades, that’s changed. John Lewis has come to occupy a privileged place in the media once reserved for King.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348954/original/file-20200722-20-zpwzi3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348954/original/file-20200722-20-zpwzi3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348954/original/file-20200722-20-zpwzi3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348954/original/file-20200722-20-zpwzi3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348954/original/file-20200722-20-zpwzi3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348954/original/file-20200722-20-zpwzi3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348954/original/file-20200722-20-zpwzi3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Rep. John Lewis speaks at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the 55th anniversary of Selma’s ‘Bloody Sunday.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/rep-john-lewis-speaks-to-the-crowd-at-the-edmund-pettus-news-photo/1209749585?adppopup=true">Joe Raedle/Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>But even the recent focus on Lewis – while much deserved – has the tendency to neglect the foot soldiers and activists who made the Selma campaign a success. Lewis’ organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9780807859599/many-minds-one-heart/">valued and cultivated grassroots movements and the empowering of ordinary people</a> rather than organizing campaigns around a charismatic leader, which was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference model.</p>
<p>The Black Lives Matter movement, which also eschews the “great leader” approach, is very much in the spirit of John Lewis and his civil rights group.</p>
<p>The current waves of protests against police brutality and systemic racism have garnered massive media coverage and widespread public support, similar to what happened in the wake of Bloody Sunday. <a href="https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/lewis-speech-at-the-march-on-washington-speech-text/">As Lewis once said</a>, “I appeal to all of you to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation. Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes.” </p>
<p>He uttered those words in 1963 during the March on Washington. But they apply just as much to protesters today.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1284615049756028928"}"></div></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143080/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aniko Bodroghkozy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Thanks to some serendipity and fortuitous timing, the images emerging out of Selma had a uniquely powerful effect on the nation.Aniko Bodroghkozy, Professor of Media Studies, University of VirginiaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1397262020-06-04T14:22:45Z2020-06-04T14:22:45ZViral videos of racism: how an old civil rights strategy is being used in a new digital age<p>After a black bird-watcher filmed a white dog-walker on May 25 calling the police on him in response to his request she obey the dog-leash laws in the Ramble woodlands area of Central Park, New York, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/nyregion/amy-cooper-christian-central-park-video.html">video went viral</a>. “I’m going to tell them <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/nyregion/Amy-Cooper-Central-Park-racism.html">there’s an African American man</a> threatening my life”, Amy Cooper informed Christian Cooper (no relation) before she called 911 and made a deliberately dramatic false accusation. </p>
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<p>Melody Cooper, discussing her decision to post her brother’s footage online, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6sF8qivmEo">told hosts</a> of American talk show The View that she “wanted to shine a light on” Amy Cooper’s weaponisation of racism “so that no other black person would have to go through it from her”. </p>
<p>Over half a century ago, African Americans viewed the potential of the newest development in communications technology, television, in strikingly similar terms. </p>
<h2>Under the TV spotlight</h2>
<p>In 1957, Howard D Gould told readers of his column in the <a href="https://www.chicagodefenderarchives.org">Chicago Defender</a>, an African-American newspaper, that: “Under the spotlight of TV, discriminatory practices will have to stop”. He explained how the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/24/little-rock-arkansas-school-segregation-racism">Little Rock crisis</a>, when cameras filmed angry mobs protesting against nine black teenagers attending a desegregated school in Arkansas, demonstrated the unique power of television to expose racism to a national audience. </p>
<p>Civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s were well aware of television’s potential to help their cause. “We are here to say to the white men that we no longer will let them use clubs on us in the dark corners,” Martin Luther King Jr <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wME0DVUFIrsC&pg=PA2&lpg=PA2&dq=aniko+bodroghkozy+massest+of+mass+media&source=bl&ots=pfdlo6Vxbf&sig=ACfU3U2y8hcxu9_o0WF9R9ZLDk5Z6jYqxw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwju3qy02OLpAhXFoVwKHc-ODLIQ6AEwAXoECAoQAQ#v=snippet&q=Glaring%20light%20of%20television&f=false">said</a> in the wake of <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/selma-montgomery-march">Bloody Sunday</a> in 1965, where mounted guards attacked peaceful protesters on Montgomery’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in front of rolling cameras. </p>
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<p>Pricking the consciences of a white national audience, a strategy that stretched back to the use of photography in the <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469609782/imprisoned-in-a-luminous-glare/">anti-lynching campaigning of Ida B Wells</a>, was at the core of civil rights activism. In a 1967 interview in Harper’s magazine, Andrew Young, executive director of civil rights organisation the <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/southern-christian-leadership-conference-sclc">Southern Christian Leadership Conference</a> (SCLC) said <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=c0kRunga1fUC&pg=PR22&lpg=PR22&dq=bourke+hickenlooper+young+republican+ladies&source=bl&ots=X1A4n8h5oD&sig=ACfU3U0MYPLqof1goQj6vOg6JzhR8ijSxA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwisppqN6eDpAhVyoFwKHWUsBY4Q6AEwA3oECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=bourke%20hickenlooper%20young%20republican%20ladies&f=false">their goal</a> was “to reach the centre of the nation, to affect the elderly white ladies in Iowa”.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-cellphone-videos-of-black-peoples-deaths-should-be-considered-sacred-like-lynching-photographs-139252">Why cellphone videos of Black people's deaths should be considered sacred, like lynching photographs</a>
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<p>The <a href="https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/the-story-of-sncc/">Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee</a> (SNCC) was similarly motivated. “Without national exposure and mobilised public opinion, there was no point to the struggle,” argued <a href="https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/sncc-national-office/photography/?fbclid=IwAR1u0tBmytYpYTZdUPlRpPuemDy6yGmuDtGr-E3GNhRkGceQz2cMYc64ogs">SNCC’s Mary King</a>. </p>
<p>Seeing with their own eyes how agents of white supremacy operated convinced some white viewers in a way that the written word never could. President of the Louisville Times, <a href="https://dl.tufts.edu/concern/eads/cz30q362v/fa">Barry Bingham, wrote to</a> television newsman Edward R Murrow that while he had read reports about the white supremacist rabble-rouser John Kasper, he hadn’t believed them until he saw the visual evidence on television.</p>
<h2>No room for the big questions</h2>
<p>Civil rights activists, however, did not have control of television. The SNCC developed an entire <a href="https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/sncc-national-office/communications/">communications department</a> designed to get reports of racial injustice onto the desks of mainstream journalists. But as Julian Bond, communications director of the SNCC, remembered, the challenge was to convince national newsmen that “<a href="https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/sncc-national-office/communications/">this is something hot</a>”. The SCLC did this through mass nonviolent demonstrations deliberately planned to disrupt public order and provoke segregationist brutality. The power to outrage white audiences lay in showing them something they did not expect: law enforcements’ disproportionately violent response to peaceful protest. </p>
<p>This strategy has had its problems. Television is not an unmediated window into reality. As media scholar <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wME0DVUFIrsC&pg=PA1&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false">Aniko Bodroghkozy has shown</a>, the largely white, male television newsmen who covered these stories framed racial inequality from their own point of view. Television networks, with one eye on the bottom line, did not want to discomfort their white viewers. Showing footage of obvious southern violence allowed northern audiences to condemn racism, yet still feel good about themselves.</p>
<p>Television, while a perfect medium to capture obvious acts of brutality, was not well suited to explaining the less visible systems that produced prejudice and fostered inequality. White television newsmen could not see and understand the structural issues involved. Therefore they did not show white viewers the insidious ways that racism continued to impact African Americans. </p>
<h2>Filming everyday injustice</h2>
<p>Today the digital age has reduced reliance on a middleman. Smartphone technology has allowed African Americans to shine the spotlight in places camera crews would never reach. Black people can now make the rest of the world bear witness to the way racism shapes their everyday encounters. In 2016 Diamond Lavish Reynolds of Minnesota, to take <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/19/us/police-videos-race.html">just one example</a>, was <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-power-of-looking-from-emmett-till-to-philando-castile">able to livestream</a> the horrific moments after police shot her fiancé Philando Castile having stopped them for a broken tail light. </p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-a-live-streamed-police-killing-revealed-the-power-of-representation-62238">How a live-streamed police killing revealed the power of representation</a>
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<p>Still, viewers make meaning of these videos based on their own understandings of how racism operates. While African Americans might look at the footage of police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck until he stopped breathing and see <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/09/18/theres-overwhelming-evidence-that-the-criminal-justice-system-is-racist-heres-the-proof/">evidence of a racist institution</a>, some white viewers watch just one <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/6/2/21276799/george-floyd-protest-criminal-justice-paul-butler">bad apple cop</a>. They can remain comfortable, condemning an isolated racist action without questioning the deeper structural problem.</p>
<p>With more and more videos of police brutality going viral over the past few years, it’s becoming easier for a new generation of activists to reframe the narrative. A report from American University’s Center for Media & Social Impact showed that the Black Lives Matter movement <a href="https://cmsimpact.org/resource/beyond-hashtags-ferguson-blacklivesmatter-online-struggle-offline-justice/">has begun to convince more white people</a> to see videos of police brutality against black people not as isolated events but as evidence of ongoing injustice. </p>
<p>Melody Cooper <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/opinion/chris-cooper-central-park.html">has reiterated</a> that she “wanted to shine a light not just on one person, but on the systemic problem of deep racism in this country that encourages her kind of behaviour”. Yet, over half a century of shining lights on racism has not eradicated the darkness of inequality. The question remains: when will white people believe without having to see?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/139726/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sage Goodwin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>By filming everyday acts of racism, today’s Black Lives Matters activists are using an old strategy in a new media age.Sage Goodwin, Phd Candidate in History, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1350132020-04-02T12:32:49Z2020-04-02T12:32:49ZBob Dylan brings links between JFK assassination and coronavirus into stark relief<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324668/original/file-20200401-23090-sflu8z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C4%2C1493%2C1073&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Then – as now – Americans found themselves transfixed by the news.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.readingthepictures.org/files/2013/11/PB_JFK_6.jpg">International Center of Photography</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Over the past few weeks, the coronavirus has turned the country’s cultural spigot off, with <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/sports/sports-canceled-coronavirus.html">sports suspended</a>, <a href="https://news.artnet.com/art-world/museums-coronavirus-crisis-1815993">museums closed</a> and <a href="https://www.thewrap.com/movies-suspended-delayed-coronavirus/">movies postponed</a>. </p>
<p>But the virus hasn’t stopped Bob Dylan, who, on the evening of March 26, released “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NbQkyvbw18">Murder Most Foul</a>,” a 17-minute long song about the Kennedy assassination. </p>
<p>Many <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/bob-dylan-s-murder-most-foul-17-minute-new-song-ncna1170766">have</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/mar/27/bob-dylan-murder-most-foul-review-jfk-assassination-john-f-kennedy">pondered</a> the timing. So have I. <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_y0Sp9kAAAAJ&hl=en">I’m a Kennedy scholar</a> writing a book about <a href="http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2013/11/15/the-assassination-of-john-f-kennedy-and-television-news/">how television handled coverage</a> of the Kennedy assassination over a traumatic four-day “black weekend,” as it was called. I’ve also <a href="https://www.doi.org/10.1177/1527476412452801">explored</a> how Americans responded to the sudden upending of national life with the murder of a popular and uniquely telegenic president.</p>
<p>NBC News anchor David Brinkley, as he signed off that first night, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X_z6T9u-tw">called Kennedy’s death</a> “just too much, too ugly and too fast.” The coronavirus crisis may also seem too much and too ugly, though it’s unfolded much more slowly. While a global pandemic is certainly different from a political assassination, I wonder if Dylan sensed some resonance between the two events. </p>
<p>Inscrutable as always, he’s unlikely to ever explain. And yet it’s hard to ignore the poignant similarities in the ways Americans have responded to each tragedy. </p>
<h2>Stuck at home</h2>
<p>As Americans hunker down in their homes during the current crisis, they might assume that, during other crises, people took solace in gathering with others in shared public space. </p>
<p>But that didn’t really happen after Kennedy’s assassination. Most businesses and schools abruptly closed early Friday afternoon following news of the noontime shooting in Dallas. Monday was declared a day of mourning, with Kennedy’s state funeral in Washington. There wasn’t anything for most Americans to do over that long weekend.</p>
<p>So what did they do? They sat at home and watched nonstop television coverage. Over 90% of Americans parked themselves in front of their television sets for an average of eight to 10 hours a day, <a href="https://www.doi.org/10.1177/1527476412452801">according to A.C. Nielsen statistics</a>; one-sixth of households had their television sets on for even longer. <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/kennedy-assassination-and-the-american-public-social-communication-in-crisis/oclc/475038">Social scientists</a> noted that television accommodated people who needed to grapple with the trauma alone, as well as those who wanted to be with family and friends.</p>
<h2>Glued to the news</h2>
<p>What did viewers get from their voluminous viewing? Besides occasional actual news, they mostly found comfort. Over and over, in the hundreds of letters sent to NBC in the wake of the assassination coverage, viewers described how emotionally connected they felt to the newsmen, whom they saw as companions in mourning.</p>
<p>“During this time of personal loss,” <a href="https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/CHPP">wrote one Lubbock, Texas man</a> to NBC anchor Chet Huntley, “I have come to you as an old friend looking for answers to questions, explanations, and even consolation. I have not been disappointed.” </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324740/original/file-20200401-23090-1i0r3na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324740/original/file-20200401-23090-1i0r3na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324740/original/file-20200401-23090-1i0r3na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324740/original/file-20200401-23090-1i0r3na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324740/original/file-20200401-23090-1i0r3na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324740/original/file-20200401-23090-1i0r3na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324740/original/file-20200401-23090-1i0r3na.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Many Americans felt a profound emotional connection to news anchors Chet Huntley (left) and David Brinkley.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/promotional-still-of-chet-huntley-and-david-brinkley-for-news-photo/2350594?adppopup=true">Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>TV viewers today might not describe network anchors as “friendly neighbors who drop in to chat and discuss events in our fast changing world” – as <a href="https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS4017">a California letter writer</a> did on Nov. 24, 1963 – but in recent weeks, they’ve turned to NBC, CBS and ABC nightly news in record numbers. According to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/business/media/coronavirus-evening-news.html">The New York Times</a>, amid the uncertainty of the moment, traditional nightly network news shows – not the 24/7 cable news – seem to be providing comfort. The paper quotes NBC anchor, Lester Holt, who compared the network nightly news to comfort food – “a broadcast that you remember growing up with as a kid that your parents watched.” </p>
<p>After JFK’s assassination, Americans spent their long days indoors in some of the same ways their contemporaries are doing today, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/style/bread-baking-coronavirus.html">like by baking bread</a>.</p>
<p>In 1963, a woman who described herself as “just a Kansas City housewife” <a href="https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS4017">wrote to David Brinkley and Chet Huntley</a> about her inability to tear herself away from the TV to go grocery shopping. So she ended up simply baking her own bread: “I took the task of baking rye bread rather than going out to the store, as I was in need of bread, but I really didn’t want to get out of the house.”</p>
<p>Others felt overwhelmed by the constant stream of news and updates. </p>
<p>“I walked around the block because I felt if I didn’t I was going to scream,” one Minneapolis man <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/kennedy-assassination-and-the-american-public-social-communication-in-crisis/oclc/475038">told two communication scholars</a>. “I thought I could get away from it for awhile, but [the TV] was like a magnet.”</p>
<p>Americans in 1963 also used television to do what people today have been doing with Zoom: participate virtually, from afar. <a href="https://www.doi.org/10.1177/1527476412452801">Ninety-six percent</a> of Americans watched the networks’ ceremonial coverage of Kennedy’s state funeral, and letter writers marveled at their sense of “being there.”</p>
<p>“I, from my home in Cincinnati, was permitted to be there by way of television,” one high school student <a href="https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS4017">wrote to David Brinkley</a>. “I was present at the scene of his death. I walked to the cathedral with Mrs. Kennedy and the famous dignitaries.”</p>
<h2>Back to normal?</h2>
<p>In the weeks after the assassination, social scientists confidently asserted that the country would bounce back to stability and quick social recovery. <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/kennedy-assassination-and-the-american-public-social-communication-in-crisis/oclc/475038">Wilbur Schramm</a>, one of the founders of the field of communication studies, declared, “This crisis was integrative rather than disintegrative.” </p>
<p>They were wrong, of course. </p>
<p>The “nightmare on Elm Street,” as Dylan calls the assassination – after the name of the street where Kennedy was shot – continues to haunt many baby boomers. Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w16bYZ-4nmE">JFK</a>” and Stephen King’s 2011 novel “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/11_22_63/MJNi0uU8kdoC?hl=en">11/22/63</a>” both portray it as a pivot point that spurred national disaster, decline and unfulfilled dreams.</p>
<p>It’s impossible to know the social, cultural and political legacy of our current crisis. <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/490042-mnuchin-us-will-bounce-back-after-we-kill-this-virus-and-reopen">Some officials</a>, including the <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/03/23/trump-wants-america-open-for-business-with-coronavirus-crisis/">current occupant of the White House</a>, suggest we’ll bounce back stronger than ever. Things, they say, will go back to normal – whatever that means in these already turbulent times. </p>
<p>But Dylan’s evocation of the Kennedy assassination at this moment suggests something more ominous. In the middle of the song, <a href="https://genius.com/Bob-dylan-murder-most-foul-lyrics">he declares</a>: </p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> The day that they killed him, someone said to me,
"Son, the age of the Antichrist has just only begun"
</code></pre>
<p>Let’s hope Dylan isn’t the oracle of this new age that’s unfolding.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Bob Dylan’s ‘Murder Most Foul.’</span></figcaption>
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<p>[<em><a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=upper-coronavirus-daily">Our newsletter explains what’s going on with the coronavirus pandemic. Subscribe now</a>.</em>]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/135013/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aniko Bodroghkozy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>During our current bout of collective trauma, many of our coping strategies have mimicked the ways Americans responded to the Kennedy assassination.Aniko Bodroghkozy, Professor of Media Studies, University of VirginiaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1009412018-09-28T10:36:16Z2018-09-28T10:36:16ZHow the media encourages – and sustains – political warfare<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234140/original/file-20180829-195325-1gxmalk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The quiet consumption of news can sustain a polarized political environment.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/concept-debate-political-argument-symbol-two-463236158?src=OjX0pUNHdS4YHxT1B2KpQA-1-2">Lightspring</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Since his inauguration, President Donald Trump has been waging war against the American press by dismissing unfavorable reports as “fake news” and calling the media “the enemy of the American people.”</p>
<p>As a countermeasure, The Washington Post has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/?utm_term=.bc5d5ca153f1">publicly fact-checked every claim that Trump has labeled as fake</a>. In August, The Boston Globe <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/08/10/newspaper-calls-for-war-words-against-trump-media-attacks/DG5ijE6VSuWCEsvi8lKHBL/story.html">coordinated editorials</a> from newspapers across the nation to push back against Trump’s attacks on the press. The Associated Press <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/08/10/newspaper-calls-for-war-words-against-trump-media-attacks/DG5ijE6VSuWCEsvi8lKHBL/story.html">characterized this effort</a> as the declaration of a “war of words” against Trump. </p>
<p>News organizations might frame themselves as the besieged party in this “war.” But what if they’re as much to blame as the president in this back-and-forth? And what if readers are to blame as well?</p>
<p>In an unpublished manuscript titled “<a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520298125/the-war-of-words">The War of Words</a>,” the late rhetorical theorist and cultural critic Kenneth Burke cast the media as agents of political warfare. In 2012, we found this manuscript in Burke’s papers and, after working closely with Burke’s family and the University of California Press, it will be published in October 2018. </p>
<p>In “The War of Words,” Burke urges readers to recognize the role they also play in sustaining polarization. He points to how seemingly innocuous features in a news story can actually compromise values readers might hold, whether it’s debating the issues further, finding points of consensus, and, ideally, avoiding war.</p>
<h2>A book born out of the Cold War</h2>
<p>In 1939 – just before Adolf Hitler invaded Poland – Burke wrote an influential essay, “<a href="http://www.csun.edu/%7Ehfspc002/442/txt/burke.pdf">The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle,’</a>” in which he outlined how Hitler had weaponized language to foment antipathy, scapegoat Jews and unite Germans against a common enemy.</p>
<p>After World War II ended and America’s leaders turned their attention to the Soviet Union, Burke saw some parallels to Hitler in the way language was being weaponized in the U.S. </p>
<p>He worried that the U.S. might remain on a permanent wartime footing and that a drumbeat of oppositional rhetoric directed at the Soviet Union was making the nation susceptible to slipping into yet another war.</p>
<p>Tormented by this possibility, he published two books, “<a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520015449/a-grammar-of-motives">A Grammar of Motives</a>” and “<a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520015463/a-rhetoric-of-motives">A Rhetoric of Motives</a>,” in which he sought to to inoculate Americans from the sort of political speech that, in his view, could lead to a nuclear holocaust.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/238382/original/file-20180927-48653-8jowuj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/238382/original/file-20180927-48653-8jowuj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238382/original/file-20180927-48653-8jowuj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238382/original/file-20180927-48653-8jowuj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238382/original/file-20180927-48653-8jowuj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238382/original/file-20180927-48653-8jowuj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/238382/original/file-20180927-48653-8jowuj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kenneth Burke.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f0/Kenneth_Burke.jpg">Oscar White</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“The War of Words” was originally supposed to be part of “A Rhetoric of Motives.” But at the last minute, Burke decided to set it aside and publish it later. Unfortunately, he never ended up publishing it before his death in 1993.</p>
<p>The thesis of “The War of Words” is simple and, in our view, holds up today: Political warfare is ubiquitous, unrelenting and inevitable. News coverage and commentary are frequently biased, whether journalists and readers are aware of it or not. And all media coverage, therefore, demands careful scrutiny. </p>
<p>To Burke, you don’t have to launch social media missives in order to participate in sustaining a polarized political environment. </p>
<p>Instead, the quiet consumption of news reporting is enough to do the trick.</p>
<h2>Pick a side</h2>
<p>Most people might think that the content of media coverage is the most persuasive component. They assume what gets reported matters more than how it gets reported. </p>
<p>But according to “The War of Words,” this assumption is backwards: An argument’s form is often its most persuasive element.</p>
<p>Burke takes pains to catalog the various forms that news writers use in their work and calls them “rhetorical devices.” </p>
<p>One device he calls “headline thinking,” which refers to how an article’s headline can establish the tone and frame of the issue being discussed. </p>
<p>Take, for example, an Aug. 21 article The New York Times ran about how Michael Cohen’s indictment might affect the 2018 midterms. The headline read: “<a href="http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/national/with-cohen-implicating-trump-a-presidencys-fate-rests-with-congress-20180822">With Cohen Implicating Trump, a Presidency’s Fate Rests With Congress</a>.” </p>
<p>The next day, the Times ran another article on the same topic with the following headline: “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/22/us/politics/trump-cohen-impeachment.html">Republicans Urge Embattled Incumbents to Speak Out on Trump</a>.” </p>
<p>Both headlines seek to assail the Republican Party. The first implies that the Republican Party, because it holds a majority in Congress, is responsible for upholding justice – and if they don’t indict Trump, they’re clearly protecting him to preserve their political power. </p>
<p>The second headline might seem less malicious than the first. But think about the underlying assumption: Republicans are only urging “embattled” elected officials to speak out against Trump. </p>
<p>The directive, therefore, isn’t born out of political principle. Rather, it’s being made because the party needs to preserve its majority and protect vulnerable incumbents. The unstated claim in this headline is that the Republican Party exhibits political virtue only when it’s needed to quell threats to its power.</p>
<p>If you side with The New York Times, you may be heartened by its efforts to position the Republican Party as craven in its lust for power. If you side with the Republican Party, you are probably disgusted with the paper for claiming that its representatives lack moral virtue. </p>
<p>Either way, the line is drawn: The New York Times is on one side, and the Republican Congress is on the other.</p>
<h2>A rhetorical ‘call to arms’</h2>
<p>Another device Burke explores is one that he calls “yielding aggressively,” which involves accepting criticism in order to leverage it to one’s own benefit. </p>
<p>We see this at play in an <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/08/22/trump-likely-safe-after-cohen-guilty-plea-but-mueller-report-will-be-fodder-for-foes.html">op-ed piece published on Fox News</a> on Aug. 22, 2018. The writer, John Fund, concluded that Michael Cohen’s guilty plea will “likely” not lead to an indictment of President Trump. </p>
<p>To support his argument, he cites Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel to President Barack Obama, <a href="https://www.lawfareblog.com/michael-cohen-plea-agreement-possible-meanings-campaign-finance-counts">who has argued</a> that the campaign finance violations aren’t very significant but are instead being used as a political cudgel. </p>
<p>Fund admits that Cohen’s guilty plea will hurt Trump and make things tougher for his supporters, requiring them “to do a lot of heavy lifting when they come to his defense.” Fund’s editorial also admits to minor lapses in Trump’s judgment – particularly in hiring Cohen, Manafort and Omarosa Manigault Newman. It thus yielded to popular criticisms of Trump. </p>
<p>But this admission is not a call for accountability; it is a call to arms. Fund ultimately argues that if Trump is indicted, it will not be because he is guilty of violating a serious law. It will be because his opponents seek to vanquish him. </p>
<p>Indictment or not, Fund seems to be saying, Trump supporters should be ready for a ferocious political fight come 2020.</p>
<p>Again, the lines are drawn.</p>
<h2>How to survive the ‘war of words’</h2>
<p>Burke <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520015463/a-rhetoric-of-motives">once wrote</a> about how rhetorical devices like those explored above can sustain division and polarization. </p>
<p>“Imagine a passage built about a set of oppositions (‘we do this, but they on the other hand do that; we stay here, but they go there; we look up, but they look down,’ etc.),” he wrote. “Once you grasp the trend of the form, [you see that] it invites participation regardless of the subject matter … you will find yourself swinging along with the succession of antitheses, even though you may not agree with the proposition that is being presented in this form.” </p>
<p>Burke calls this phenomenon “collaborative expectancy” – collaborative because it encourages us to swing along together, and “expectancy” because of the predictability of each side’s argument. </p>
<p>This predictability encourages readers to embrace an argument without considering whether we find it persuasive. They simply sit on one of two opposing sides and nod along. </p>
<p>According to Burke, if you passively consume the news, swinging along with headlines as the midterms unfold, political divisions will likely be further cemented.</p>
<p>However if you become aware of how the media reports you’re consuming seek to subtly position and influence you, you’ll likely seek out more sources and become more deliberative. You might notice what’s missing from a debate, and what really might be motivating the outlet.</p>
<p>To avoid getting sucked into a dynamic of two opposing, gridlocked forces, it’s important for all readers to make their consciousness a matter of conscience.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100941/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kyle Jensen received funding from the University of North Texas and the Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Penn State University.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jack Selzer received funding from the New York Public Library to do research related to Kenneth Burke's "The War of Words." He was also supported by the Paterno Family Liberal Arts Professorship endowment. </span></em></p>In Kenneth Burke’s ‘The War of Words,’ the late rhetorical theorist picks apart the little ways news articles can subtly influence readers – and harden divisions.Kyle Jensen, Associate Professor of English, University of North TexasJack Selzer, Paterno Family Liberal Arts Professor of Literature, Penn StateLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/920092018-07-26T10:36:26Z2018-07-26T10:36:26ZA conservative activist’s quest to preserve all network news broadcasts<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229155/original/file-20180724-194143-1l0jvgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon smiles for the cameras during a 1968 news conference.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fifty years ago, in the middle of a typically hot and humid Nashville summer, a Metropolitan Life insurance manager named Paul Simpson sat with Frank Grisham, the director of the Vanderbilt University Library, in the rare books room of the main library building.</p>
<p>Using three <a href="https://www.ampex.com/ampex-history/">Ampex video recording machines</a>, three television sets and $4,000 of Simpson’s own money, they began what they thought would be a 90-day experiment: From then until election night in November, they would record the ABC, NBC and CBS evening news broadcasts, which usually aired at the same time.</p>
<p>The day Simpson and Grisham started taping, August 5, 1968, was an eventful one. The Republican Convention began, <a href="http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/campaign68/timeline.html">and Ronald Reagan officially announced his candidacy for the presidential nomination</a>, joining with liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller in an attempt to stop Richard Nixon’s hopes of a first ballot nomination.</p>
<p>The news broadcasts also included the era’s biggest stories: fighting in Vietnam, communist leaders meeting in Eastern Europe and the civil war in Nigeria. Other reports from that day sound hauntingly familiar: an Israeli strike into Jordan and a violent incident at the Korean Demilitarized Zone, in which an American and North Korean soldier were killed. </p>
<p>Such was the modest beginning of what Rutgers University historian David Greenberg <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=7oQsWVsy6tkC&pg=PA185&dq=Do+Historians+Watch+Enough+TV?+Broadcast+News+as+a+Primary+Source&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjLh6Dq-rXcAhVDGt8KHXjCDw8Q6AEILDAB#v=onepage&q=Do%20Historians%20Watch%20Enough%20TV%3F%20Broadcast%20News%20as%20a%20Primary%20Source&f=false">has called</a> the “preeminent video resource for scholars of TV news.” </p>
<p>Although legal and copyright issues continue to hinder access, the Vanderbilt Television News Archive – a repository of television news recordings from the past 50 years – is a national archival treasure.</p>
<p>But the archive’s beginnings are rooted in the political and cultural conflicts of the late 1960s. Simpson, the archive’s founder, first financial backer and chief fundraiser, was deeply conservative. <a href="https://www.abebooks.com/Network-Television-News-Conviction-Controversy-Point/22707912691/bd">And he was convinced</a> that the network news broadcasts, with their executive producers living in New York’s “liberal atmosphere,” were contributing to social turmoil and unrest throughout the country.</p>
<p>For this reason, he sought to save the recordings for posterity – to be able to show, years later, that CBS, NBC and ABC were as much a part of the problem as the anti-war movement, drug culture and free love.</p>
<h2>The most trusted men?</h2>
<p>Although he later downplayed political motivations in <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?152200-1/television-news-archives">a 1985 C-SPAN interview</a>, Simpson had long been passionate in his concern about television’s malign influence over “the American mind.” </p>
<p>In 1964, <a href="https://collections.library.vanderbilt.edu/repositories/2/resources/1605">he wrote to CBS</a> to complain about Walter Cronkite’s coverage of the Goldwater campaign. He wasn’t necessarily wrong: Cronkite, who enjoyed his reputation as the “most trusted man” in America, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=XWv46Na-PIcC&lpg=PP1&dq=cronkite&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false">did detest Goldwater</a> and was liberal in his politics.</p>
<p>Simpson also believed that television news unfairly blamed President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on the “conservative atmosphere” in Dallas, <a href="https://www.abebooks.com/Network-Television-News-Conviction-Controversy-Point/22707912691/bd">and he recalled with particular disgust</a> a 1967 network interview with psychologist <a href="https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/timothy-leary">Timothy Leary</a>, who was encouraging young people to try LSD.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229293/original/file-20180725-194134-1bo0v1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229293/original/file-20180725-194134-1bo0v1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229293/original/file-20180725-194134-1bo0v1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229293/original/file-20180725-194134-1bo0v1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229293/original/file-20180725-194134-1bo0v1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229293/original/file-20180725-194134-1bo0v1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229293/original/file-20180725-194134-1bo0v1o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Simpson was deeply suspicious of Walter Cronkite’s motives and beliefs.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/charleskremenak/9399912564">Charles Kremenak</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On a business trip to New York in March 1968, Simpson toured each of the three networks. At each stop, he asked to see a broadcast from the previous month. They all told him that they weren’t available – they only saved their broadcasts for about two weeks because it was too expensive to preserve them.</p>
<p>Simpson was shocked. He viewed nightly newscasts as the equivalent of America’s national newspaper. How could they be held accountable if no record existed of their stories, segments and analysis?</p>
<p>When he returned to Nashville, Simpson found an ally in Vanderbilt librarian Frank Grisham. </p>
<p>Grisham didn’t share Simpson’s politics but did believe that the broadcasts should be preserved. The two took the idea to Vanderbilt’s chancellor, <a href="https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2009/07/25/alexander-heard-vanderbilts-fifth-chancellor-dies-85205/">Alexander Heard</a>, a political scientist <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Gone_with_the_Ivy.html?id=G5hlQgAACAAJ">whom historian Paul Conkin described</a> as a true believer in “an open society, one in which divergent views could find expression” and compete for public acceptance. Heard got the board of trustees to approve a short-term experiment, hoping that the Library of Congress might eventually take it over.</p>
<h2>Preserving bias for posterity</h2>
<p>The expensive project may have ended after its three-month test run were it not for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, held a few weeks after the Republican gathering.</p>
<p>On August 28, 1968, the night Hubert Humphrey was nominated, the news networks aired footage of the swelling crowds of protesters, the outbreak of violence in the streets and the demonstrators shouting, “The whole world is watching” as the police attacked them. It was dramatic stuff – and Simpson and Grisham preserved it all.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7_9OJnRnZjU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The dramatic images that emerged from the 1968 Democratic National Convention horrified a huge swath of the electorate.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Although the protesters believed media coverage would create sympathy for their cause, <a href="https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/the-whole-world-was-watching/">a substantial majority of Americans</a>
– including Paul Simpson – sided with the police. When editing the tapes, Simpson realized that NBC had shown the same arrest of one violent protester from three different angles without acknowledging that it was the same person. <a href="https://www.abebooks.com/Network-Television-News-Conviction-Controversy-Point/22707912691/bd">In Simpson’s view</a>, this exaggerated the scale of violence and discredited the police. </p>
<p>In the heated atmosphere of 1968, it was enough to fuel suspicions of media bias. Simpson now had his smoking gun – and a potent fundraising tool.</p>
<p>Over the next two years, the tape of the Chicago violence played a critical role in the survival of the archive. Simpson argued that the only way to be able to study the media’s impact was to ensure copies existed for critics, researchers and academics to review. Two conservative Nashville business executives, one of whom sat on the Vanderbilt board of trustees, made substantial donations to keep the archive functioning. </p>
<p>Nixon’s election made the White House receptive to the project. Simpson sent the tape to <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/249080/nixons-white-house-wars-by-patrick-j-buchanan/9781101902868/">Patrick Buchanan</a>, a Nixon speechwriter who shared the president’s deep distaste for the media. Buchanan even included a reference to the protest footage in Vice President Spiro Agnew’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQpQyJQm2Mk">famous 1969 speech attacking television news as biased</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229157/original/file-20180724-194128-16o7vkd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229157/original/file-20180724-194128-16o7vkd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229157/original/file-20180724-194128-16o7vkd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229157/original/file-20180724-194128-16o7vkd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229157/original/file-20180724-194128-16o7vkd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229157/original/file-20180724-194128-16o7vkd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229157/original/file-20180724-194128-16o7vkd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Vice President Spiro Agnew laid into the press, citing the same footage from the 1968 DNC protests that infuriated Paul Simpson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-AP-A-NM-USA-APHS437970-Agnew-Native-Americans/9778c5b3869c4c9f932504345e7ffd9f/58/0">AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“Another network,” Agnew announced, “showed virtually the same scene of violence from three separate angles without making clear it was the same scene.”</p>
<h2>The networks fight back</h2>
<p>The networks had never been singled out by elected officials in this way, and they weren’t happy about the scrutiny. Operating as they did with government licenses, they saw Agnew’s speech as intimidation.</p>
<p>With a hubris that, in retrospect, was certain to invite further scrutiny, the three networks pushed back, arguing that they were objective and impartial watchdogs looking out for the public interest. They saw themselves as above politics. As media historian Charles L. Ponce De Leon <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo12345529.html">wrote</a> in 2015, “It was news from Olympus, presented in a tone that suggested the voice of God.” </p>
<p>NBC’s Reuven Frank <a href="https://collections.library.vanderbilt.edu/repositories/2/resources/1605">sarcastically dismissed</a> Simpson’s claim that he was acting in the “spirit of free inquiry,” remarking that “I have never known a self-proclaimed objective student who sought to evaluate my performance because he thought I was doing great.” </p>
<p>The networks also worried that if Vanderbilt continued recording their broadcasts, they would lose the ability to repackage and resell their footage. People could just go to Vanderbilt for it.</p>
<p>CBS accused the Vanderbilt Television News Archive of violating its copyright and sued in December 1973. Amazingly, CBS stated it would destroy the Vanderbilt tapes if it won in court.</p>
<p>Thankfully, Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker helped insert <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/108">a clause in the revision of the copyright law</a> that protected the right of libraries to record the news. CBS dropped its lawsuit, but some of the restrictions it insisted upon were put in place.</p>
<p>While the entire collection was digitalized in the early 2000s, the Vanderbilt Television News Archive is only allowed to stream NBC and CNN to researchers. Examining ABC, CBS or Fox segments requires a trip to Nashville. </p>
<p>The recording of the evening newscasts of the big three networks – ABC, CBS and NBC – continues to this day. In 1995, the archive began recording an one hour a day of CNN, and in 2004, an hour of FOX. Over the years it’s been used by researchers to study topics as diffuse as political bias, gender stereotyping and even the evolution of television advertising, since the commercials during the news broadcasts are also recorded.</p>
<p>In recent times, the archive was used in the 2015 documentary “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3518012/">Best of Enemies</a>” because it contained lost footage of the debate between conservative commentator William F. Buckley and liberal writer Gore Vidal. More poignantly, <a href="http://www.newsknowledge.today/episode-002/">it was used by the mother of an American soldier</a> who died in Vietnam; after someone told her that her wounded son had been photographed lying on the ground during a network news segment, she traveled to the archives to review footage and confirm the account.</p>
<p>Even if one thinks Simpson’s perception of deliberate political bias was misguided, his insistence on preserving the evening news in order to study and analyze its presentation was an extraordinarily important contribution.</p>
<p>The British writer Christopher Hitchens <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/boycott-the-gop/550907/">once remarked</a> that political partisanship makes us stupid. </p>
<p>But in the case of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, partisanship led to unintended, historically enriching results.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92009/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Thomas Alan Schwartz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Fifty years ago, an insurance agent named Paul Simpson was convinced of rampant bias on the evening news. So he embarked on a project to record each broadcast and store them at Vanderbilt University.Thomas Alan Schwartz, Professor of History, Vanderbilt UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/784422017-06-01T01:55:18Z2017-06-01T01:55:18ZMainstream media outlets are dropping the ball with terrorism coverage<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/171670/original/file-20170531-25658-1975cei.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Breathless reporting accompanies each attack, with little time spent addressing the underlying causes.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nick Lehr/The Conversation via Google</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>News coverage of the Manchester terrorist attack was sadly familiar: cellphone videos of screaming victims; details of first responders’ hectic efforts; “Was it terrorism?” guesswork; speculation about the perpetrator. In this case, the horror was amplified by so many of the killed and wounded being young people.</p>
<p>Since the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, covering the type of violence inspired by al-Qaeda or the Islamic State (IS) has become a staple of the news media’s repertoire. Collectively, this reporting increases the public’s sense of vulnerability: An evil is out there, unpredictable and ferocious, sure to strike again.</p>
<p>But what’s behind that evil? When I watch or read mainstream news coverage of the attacks, they tend to treat them as distinct events, much like a train wreck or bank robbery. </p>
<p>As I worked on my forthcoming book, “As Terrorism Evolves: Media, Religion, and Governance,” it became clear that for all the breathless headlines about IS-inspired terror attacks, many know little about the complexities of terrorism and Islam. Who are these people who murder so wantonly? Why do they do it? And, most importantly, how might such attacks be stopped?</p>
<p>Answering such questions requires daily news coverage that consists of more than depictions of scattered chaos. A holistic approach to reporting about terrorism might better explain this phenomenon that’s reshaping our lives, much as the Cold War did 50 years ago.</p>
<h2>A journalistic void</h2>
<p>Western reporting about IS-inspired terrorist attacks almost always, explicitly or implicitly, notes a connection to Islam. But it often ends there. <a href="http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/12/religious-lit-symposium/">Many journalists shy away from religious topics</a>, and this creates a vacuum of public knowledge that terrorists and anti-Muslim activists and politicians can exploit. </p>
<p>The result? A religion of 1.6 billion people is being defined in public discourse by the acts of the few who spill blood in a Manchester arena or a Baghdad marketplace. And because there is such limited understanding of Islam in the non-Muslim world – <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/2010/08/24/public-remains-conflicted-over-islam/">55 percent</a> of Americans say they know little or nothing at all about Islam – many news consumers are prone to accept the idea that “Islam-equals-terrorism.” <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/26/muslims-and-islam-key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-world/">Results of a 2015 Pew Research Center study</a> underscored the pervasiveness of stereotypes and the tensions underlying them, with significant numbers of Americans viewing Muslims as anti-American and violent. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/03/13/iowa-republican-party-criticizes-steve-king-for-controversial-muslim-tweet/">When political figures denounce Muslims</a>, or when there is anti-Muslim backlash following an attack, <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/05/24/reactions-to-manchester-bombing-show-how-anti-muslim-bigots-are-useful-idiots-for-isis/">terrorist organizations chalk up a victory</a>. Because some Muslims will inevitably see their religion as being under siege, they become susceptible to recruitment by the likes of al-Qaida and IS, who portray themselves as defenders of the religion.</p>
<p>Following terror attacks, anti-extremism responses from Muslim communities might receive some coverage. For example, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U49nOBFv508&feature=youtu.be">an antiterrorism message</a> produced in Kuwait and broadcast soon after the Manchester bombing quickly went viral on social media and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/30/world/middleeast/zain-ad-ramadan-terrorism.html">received coverage from Western news media</a>.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, Islam usually disappears from the news until the next tragedy, even though approximately <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/31/worlds-muslim-population-more-widespread-than-you-might-think/">80 percent of Muslims</a> live outside the Arab world in countries of rising importance such as Indonesia, Pakistan and Nigeria. The global political clout of Islam is, in some ways, like that of Catholicism centuries ago. If the role of Islam in world affairs were to receive continuing coverage, perhaps news consumers would realize that there is far more to Islam than violence. And if antipathy toward Islam were to diminish, terrorists would lose a recruiting tool.</p>
<h2>Honestly addressing the threat</h2>
<p>That said, this coverage should also address state-sponsored extremism, most notably Saudi Arabia’s <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saudi/analyses/wahhabism.html">well-funded promotion of Wahabbist Muslim ideology</a>. This fundamentalist doctrine is intrinsically separatist and lends itself to militancy. <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2014/11/wahhabism-isis-how-saudi-arabia-exported-main-source-global-terrorism">It provides a purported theological rationale</a> for treating moderate Muslims – as well as non-Muslims – as enemies. </p>
<p>While Western politicians are restrained in dealing with this for reasons related to oil and regional geopolitics, the news media could play a more forceful role in describing how even purported allies help terrorism take root.</p>
<p>Journalists could also more thoroughly examine the sophistication of terrorist operations. Islamic State, for example, has deftly used social media to inspire terrorist attackers, even those with whom it has no direct contact. </p>
<p>The perpetrators of the December 2015 terror attack in San Bernardino, California had received no training or orders from Islamic State, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/05/us/san-bernardino-shooting/">but they pledged allegiance to IS</a> and launched the attack based on what they had gleaned from IS’ online content.</p>
<p>Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al-Qaida, recognized the power of media <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/03/isis-winning-social-media-war-heres-beat/">when he wrote</a>, back in 2004, that “more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media…we are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of our Umma [Muslim people].” </p>
<p><a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/03/isis-winning-social-media-war-heres-beat/">IS has used social media</a> to spread its message, recruit followers, train fighters and raise funds. Governments and nongovernmental groups <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2015/11/19/fight-against-isis-reveals-power-of-social-media/">have recently become more adept at pushing back against this</a> – the U.S. State Department has released over 300 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcQxGG6y-MY">YouTube videos</a> to counter the messaging of extremist groups – but the news media still tend to understate the organizational and military capabilities of terrorist groups.</p>
<p>Consider the long-running story of efforts to liberate Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, which Islamic State has held since 2014. Iraqi and American sources provide vaguely optimistic updates, which are duly reported. But this battle has been underway since October 2016. Despite the U.S.-backed onslaught, parts of Mosul remain under Islamic State control. What does this portend for future Islamic State military efforts and its far-ranging terrorist attacks? Relying on daily combat bulletins obscures the long-term realities that journalists should be analyzing.</p>
<p>More broadly, counterterrorism efforts by the United States and other countries deserve greater scrutiny. The public needs to know what’s working and what isn’t. Defeating terrorism will require a mix of hard and soft power. Shutting down terrorists’ recruiting pipelines is crucial. That requires innovative programs to reach those who are vulnerable to extremist appeals. </p>
<p>Terrorism is a pervasive enough part of our lives to merit more consistent news coverage, and journalists on the terrorism beat must develop expertise about this multidimensional topic. (Among the best are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/joby-warrick/?utm_term=.9e1b163e07c6">Joby Warrick</a> of The Washington Post and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/rukmini-callimachi">Rukmini Callimachi</a> of The New York Times.) But overall, terrorism-related journalism remains episodic and simplistic.</p>
<p>Since the rude awakening of 9/11, journalism, in my view, hasn’t kept pace with the bloody growth of terrorism. It needs to catch up.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/78442/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Philip Seib does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Terrorist attacks are more than ‘breaking news,’ but the media aren’t taking a comprehensive approach to exploring the underlying issues.Philip Seib, Professor of Journalism and Public Diplomacy, USC Annenberg School for Communication and JournalismLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/628832016-07-22T20:22:20Z2016-07-22T20:22:20ZThe one Roger Ailes hire that changed American politics forever<p>In the wake of Roger Ailes’ <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-fox-news-chief-roger-ailes-dies-1495112318">death</a>, many will remember him for his 20-year reign at the helm of Fox News, and his strategic approach to programming that took the network to new heights.</p>
<p>But to journalism ethicists, he will be remembered as a poster boy for conflict of interest. Of Ailes’ many departures from journalistic norms of impartiality, the most egregious was his hiring of a cousin of presidential candidate George W. Bush during the 2000 election. </p>
<h2>Partisan journalism, redefined</h2>
<p>We talk a lot about conflict of interest in my journalism ethics class: why travel writers shouldn’t accept free trips to Disney World. Why food critics shouldn’t write about their sister-in-law’s restaurant. Why no journalists should actively support or work against any causes or organizations that they may be called upon to write about. </p>
<p>And, especially, why no news executives should assign stories that promote their allies or attack their enemies.</p>
<p>The prohibitions are grounded in the belief in the importance of journalistic independence – the belief that journalists’ first allegiance should be to the public they serve.</p>
<p>It gets complicated, of course. If everyone who has an opinion about abortion rights is disqualified from covering a march for or against abortion rights, there would be no news of such protests. If, as is increasingly the case, the news organization is owned by a corporation that also owns a movie studio, how should the news organization handle a new release by the studio?</p>
<p>Classic cases help us see how such conflicts play out in the real world: the political reporter <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-mayor4jul04-story.html">who was having an affair with the mayor</a>, the news anchor <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/04/04/rather-spoke-at-democratic-fundraiser/89d04ae7-47c8-4691-9d50-8cb627a97c36/">who spoke at a Democratic Party fundraiser</a> and the business reporter whose coverage of a company he owned stock in <a href="http://money.cnn.com/gallery/investing/2014/06/02/insider-trading-famous-cases/3.html">caused that stock to rise</a>.</p>
<p>Then there’s Fox News, which is in a whole different category. </p>
<p>From one perspective, a conservative-leaning TV news source was needed as a counterweight to all the liberal-leaning sources. From another, the arrival of Fox was part of a two-pronged right-wing strategy: First, relentlessly discredit what were actually more or less impartial news sources as having a liberal bias. Then, offer your own news shows as the “fair and balanced” alternative.</p>
<p>The giveaway was Rupert Murdoch’s 1996 appointment of Roger Ailes, a former adviser to the Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush campaigns, to build the operation. Where individual journalists or newsroom executives might have a conflict of interest covering particular stories or issues, Ailes brought a political agenda to an <em>entire news organization</em>. The master political operative became a master news producer, enjoying 20 years of <a href="http://www.journalism.org/files/2014/03/1-cable-tv-viewership.png">powerhouse ratings</a>. </p>
<h2>Tilting the 2000 election?</h2>
<p>But Ailes’ signature moment was bringing John Ellis on board to analyze the data provided by the Voter News Service on Election Night 2000.</p>
<p>To this day, some claim the networks suppressed Republican turnout by prematurely calling some states for Al Gore; others argue the networks, starting with Fox, influenced the outcome by prematurely calling the election for Bush. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/one-call-too-many/">One thing is known</a>: Ellis was on the phone with the Republican nominee and his brother Jeb throughout the evening, and it was Ellis’ declaration that his kinsman was the winner that influenced all the projections that followed.</p>
<p>Before the gig at Fox, in a column he wrote for the Boston Globe, <a href="http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/boston/doc/405294146.html?FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Jul+3%2C+1999&author=Ellis%2C+John&pub=Boston+Globe&edition=&startpage=A.11&desc=Why+I+won%27t+write+anymore+about+the+2000+campaign">Ellis recused himself from coverage of the election</a>, acknowledging that his first loyalty was to his cousin.</p>
<p>“Dwell on this for a moment,” Tim Dickinson <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-20110525">wrote</a> in a 2011 Rolling Stone article. “A ‘news’ network controlled by a GOP operative who had spent decades shaping just such political narratives – including those that helped elect the candidate’s father – declared George W. Bush the victor based on the analysis of a man who had proclaimed himself loyal to Bush over the facts.”</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vJIGQyF2Yjo?wmode=transparent&start=86" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A clip from the documentary ‘Outfoxed’ details how Fox News erroneously called the 2000 election for Bush – and the other networks fell in line.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Once Bush took office, Dickinson wrote, Ailes frequently served as an informal adviser to the president. And when Obama succeeded Bush, Fox News reverted to attack mode, <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/2011/04/20/fox-news-goes-full-birther/178860#Head1">raising doubts about his citizenship</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC0g5l9kq94">his religious affiliation</a>. </p>
<p>With Ailes at the controls, Fox News was fair and balanced only if you believe that all other news coverage is so biased that an entire network is needed to counteract it. In other words, in the face of the supposed liberal slant at the other networks, Fox needed to be unfair and unbalanced.</p>
<p>Now we are in an era of <a href="http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/section-1-growing-ideological-consistency/">unprecedented political partisanship</a>. Other networks tried to mimic Fox News’ success; the result has been a proliferation of partisan outlets that have only <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12008/abstract;jsessionid=E1531D46DB93F7A849E5092FB7BAEC55.f01t03?userIsAuthenticated=false&deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=">further polarized viewers</a>, while the public’s trust in the media <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/185927/americans-trust-media-remains-historical-low.aspx">is at a historic low</a>.</p>
<p>Give Ailes credit. His experiment with overtly partisan news-like programming was wildly successful for <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/as-viewers-drift-is-it-past-prime-time-for-the-cable-news-networks/2015/05/06/6dbba2bc-eeb6-11e4-a55f-38924fca94f9_story.html">Fox’s bottom line</a>. But his tenure – epitomized by his appointment of John Ellis – grievously harmed journalism. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article first published on July 22, 2016.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62883/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Russell Frank does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The former Fox News CEO crossed the line between unbiased coverage and political activism with ease.Russell Frank, Associate Professor of Communications, Penn StateLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/382732015-03-03T06:19:54Z2015-03-03T06:19:54ZLies, slurs and dodgy experts: welcome to the nightly news<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/73534/original/image-20150302-15991-euj2ym.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Perhaps the closest Bill O'Reilly has actually been to combat</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%93%E3%83%AB%E3%83%BB%E3%82%AA%E3%83%A9%E3%82%A4%E3%83%AA%E3%83%BC#mediaviewer/File:Bill_O%27Reilly_(commentator).jpg">US Army</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s not a good time to be a newscaster in the US. The latest controversy to hit broadcasters concerns Kristi Capel, a morning news presenter on Cleveland Ohio’s Fox 8 network. The morning after Lady Gaga had wowed the Oscars ceremony with her Sound of Music medley, <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/local-fox-anchor-uses-racial-slur-to-describe-lady-gaga-s-music-193704985.html%2520">Capel commented</a>, live on air, whilst giggling and gesticulating, “It’s hard to really hear her [Ga Ga’s] voice with all that jigaboo music that she does, or whatever you want to call it. Jigaboo.”</p>
<p>Amid the predictable <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/kristi-capel-fox-8-anchor-criticised-for-using-racist-term-to-describe-lady-gagas-oscars-performance-10066688.html">twitter storm</a>, Capel apologised, tweeting to one complainant: </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"569840222357360640"}"></div></p>
<p>She added later, “I deeply regret my insensitive comment. I didn’t know the meaning and would never intentionally use hurtful language. I sincerely apologise.”</p>
<p>Her apology was not universally accepted. Professor of Political Science, Jason Johnson, argued that it was a “total stretch” to believe that she did not know that jigaboo was a negative reference to black people. <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/oped-why-jigaboo-apology-gaga-comment-not-enough-n312626">He wrote</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>She didn’t make an ‘insensitive’ statement, she made a racist statement, and to believe her story you’d have to believe that a woman with a degree in journalism uses words on television that she doesn’t know the definition of.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Capel has been <a href="http://perezhilton.com/2015-02-25-fox-news-anchor-suspended-racial-slur-three-days#.VO7xtDSsWH4">suspended</a> from her duties. For three days. She is now back on the air.</p>
<h2>Anchors away!</h2>
<p>So more problems for Fox whose far more well-known national news caster Bill O’Reilly has found his own credibility under scrutiny. In a sense he should be used to this. His uncompromising and belligerent interviewing style coupled with his right-wing views and unshakeable belief in the virtue of his own opinions has led to forensic examinations of his broadcasts. </p>
<p>Peter Hart’s 2003 book, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Oh-Really-Factor-Unspinning-Channels/dp/158322601X/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1424949762&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=fox+news+and+billoreilly">Oh Really? Unspinning Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly</a> critically evaluated O’Reilly’s output and began with an endorsement from Robert McChesney which stated: “O’Reilly’s disinterest in the truth, in principle, and interrogating his own assumptions, and in intellectual consistency, is little short of breath-taking.”</p>
<p>All of which makes the current accusations made by his <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/26/bill-oreilly-former-colleagues-la-riots-bombardment?CMP=share_btn_tw">former colleagues</a> and non-profit investigative news magazine, <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/bill-oreilly-brian-williams-falklands-war">Mother Jones</a> not in the least surprising. On February 19, journalists David Corn and Daniel Schulman wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For years, O'Reilly has recounted dramatic stories about his own war reporting that don’t withstand scrutiny — even claiming he acted heroically in a war zone that he apparently never set foot in.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Corn and Schulman allege that O’Reilly has on many occasions referred to his role as a war correspondent during the Falkands war in 1982 and of his experience of combat. They suggest that he embellished his role there and dramatised his experiences in war-stricken El Salvador in 1981.</p>
<p>When this story broke last week, O’Reilly predictably went on the attack. Seeking to contest the Mother Jones story, he spoke to a journalist at the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/business/media/bill-oreilly-and-fox-news-redouble-defense-of-his-falklands-reporting.html?_r=0">New York Times</a> who was reportedly threatened with repercussions if any of the subsequent coverage was “inappropriate”. “I am coming after you with everything I have,” O’Reilly said. “You can take it as a threat.”</p>
<p>The whole incident is clearly a case of O’Reilly being hoist by his own petard because the Mother Jones piece was written in response to his high-minded on air denunciation of another news anchor who had exaggerated his war record, NBC’s Brian Williams.</p>
<p>For years, Williams had recounted the tale of his being caught under fire whilst in an army helicopter in Iraq 2003. When his version of the incident was questioned by a soldier who was actually under attack, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/04/brian-williams-forced-retract-feel-good-iraq-war-story-10-years-later">Williams admitted</a>: “I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago … I said I was traveling in an aircraft that was hit by RPG fire. I was instead in a following aircraft.”</p>
<p>O’Reilly’s response to this admission was both pious and ultimately hubristic. On February 11 on Fox News, against a backdrop that read “BRIAN WILLIAMS, THE PRESS AND YOU … Reporting the news comes with a big responsibility” <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7UGC3quedc#t=32%C2%A0%2520%20%C2%A0">he intoned</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Reporting comes with a big responsibility, the Founding Fathers made that point very clearly. They said to us, ‘We’ll give you freedom. We’ll protect you from government intrusion. But, in return, you, the press, must be honest.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s not as if the newsrooms of US television stations need any more bad publicity. It’s only a month or so ago that Fox’s Steve Emerson, the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/11340399/David-Cameron-US-terror-expert-Steve-Emerson-is-a-complete-idiot.html%25C2%25A0">self-titled</a> “internationally recognised expert on terrorism” said during a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_zF7nbEvwY">television report</a> that in the UK, “There are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in.”</p>
<p>“There are parts of London there are actually Muslim and religious police that actually beat and actually wound seriously anyone who doesn’t dress according to traditional Muslim attire.”</p>
<p>These comments were met with the derision they deserve with David Cameron wading in to call Emerson a “<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2905876/Fox-News-terror-expert-apologises-claiming-Birmingham-totally-Muslim-non-Muslims-just-simply-don-t-in.html">complete idiot</a>.” </p>
<h2>Is the UK any better?</h2>
<p>But before we get ahead of ourselves ridiculing the American TV news model, let’s remember the Leveson report, <a href="https://theconversation.com/hacking-affair-is-not-over-but-what-would-a-second-leveson-inquiry-achieve-29715">phone hacking trials</a> and the fact that several that British journalists have recently had to deal with questions about their integrity. As Hadley Freeman wrote in the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/25/america-cult-newscaster-hero-bill-oreilly-fox-news%25C2%25A0">Guardian last week</a>, Johann Hari, once the bright young thing of British journalism and winner of the Orwell prize who was exposed in 2011 as a plagiarist and slanderer, is now well on his way back to rehabilitation.</p>
<p>Even more lately, on the Muslim Council of Britain’s “Visit my Mosque day” held February 1, Channel 4 News anchor Cathy Newman tweeted that she had been turned away from the South London Islamic Centre. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"561872303672524800"}"></div></p>
<p>It turned out that Newman had simply turned up at the wrong mosque, one not taking part in the event. More than this, CCTV footage showed quite clearly shows her having a very short exchange with a man who points her toward the exit. She leaves through a courtyard and that is that. As the Huffington Post, who first <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/02/12/cathy-newman-channel-4-mosque_n_6667900.html.">highlighted the video</a>, put it, “the entire encounter lasts just seconds.” In no way could it be said that Newman was “ushered” out.</p>
<h2>Age of accountability</h2>
<p>In the cases of Emerson, Williams and O'Reilly particularly, it is difficult to feel any sympathy – their fabrications and claims are many and the accusations of embellishment continue to come. But what all these instances tell is that in the internet age there is nothing that is said or claimed that can be completely consigned to the memory hole. </p>
<p>Journalists, or any individuals come to that, can be held to account for whatever they say or do. As <a href="http://ewasserman.com/2006/05/08/ethical-journalism-in-the-internet-age/">Ed Wasserman</a> said in 2006, “journalists are no longer simply producing news, they’re creating permanent archives on deadline.” </p>
<p>It is undoubtedly a good thing if poor journalism and mendacity is highlighted and called to account, but we live in an age where every public utterance can be scrutinised by an army of critics with access to a search engine and Twitter. Let’s hope that this scenario leads to better journalism and not a culture of conformity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38273/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
It’s not as if the newsrooms of US television stations need any more bad publicityJohn Jewell, Director of Undergraduate Studies, School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.