The CJR has an outstanding example of media duplicity as enacted by the AP's Ron Fournier.
Yesterday, in a story on truth vs. distortion thus far in the 2004 campaign, Fournier wrote: "Few of [Bush's and Kerry's] assertions [about each other] are patently wrong; most reside in the murky gray area between correct and incorrect -- a rhetorical margin of error. Just as Bush convinced many Americans in 2000 that Democrat Al Gore fabricated his biography and record, Bush and Kerry hope to open a credibility gap."
So far so good. But it turns out that Fournier himself was a key player in framing the Gore "credibility problems" story. At first, Fournier accurately reported Gore's quote about the Internet: "During my service in Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." But a week after this straightforward quote, what Gore said as reported by Fournier begins to morph, until it becomes "his suggestion that he invented the Internet".
This should be a familiar line to regular blogreaders, but it bears some repetition, especially as we see Fournier pretending that the "credibility problems" exist essentially within the candidate, rather than in the representations of the candidate. Fournier alludes to a "rhetorical margin of error" and, in doing so, comes ever so close to admitting the truth of the matter: that "credibility gap" is a reality which is created by its representations. But that seems backwards in the everyday understanding of representation -- that a sign is mimetic of a thing which exists independently of it -- and so the rhetoric gets shifted into a mimetic frame, where what the media reports becomes truth.
Fournier's article has this nugget for the close reader:
If you believe Bush's and Kerry's accusations about each other, both are opposed to body armor for U.S. troops in Iraq.
But of course the facts don't matter. Fournier's article takes place within, and helps to create, the very "rhetorical margin" that he claims to be critiquing. And, because of the media ontology's commitment to objective reportage, this move can't be acknowledged, except implicitly. Fournier quotes Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania as saying:
"We see this every cycle, but usually not this early or this obvious."
For "we see this", you can read "we perform this". It's exactly what they're doing: inventing a reality that they pretend to be reporting.
There's a scene in Bernardo Bertolucci's new movie The Dreamers which evokes this problem: Michael Pitt's character realizes that a Zippo lighter, when held appropriately next to or in front of any given object, matches it precisely. Its length matches the pattern in the tablecloth, and his friend's nose, and a piece of silverware. Arranged appropriately, some dimension on the lighter corresponds exactly to some dimension in another object.
But this correspondence is no property of the lighter itself, or what it is held next to; it's an accident of geometry and placement. In principle, by varying the angles and distances from your eye, you could make anything match anything else. In other words, one fact, one measurement, one datum, is just as good as any other, because anything can substitute for anything else.
Just as Michael Pitt's character pretends the correspondence is "out there", i.e., in the objects themselves, the media pretends that the rhetorical grayness and indeterminacy, the undecidability between two candidates ("Voters are left wondering, who is more incredible?"), inheres in the candidates themselves.