Page 275 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Med a Watch Groups

Consider the example of the much-covered downfall of radio personality Don
Imus following his racist slur about the Rutgers University women’s basketball
team after their advance to the 2007 national championship game: Imus, who
for an extended period managed to balance a serious persona ratified by pres-
tigious political and media guests with a crude jokester persona that brought
him a large audience, was suddenly brought low not only because of his own
clumsy response and a cultural tipping point involving the identity of his vic-
tims, the political climate of the moment, and evolving standards for public dis-
course, but because his words were propelled into the court of public opinion
by a media watch organization. The impact of the work of a diligent young re-
searcher for Media Matters for America was not immediate, for the antennae of
the public are not generally attuned to such frequencies, but it began there, and
its growth was sustained by the ready provision of contextual material. Another
media watch group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), sent detailed
quotes from Imus’s long track record of such offenses to online subscribers. That
and other documentation reverberated over the Internet and was amplified in
the blogosphere, making it impossible for mainstream media to continue to ac-
cept the phrase as a harmless joke. The reexamination of not only Imus’s oeuvre
but of his guests’ association with him, the networks of influence that keep alive
voices of intolerance, and the evolution of standards for mediated discourse was
also led by media watch organizations from across the spectrum, as conserva-
tives reacted to perceived censorship by liberals decrying racism and sexism.
Imus was ultimately dislodged from his radio and cable television shows by the
market consideration of lost advertisers rather than any sudden media watch
group–inspired development of corporate morality, but the imbroglio demon-
strated that a market for the products of such critics clearly exists in the realm
of public opinion.

ProminEnT mEDia waTCh grouPs

That represents a change from the long-time status quo, which had largely
allowed mainstream media to ignore external critiques. The student-staffed
Project Censored, founded by Sonoma State University professor Carl Jensen in
1976, has regularly identified important news under-covered by the mainstream
press, but its annual reports are seldom recognized in the media they criticize.
Even as the organization has grown under Jensen’s successor Peter Phillips into
an operation that wins awards, publishes a yearly book, and achieves widespread
recognition in alternative newspapers and on the Internet, it remains as un-
known to most Americans as the stories ignored by major media. Other media
watch organizations generally suffer the same fate. Most remain barely known, if
at all, by the public, but like Media Matters’s Imus report, their work can perco-
late through layers of media cross-reporting, sometimes surfacing to embarrass
friends and foes alike.
For example, FAIR, known for its criticism of proconservative bias in media,
attracted attention for its study critiquing the selection of experts appearing on
the PBS show NewsHour, debunking some conservatives’ notion of a “liberal”