Weapons of Mass Deception" An accidental interview with director Danny Schecter
by Adam Goldstein
The Metropolitan
Why do young people rely on comedy shows for their news?
We're in a culture that has been programmed in an entertainment-oriented direction. Newsbiz and Showbiz had merged a long time ago. So, in a way, if you want to convey serious ideas and you make them comedy, funny, more people...
So, what I was saying is, you know, people are programmed to expect... Michael Moore made a decision early on: to be successful, he had to be a comedian, not a journalist. So he created a celebrity persona in order to be successful. This is the challenge that a journalist like myself has-how do you get people interested in important issues and how do you get them receptive to information, not just attitude?
Kids love attitude; they love Jon Stewart making fun of other people. I grew up with Mad magazine; it's the same thing. I loved all that. 'What me worry?' So, this isn't new. In a sense, it's been there for a long time.
"Saturday Night Live" also always had parodies. We have to go beyond that. We have to really understand these issues. That's why I tried to use some of those techniques in "WMD," to make it fast-paced, to make it accessible, not to make it boring. On the other hand, it's very informative, maybe too informative to some people.
Since comedians like Jon Stewart have such an influence on the younger audience, do you think they have more of a responsibility to ask hard-hitting questions?
People get their information from lots of different places. They get their information from movies, their impressions of character, of lots of issues. Fiction often frames our outlook more than anything else. That's why in the coverage of the war, the Pentagon used storytelling techniques from Hollywood, Hollywood narrative technique, characters, bad guy/good guy (Saddam=bad guy, Bush=good guy), evildoers, damsel in distress (Jessica Lynch). They used these techniques because they know that this is the way to reach the American people, not with slogans, but with rhetoric.
As a consequence, they were very successful because they studied television, they understood that the most popular formats are storytelling formats and they shape the law into that approach. That was very sophisticated use of propaganda, a new approach to propaganda.
That's what interested me in doing this movie, to get at this, because this also would challenge the filmmaking. Most filmmakers do characters, like storytelling vignettes. Who are your characters? Let's see their conflicts; let's see them cry on camera. That's the emotional moment. I think that can be very superficial. We need to combine insight and issues. Sometimes when you do just storytelling, you don't really inform people about anything. It's empathetic journalism. 'Gee, isn't it sad that the woman lost her child.' You don't really get the bigger picture of what the issues are.
Why do you think the networks and cable channels did such a superficial job of covering the war in Iraq?
I think that they (the big networks) were invested in this. First of all, there was a lot of fear to do anything else. Secondly, a lot of these people don't know anything. The research departments are gone from most of the networks. Everybody's in an incredible hurry; they're driven by anxiety. They're driven by, 'Fox has got this, we don't have this.' What that creates is an environment that's thoughtless, that's not reflective, that's not analytical.
Secondly, they're a prisoner of their sources. They don't think outside the box. They had Al-Jazeera coverage; they bought it, but they shifted the narrative. They didn't use their journalists; their journalists were not worthy of being on the networks. That, to me, is a mistake.
Their way of approaching this whole thing, instead of having Iraqi journalists who knew something about Iraq, they relied on people who didn't know anything. So, they were just fed information and they went with it. And they had to do it very fast.
Edward R. Murrow, during World War II, wrote these stunning reports everybody still remembers. He did those reports; they were broadcast three days later. He wasn't live, at the moment. He could think about it; he could craft it; he could actually explain something.
The point is the technique was different... It's frightening because what happened during the war ... the war techniques are now the political techniques in covering their election. With the Republican convention, it's the same thing.
How do you respond to the assertion that there is a liberal bias in the media?
On social issues, on human rights, on civil rights, on women's rights, there tends to be coverage of that that really highlights the problems that society has.
On national security, there's a tendency for all the people to have a consensus. This is why there's a consensus between Kerry and Bush. You know, 'America Held Hostage' was how Nightline started. This was pandering to the public, accepting the assumptions of the Cold War, ... assumptions of the War on Terror.
So, it's a template. It's a way of viewing the world through a worldview. Ted Koppel used to play tennis with Henry Kissinger. This is a beltway bubble.
What did you think of the debates?
Each person had a message, and they just repeated that message, they didn't stray from the message points.
Occasionally, Kerry got in a few punches, Bush came back ... but it was pre-fabricated message politics. Somebody says something and you don't even challenge it, you just go back to your own message. In that sense, you could have had two guys talking and not talking to each other.
There's a lot that's stilted about it. What's frightening is that this war showed us how our own media system can become state media. Around the world, when people see the American media they see the American government.
(Americans supported this war) because their media supported it, because they had no diverse views, because they didn't have any other perspectives.
What advice would you give to young people to get a different view of the news?
Get involved. Learn about media issues. Mediachannel.org, that's our network. For a long time we had a network called Media10.org based in Bahn, Germany, analyzing the American media coverage.
They were communication scientists, they were really examining coverage. We need an international, global perspective; we need to work with other people, not just Americans. We need to open our eyes to other things.
Who took the pictures at Abu Ghraib? It was the soldiers. It wasn't the journalists. Journalists knew this was happening. I found a video from Amnesty International in June, 2003 talking about torture in Abu Ghraib. The story only came here in April of 2004. What happened? Why did it take so long? This is the point.
Should there be a public interest in our media?
In Germany, the German state, after WWII, spent $50 million over the years creating one of the world's best public system broadcasters. Historically, it was much better than anything we had. They funded radio theatre, radio plays, the arts, all kinds of things. They took media seriously.
They inform on debates; they don't have these ads like we have here. All over Europe there's a different media system. People are more knowledgeable about what's going on. Here, people don't know anything.
Do you think that PBS and NPR are an exception to the rule? Do they have their own problems?
We don't have a public broadcasting network. ARD is a network. We have what's called a programming service that gives programs to local stations. Local stations choose to run them or not to run them.
I did a series on human rights. It was on the air in Boulder but not in Denver. The Denver station wasn't interested. We were covering Saddam's crimes in '93. They weren't interested.
Public Television told us, 'Human rights is an insufficient organizing principle for a TV series.' Unlike cooking. Cooking is a sufficient organizing principle for a series, human rights wasn't.
The PBS system is dependant on corporate support, it's run by local businesses in most communities. It doesn't have the independence and it doesn't have the resources to compete.
In other countries, public broadcasting has the dominant share. In this country, it has a very tiny share. Public broadcasting in America has a big audience under the age of 5, and over the age of 50. What about in the middle? They're not watching because they think it's boring. Period.
NPR has grown. NPR is certainly better than commercial radio because commercial radio has declined so much. They don't even have news in a lot of commercial radio.
NPR has benefited from that. But it's still not what it should be. We have so many channels, so many choices, so few voices. That's the problem: lack of diversity, control by corporations, government manipulation. All this stuff is why we need to do something about it.
Look at this film festival. Look at all these films from around the world. Are we going to be able to see them on American television? Probably not. Are people interested? They're coming and paying money. Sure, they'd be interested if it was presented in an interesting way. If it's not presented in an interesting way, they're not going to come see it.
Solutions?
First, arm yourself with information. Find out what's really going on. Get involved in trying to bring these issues up and discuss them. This is what we really need to be doing.
What can you do about it? Obviously, we need to change our media policy. Two, we need to promote media literacy in our schools so kids are taught about the media and become critical viewers and thinkers. Three, we need to hold media accountable for errors, mistakes, and the like. |
