Journalists dutifully report those fabrications. Officials oblige the media’s need for drama by fabricating crises and stage-managing their responses, thereby enhancing their own prestige and power. The news media and the government have created a charade that serves their own interests but misleads the public. As a result, Weaver writes, “there were no news stories about government adding to the deficit even though that was what was happening.” Journalists conspired with politicians to create an image of a government fighting to end the deficit crisis, but they ignored the routine procedures that increased the deficit. When journalists reported on a new program, they usually characterized it as good news-the government tackling another problem-rather than as an addition to the budget and the deficit.

Anyone who read a newspaper or watched television news received the message that Congress and the Reagan administration were heroically and painfully struggling to contain government spending and reduce the deficit.īehind the smoke screen, however, congressional committees and federal officials were increasing spending and adding new programs in the routine annual budgeting and appropriations processes. Politicians postured-and were described-as working diligently to get a grip on the deficit. For several years, newspapers, magazines, and television newscasts ran hundreds of stories on the debates over Gramm-Rudman, the views of all sorts of experts on the urgent need for deficit reduction, and the eventual enactment of the legislation.

Take, for example, the long effort in the 1980s to eliminate the federal deficit, centered on the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Amendment. Journalists and politicians have become ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that misleads the public. Weaver, a former political scientist (at Harvard University), journalist (at Fortune magazine), and corporate communications executive (at Ford Motor Company), in his provocative analysis entitled News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works. The two institutions have become so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that the news media are unable to tell the public what is true and the government is unable to govern effectively. Too often, the crises are not really crises but joint fabrications. Journalists need crises to dramatize news, and government officials need to appear to be responding to crises. The news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, mythmaking, and self-interest. It fails to do what it claims to do, what it should do, and what society expects it to do. Corrupt not so much in the sense that it accepts bribes but in a systemic sense.

government, is a corrupt and troubled institution. Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America, Cynthia Crossen (Simon & Schuster, 1994). Who Stole the News?: Why We Can’t Keep Up with What Happens in the World, Mort Rosenblum (John Wiley & Sons, 1993). News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works, Paul H.

Never read your own press releases