How CNN Shapes Political Debate
By Ray McGovern
October 12, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Consortiumnews"
- CNN, the sponsor of Tuesday’s debate among Democratic
presidential candidates, has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid
being sullied with the stigma of “liberal bias.” The four CNN
journalists handpicked to do the questioning have carefully
protected themselves from such a charge.As
Jeff Cohen noted Friday in “CNN’s
Double Standards on Debates,” CNN made a point of including
a bona fide right-winger in the Republican debate but “is not
planning to include a single progressive advocate among its panel of
four questioners … CNN presents as neutral: CNN’s [Dana] Bash and
three CNN anchors (Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, and Juan Carlos Lopez
of CNN en Espanol.)”
The significance is that while a person from the
Right or Left might break out of the usual frame of these debates,
“mainstream” panelists can be counted on to ask predictable queries
with maybe a “gotcha” question or two tossed in to show how “tough”
the reporter can be. CNN’s line-up fits that description to a tee.
Dana Bash, who was also a panelist at last month’s
debate among Republican candidates, has been a godsend to me as I
hunted for examples to illustrate what has become of the so-called
“mainstream media.” Speaking to college and other audiences, I often
show this short but
revealing video clip of Bash plying her “neutral” trade.
Perhaps you will agree that, although less than a
minute long, this clip is worth far more than a thousand words in
making clear how CNN crackerjack reporters like Dana Bash and CNN
senior statesman Wolf Blitzer apply their peculiar brand of “fair
and balanced.”
What leaps out is how they, and their acutely
attentive technical support, were prepared at a second’s notice to
nip in the bud any favorable (or merely “neutral”) allusion to Iran,
on the one hand, and any possibly negative reference to Israel, on
the other.
In Iowa, reporting on the Republican caucus 3 1/2
years ago, Bash singled out Army Cpl. Jesse Thorsen for an
interview. The young soldier sported on his neck a large tattoo of
the Twin Towers with the words “9/11 Remember” – making Thorsen seem
an ideal candidate for the kind of “neutral” – super-patriotic –
interview that Bash had in mind.
Although he supported libertarian Ron Paul, this
young corporal on his way to his third deployment to Afghanistan
looked like an easy mark for a fast-talking reporter whose
“neutrality” was infused with Official Washington’s disdain for
Paul’s anti-interventionist stance on foreign policy.
Pointing to the tattoo, Bash closed in for the
kill, suggesting Ron Paul would endanger U.S. security if he pulled
troops out of conflict areas like Afghanistan. Alas, Thorsen had not
been briefed on the intended script, and the encounter did not work
out the way Bash expected. The young soldier went off message into
dangerous territory, mentioning – or, rather, trying to mention –
Iran and Israel in ways that didn’t mesh with what all the Important
People know to be true: Iran always bad, Israel always good.
Just in the nick of time, there was fortunate
glitch cutting off the discordant message. Or as Blitzer explained,
“we just lost our technical connection, unfortunately.”
Personal Experience
For good or ill, I have had some rather
instructive personal experience with two of the other three
panelists on CNN’s all-star team for Tuesday evening – Anderson
Cooper and Don Lemon. Those experiences might help potential viewers
know what to expect as the Democrats go under their magnifying
glasses.
Minutes after the impromptu
four-minute
Q & A debate I had with then-Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld on May 4, 2006 in Atlanta – in which I challenged Rumsfeld
about his false pre-war claims about Iraqi links to Al Qaeda and
Saddam Hussein’s possession of WMD – I got a call on my cell phone
from CNN star Anderson Cooper. He noted that I had been causing
“quite a stir here in Atlanta,” adding that he wanted to interview
me that evening.
“But first,” he said in an awkwardly halting way,
“I need to ask you a question. “Er … weren’t you afraid?”
Not really, I replied. The experience was, rather,
a real high. I went on to suggest that Cooper could experience the
same high, were he to do a little homework and ask folks like
Rumsfeld pointed questions – quoting them back to themselves,
whenever possible.
The Rumsfeld speech and Q &A that followed took
place in the early afternoon of May 4, 2006, and was broadcast live.
So, in a sense, it fit with the perfect storm for that night’s
evening news. It was early enough to fit the evening TV “news”
cycle; there was time to check facts; it was a live exchange of a
citizen confronting a powerful official, something that is
disturbingly rare in modern America; and it happened on a slow news
day when there wasn’t some other story that dominated public
attention.
As it turned out, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann
exhibited none of the self-censoring inhibitions that seemed to
worry Anderson Cooper earlier that day. Olbermann decided to feature
the story that evening, as he put it, “with fact-check.” And for
that – and no doubt countless other violations of “mainstream media”
etiquette – Olbermann did not endear himself to his corporate TV
brass. (Where is Olbermann now?)
The lesson here seems to be that, if you elect to
give priority to having your comely face on the tube rather than
speak truth to power, you forfeit the high that can come of being a
serious journalist. You get to keep both your fame and your six- or
seven-figure fortune for a Faustian bargain.
The issue at the Rumsfeld talk in Atlanta was no
trifling matter. During the Q & A, it was easy to use his own past
words – together with his disingenuous responses – to show that
the Defense Secretary had lied through his teeth to help get the
U.S. into what the post-WWII Nuremberg Tribunal called the “supreme
international crime” – a “war of aggression.”
Worth emphasizing, though, is the unfortunate
reality that — malnourished as most Americans have become on
accurate information from the media – only those TV viewers who were
offered an Olbermann-type fact-check would have gotten anything
approaching the full story that evening. Otherwise, it would remain
the proverbial whom-to-believe kind of puzzle: “Former CIA analyst
said ‘Rumsfeld lied’ …. but Rumsfeld said, ‘I didn’t lie.’”
Last But Not Least
Then, we have Don Lemon. After the publication by
WikiLeaks of thousands of official cables – many of them highly
embarrassing to the U.S. – which Bradley/Chelsea Manning gave to
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Fawning Corporate Media
eagerly joined an intense campaign by the Establishment to make
Assange the bête noire of 2010, painting him the same deep
black regularly used for the likes of Russian President Vladimir
Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“Expert” after “expert” on CNN tore into Assange.
It was such a one-sided spectacle, that someone must have suggested
that CNN invite some dope who might try to defend Assange (ha, ha;
good luck) and deny that he was what Vice President Joe Biden called
him – “a high-tech terrorist.” I was to be the victim.
CNN introduced Lemon’s five-minute interview of me
with a very violent clip from Bonnie and Clyde and
additional footage showing other terrorist miscreants at work. (In
retrospect, I was glad that CNN barred me from seeing that
introduction before my interview; seeing it might have strained my
Irish temper beyond the breaking point.)
Don Lemon was loaded for bear, since one of the
jobs of mainstream journalists is to prove their “objectivity” by
getting tough with anyone who deviates from the conventional wisdom.
You have to
see it to believe it: You Say Julian Assange Is a
Journalist? Wattayou Crazy?
After Lemon’s lemon of an interview, I seem to
have ended up on CNN’s “no-fly” list – for me, a small price to pay.
I would prefer to be in the company of the gutsy Olbermanns of this
world rather than the timorous Coopers.
Let me add here that, in my view, Anderson Cooper
is by no means the worst of the bought-and-sold pundits. He
is, however, perhaps the wealthiest, as heir to the
Vanderbilt fortune. So, with all due respect, he would not face the
prospect of life on the streets with hat in hand, were he to decide
to go for the high of committing real journalism rather than
acquiesce in the customary low of showing deference when
interviewing powerful war criminals like Rumsfeld.
So as not to raise unrealistic expectations about
Tuesday’s debate, Cooper has
said that there will be no “gotcha” questions. “As a
moderator, it’s not my job in this kind of debate to try and force
anything,” he said. “I don’t go into this with some strategy for
getting people going in one way or another. … Even if I did have
that strategy, or a strategy, I wouldn’t necessarily telegraph
that.”
But one can expect a focus on many of the usual
mainstream topics, framed in the typical mainstream way: What can be
done to stop Putin? Why didn’t President Obama do more to achieve
“regime change” in Syria? If the ongoing catastrophe in Libya is
mentioned, it is likely to be in the narrow context of the Benghazi
investigation and Hillary Clinton’s emails as Secretary of State.
It’s not likely that Clinton will be pressed on
her disastrous history as a liberal war hawk: supporting the Iraq
War, pushing for a pointless “surge” in Afghanistan, orchestrating a
“regime change” war in Libya that has left the country ungovernable
and opened the door to inroads by Islamic State terrorists. She is
not likely to be asked whether she thinks “American exceptionalism”
exempts U.S. officials from the constraints of international law.
The reason why she won’t be pressed on such
questions is that CNN and the rest of the mainstream media accept
the same premises that Clinton does. They frame the public debate
with an implicit embrace of the U.S. right to invade countries and
topple governments. The debate is only focused on whether the
tactics worked, whether mistakes were made, not whether the
decisions were wise or legal.
Other debate participants, such as Sen. Bernie
Sanders, also will be expected to squeeze their comments into the
acceptable mainstream frame. That is why it would have been a good
idea — or at least a novel one — to invite at least one
out-of-the-box progressive to join the panel and possibly shatter
the frame.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing
arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city
Washington. He was a CIA analyst for more than 27 years after
serving as an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer. He now serves on
the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS).