The Influencing Machine (2011)
Brooke Gladstone
Illustrated by Jeff Neufeld
170 pages
Brooke Gladstone edits and, along with Bob Garfield, hosts the engaging and informative weekly National Public Radio program On the Media, which analyzes how the media reports stories, as well as the complex relationships between the media and its audience, advertisers, and government leaders. In 2011, building off of her many years of experience on the show, Gladstone released a graphic nonfiction book, The Influencing Machine, in which she reviews the long history of the media. She tells the story using a comic book format in which she herself appears as a character, serving as our guide as she distills down for the reader how the media has evolved, and the variety of psychological biases that challenge reporters as they do their work.
The story opens with a summary of the history of the media, starting in the ancient societies of Guatemala and Egypt, where rulers put in place people responsible for documenting their deeds. After brief stopovers in Roman Empire and seventeenth century Europe, Gladstone quickly focuses in on “The American Exception,” tracing the early development of the press in the American colonies, its growth in the newly formed United States, and on up to modern times.
As she traces the development of the press in the US, it becomes clear that this represents a kind of history of the country itself; we discover that many of the contentious issues playing out today between the press and the government have their origins in the early years of our Republic. So, for example, the Sedition Act signed into law by President John Adams in 1798 during an undeclared naval war with France empowered the government to restrict speech that it felt maligned its policies and officials. Though the act was allowed to expire a few years later under Thomas Jefferson, similar acts have reappeared every few decades, whenever the government has felt threatened by too much free speech.
Gladstone goes on to describe the conflicted relationship the press has had, and continues to have, with its audience. She points out that levels of public trust in the media have varied widely over the course of the republic, and that recently, aside from a brief spike after 9-11, have reached painfully low levels. The reason often given for this low opinion of the press is that it is politically biased --- generally expressed as being too liberal.
The real problems for the media, Gladstone claims, are a host of other biases, which she examines in successive, short chapters: Commercial Bias (novelty sells), Bad News bias (threatening events sell), Status Quo Bias (resisting change sells), Access Bias (reporters enjoy contact with powerful figures), Visual bias (pictures sell), Narrative bias (stories with a clear beginning, middle and end, sell), and Fairness bias (bending over backwards to appear balanced sells). She notes that it can be all too easy for the media to fall into these various biases, often under the claim of giving the public what it wants. As she makes clear, however, each of these biases serves only to pervert and distort the reporting being done.
In an extended section she looks at how the negative effects of these existing biases become strengthened in times of war, as reporters struggle between their role as journalist and their role as citizens, and the government and the military balance the need to get the story out that they want told, while keeping secret what they don’t want revealed. Gladstone takes examples from the U.S. Civil War up through the War in Iraq to describe how the press, the government and military have performed a complicated dance with one another, each seeking the maximum advantage. As she points out, the public often suffers from the resulting confusion and obfuscation.
Her discussion on the role of the press in war-time leads directly to her next topic: Objectivity. She calls it “an unreachable goal – because it’s unprofitable to ignore your readers’ emotions, assumptions, and values,” (98) and goes on to describe the challenges to achieving it, using examples from as far back as the early 1800’s.
A particular aspect of Objectivity that she discusses, one that has been addressed extensively by scholars such as Noam Chomsky, is that much of the press constrains its reporting to within starkly defined limits. She cites a description from ‘historian Daniel Hallin [that] divides the journalist’s world into three spheres’, with reporters limiting themselves to a narrow, doughnut-shaped region of what’s allowed to be reported on, a region bounded on the inside side by “consensus ... unquestionable values and unchallengeable truths,” and on the other by “deviance ... the place for people and opinions that the ‘mainstream of the society reject as unworthy of being heard.’” Again citing Hallin, Gladstone notes that the mainstream media not only confines itself to these hard bounds, but also “plays gatekeeper, by defining and defending ‘the limits of acceptable political conduct.’”(105) To go beyond these bounds to be marginalized, almost by definition.
This last thought plays into perhaps the most critical role of Gladstone’s book, her debunking of the idea that there is some sort of conspiracy of the media, through which the media are attempting to control the public --- that is, that there is an “influencing machine” at the heart of the media. Already in the Introduction, Gladstone firmly declares
There is no conspiracy. Even though the media are mostly corporate-owned, their first allegiance is to their public because, if they lose that allegiance, they lose money. … Conspiratorial. That’s a joke. Craven? Not quite so funny. (xiv)
The book comes in at some 170 pages and with its comic book format one could imagine that ultimately there is not much content. Quite the opposite is true, however; Gladstone has done an excellent --- and undoubtedly crazy-time-consuming --- job of condensing a huge amount of detailed information into each page, using the strengths of the comic strip format and the wonderful illustrations by Jeff Neufeld, to reinforce and amplify her message. Someone looking for a clear and yet compact summary of the role of the media, and the issues facing it, would be well-served starting with Gladstone’s excellent book.
Other reviews / information:
For Noam Chomsky's take on the limitations within which the media operate, and which they also help to enforce, see for example Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, a thorough and pointed discussion of the history and implications of the situation.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
No comments:
Post a Comment