>I know the tendency on the intellectual left is to dismiss the conscious
>production of targeted propaganda as an important factor in the US news
>system--but I'm finding myself more and more leaning to the "schemers in a
>locked room" model, that most of this junk is just churned out by PR firms
>and other propagandists and printed almost verbatim. Are journalists really
>THAT stupid as to labor who-knows-how-many hours to produce crap like this
>"poll"?
I agree with the thrust of this, but you needn't abandon the lefty orthodoxy too much, as the material conditions within which journalism is practised are a decisive component of the explanation. Time is short, bulletins must be filled, TV bulletins require sexy footage, scoops can't be passed over just coz verification etc hasn't been done, 'the unexpected' must be 'routinised', journalists are typically very young (they go into PR in middle age to avoid the wear'n'tear occasioned by working in the news factory - to which industry they bring the skills necessary to make 'PR release' ultimately equal 'news item'), and personal relationships tend to form between roundspeople and their sources as a matter of human course.
The PR sector knows all about this, and is geared to exploit it - releasing information, for instance, at selected times and in pre-digested quasi-news-story ways (right down to contending experts to narrow and direct the issue - the release of the Dolly The Sheep thingy was a great example of both - a video, in the shape of a polished news story, with just the right note of concern (rather than open dissent) in-built via a designated expert, was released to news factories just as bulletins were being formulated - as the story was not one in which it would be good come second, the whole thing went to air without internal editing all around the Anglophone world.
The PR is consciously produced for largely private ends (the 'locked room' component), but I suggest the news industry is usually not consciously complicit in the fact so much of this palaver gets to air or onto the page unedited, unchecked, unquestioned, unreflected-uopn and unopposed (the more orthodox unconscious 'sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es' bit).
BTW, I wrote yesterday: "I also bet a bottle a pop that (a) we're near the end of a dead-cat bounce, as "investors" and lenders are about to realise that residential employment and earnings shouldn't be going backwards while residential debt is climbing and that telcos have a long self-destructive time ahead of them; (b) Australia will promise James Kelly the use of Pine Gap as forward Star Wars surveillance node and primary nuclear target just before he 'consults' us; and (c) a Pentagon leak discloses that Rumsfeld did write those orders," and am two bottles of LBOphroaig to the good in less than 24 hours. The third speculation might depend on just how angry Powell is with Rusmfeld at the moment ...
Cheers, Rob.