Say It: 10 Questions with Peter Hart of F.A.I.R. (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting)

Silence Lies Interview with F.A.I.R. Media Activist Peter Hart

1. How did you come to the career of media activist and what inspired you along the way?

    I was studying journalism in college, with an eye towards doing it for a living. But the more I read about journalism and how corporate media really operate, the more I realized that what I really wanted to do was contribute to the movement to counteract some of the worst tendencies in the media. FAIR was the only place to do exactly what I wanted to do. My first exposure to FAIR came in high school, thanks to a Maximum Rock and Roll split 7" with Noam Chomsky and Bad Religion during the first Gulf War. A story about war propaganda was part of the fold-out poster that came with the record.

    Oddly enough, years later I showed it to some of my co-workers, who'd never even seen it.

2. Who is FAIR and what sort of work does FAIR do?

    FAIR is a national progressive media watch group that documents the elite bias of the commercial media. FAIR works to explain these media practices to the general public, and we push for changes inside the media system as well. Ultimately, FAIR's vision for a more vibrant media involves breaking up large conglomerates and encouraging the establishment of independent, not-for-profit sources.

    FAIR has long argued that the business model of corporate media-- heavily dependent on commercial advertising, controlled by profit-seeking conglomerate-- is fundamentally at odds with the values that would encourage the kind of journalism necessary for a healthy democracy.

3. How did you come to work for FAIR?

FAIR is the only place I've ever worked-- and the only place I really wanted to work. I came here right after college.

4. What made you decide to write the Oh Really? Factor and what sort of reception did it receive?

    That book was conceived shortly after we did a package of articles on the Fox News Channel in 2001. Fox was understandably unhappy with that, and I ended up appearing on O'Reilly's show to 'debate' him. The research for those pieces led us to realize that there was a lot to work with, so we started piecing together the material that soon turned itself into a book. The research involved many, many hours of reading transcripts of his show. It's not something I would recommend.

5. What are some of the largest challenges you see facing the future of news media in this country?

    For 25 years now FAIR has argued that the commercial structure of the media business was a problem. The way we saw it, outlets that were bought and sold by Wall Street interests and were dependent on advertisers could not be independent of pressure-- advertisers want a certain environment for their products, and Wall Street wants a certain level of profit. In the last few years, the model has started to collapse. The bad news is that working journalists are being laid off by the thousands; it's hard to imagine how these outlets can ever really build themselves back up. The good news, though, is that we're hopefully at the very early stages of a transformation of the media business, with more room for start-ups and locally oriented outlets that won't have to justify their business model to a group of Wall Street investors.

6. Is the consolidation of news media outlets to be judged wholly as a negative thing. And if so, what can be done about it?

    It's hard to imagine the upside of media consolidation. Up until a few years ago it was working well for most investors and owners, who stood to make substantial profits thanks to a variety of factors (loose regulations, lack of competition). It never offered much upside to the public, so they continued to shed readers and viewers until they reached the kind of crisis we're seeing now.

7. Does the rapid rise of non-professional journalism via the internet open up space for the political contestation of sanctioned media, or does it do more harm than good?

    More voices is almost always going to be a good thing. Will it mean the free flow of unchecked information and innuendo? Of course. But I would submit that a format like talk radio has performed a similar function for at least the last 2 decades, and I don't recall serious conversations about whether this meant that people listening to anything on the radio was a bad idea.

     I think you can see a lot of nervousness on the part of people in the establishment media, and that's totally unsurprising. But the conversation can tend to overstate the problem of internet information. Journalists often seem concerned about the lack of 'gatekeepers' and such, but that's because they see themselves as playing that role, and it's arrangement they like.

    I'm curious to watch how the pundits react to this changing media landscape-- by 'pundit' I mean the syndicated columnists and TV talking heads who are paid to share their opinions on a variety of topics. The internet offers an abundance of that kind of commentary, much of it written by people with far more expertise than well-compensated TV pundits.

8. What is your opinion on the enormous success of culturally volatile opinion shows such as Glen Beck, Lou Dobbs, and The Daily Show that may conflate news with opinions for some people?

    It's important to remember that shows like those are based on cultivating a very small, very loyal audience. Beck's audience are people who believe Barack Obama is a socialist; Dobbs' show was intended to pander to people who, among other things, felt like panicked about immigration. The problem is when their opinions are used to manipulate or misrepresent the facts. There's abundant evidence that Beck, O'Reilly and Dobbs were guilty of that. So on that score they perform a terrible service, journalistically speaking. There's nothing wrong with journalism that advocates a particular point-of-view; we've always argued that all journalism does, even when an outlet professes to be in the "middle." That's a political position of its own, and in some ways it can be more dangerous. When the "middle" is selling you on, say, the Iraq War, it has a more dramatic effect than if Fox News is delivering the same message.

9. All news agencies exert power over deciding what is news worthy and what isn't. The fear is that these types of decisions will also affect the quality of the reporting being conducted. This being the case, is objectivity possible? And if not, as a nation dependent on an informed polity, where does that leave us and our ability to make informed decisions?

    Objectivity is a difficult measurement; we've always encouraged people to ask whether the media exhibit fairness, whether they hold powerful institutions accountable, and whether they pose the right questions. Trying to stay in a safe zone in the middle of a policy debate doesn't strike us as a particularly healthy role. We've lived through several major events over the last handful of years that should have shown that being in the 'middle' was not journalistically helpful. The 'middle' in the Iraq War was, in terms of elite opinion, to back the war with a few mild reservations. The 'middle' in the financial meltdown was basically to throw up one's hands and say you cannot understand how any of it worked. The 'middle' often leads journalists to treat competing claims from different sides of a debate (usually represented by a Republican and a Democrat) as if they were equally valid. Within the world of corporate journalism, this is considered the way things are meant to work. But it can have pretty disastrous consequences.

10. When an institution such as the New York Times is faulted for essentially cheerleading the government's position in the run up to the war in Iraq, what can the average person do that wants to stay informed but doesn't know which outlets they can trust?

    The first step is not to 'trust' any particular institution. Reading from a wide variety of media sources helps, and I think one of the great things about the internet is that it has exposed people to a diversity of media options that was unthinkable just a few years ago. Part of FAIR's mission is to encourage readers to think critically. I get emails every day from people who have heard or read something that doesn't sound quite right to them. And often they're right to be skeptical. Teaching people how to think that way about the media is part of our job. It's quite natural for people to feel like they can't trust anything. But the real point is to push them to find other sources of information, and to support those outlets-- community radio, independent websites, and so on. In that sense it's a pretty remarkable moment we're living in. People often ask if we think that FAIR has made the media "better," and I think the honest answer is probably that we haven't (at least in a broad sense). But we've helped make people into smarter consumers of media, and I think that's in the long run going to be more important. They're learning to question what it is presented to them, and learn that they can find better information elsewhere.

(Interview by Ryan Langley, Photo by Gary Lund)

The Liar's Club

Add Your Liar's Club Comment on this Article Name Date/Time Comment Dan O'Mahony 5/13/2010 6:15 PM This article and others are part of an unexpectedly heavy slant towards journalism that's been going on here in our first few weeks. It's interesting to me that Hart and Adam Thompson differ a bit on the notion of free information and therole of the advertising dollar in making things possible.

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