Here are excerpts from a fascinating interview with Jeff Cohen, a former FoxNews Media critic who left Fox to work on the ill-fated MSNBC Donahue show. He's promoting his new book
Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.Some choice quotes:
Cohen: ...It has to be understood that you always hear that this is called "Bush's war," but it was, in many ways, Rupert Murdoch's war. He sold this war across continents.
Hazen: Say more about that ...
Cohen: The main media pushing this in England were his media. Now, in England, there was a wide-ranging debate, so he wasn't able to completely snow the people of England. There were some news outlets that weren't owned by Murdoch that did something called "journalism." In our country, the Murdoch outlets were pushing for war ferociously, and among the outlets in the mainstream, they seemed to be imitating him during the runup to the war. But Rupert Murdoch was crucial to bringing this world to a destabilizing war that has done very little except inflame and mobilize Islamic extremists.
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Hazen: So you left all that at Fox, and at his urging, you followed Phil Donahue over to MSNBC. A good chunk of your book is about the horror show there, especially in the face of the lead-up to the war in Iraq. But on page 100, you say you would follow Phil just about anywhere, just to not such a dysfunctional place again. It sounds like you might have regrets about that decision.
Cohen: (snip)...And then you have Phil Donahue who came on in July of 2002 and they're petrified at MSNBC at this point. When they made the move to hire Donahue, it was in the early spring of 2002. No one could really see the war in Iraq. Obviously they knew about it in the inner reaches of Team Bush, but at MSNBC they had no or little clue. That's why they hired Phil. Then there was a 2.5-month gap between when they hired him and when he went on the air the first night.
In that 2.5-month gap, these normally timid MSNBC executives -- and believe me, I was in touch with them week by week -- they became even more scared. And that's why they put a straightjacket on the Donahue show even before we went on the air, and it just got worse and worse as they tightened the screws. At the end they were trying to turn us into a Fox News program look-alike.
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Hazen: Let's pursue this a little bit. Frank Rich's new book is "The Greatest Story Ever Sold," about how Bush and Cheney have sold everything, but particularly the invasion and the occupation of Iraq. Given who owns the networks and cable, is there any way to fight the propaganda model of fear and patriotism?
Cohen: How do we fight it? We turn it off. Frankly, the only way you can maintain your sanity and your connection to the reality-based community is to either shut this stuff off, or when you watch corporate TV and cable news, you're so armed with the facts that you can see through it. The good news is that there's been that steady migration away from corporate in the last few years. During the run-up to the Iraq war, people were looking hungrily for alternatives. Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! moving from radio-only to radio and television. People sought out the BBC.
Independent media were booming during that period because people just couldn't trust what they were getting, and it's a migration that's continued -- away from corporate media, toward independent fare. Independent media don't have the resources that corporate media do, but independent media are not shackled by corporate management or fears that the corporate sponsors will flee if we do good, bold journalism. The freedom an independent journalist has is the reason they've become so attractive, why blogs are booming.
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There's a lot of interesting, scary stuff in this article. Check it out:
http://alternet.org/story/41803
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