First of all I’d like you to introduce the issue of what you call the main biases of TV news and their influence on public opinion. Is mass medium TV still dominant in democratic systems?

The research is well documented that television news remains the most important source for general publics to receive information and to think about the meaning of issues in the news. There are important developments through the internet and the web that may someday change this. Indeed there are many alternative information channels that are now easily available but most members of the general public, in most countries, are not that attentive to issues and so they tend to monitor the news environment for updated developments and crisis, which makes television a very important political force in society.

Is it the same situation everywhere?

The channels through which television operates are very different from one country to another. European nations, particularly northern European nations, have very strong public service broadcasting. BBC is the model for this. These are important sources for some diversity in nations. Also, many countries have national independent newspapers (Italy, France, Spain and Germany) that are also important in setting the tone of the elite intellectual discussion on many public issues. But television remains the most important. It brings us pictures and as we know pictures are often more important than the words that go with them.

What about the biases you mention in your book?

I think that the tendency among most television journalists is to focus on drama, fear, sensation, and crisis because those are the most amazing pictures that people see. The question of course is whether this leads to a sense on the part of publics that the world is out of control and that there is little hope of restoring order in chaotic situations. I think there is some evidence to suggest that those are the effects of television, a sense of chaos and crisis, accompanied also by not very good information beyond that sense of crisis. As a result, people often don’t have a very deep understanding of the issues that they are watching on television. In many cases, their understanding comes primarily from governments themselves, particularly their own national governments, so that different countries tend to filter the news through governments in important ways. In the United States for example, there were continuing misunderstandings about the war in Iraq for up to two, three years after the war started. Many people still believed that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, many people still believed that there were some connections between Saddam Hussain and Osama bin Laden leading to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

How can they still believe something that is evidently false?

The reason is very simple. Namely the news, particularly television news reported these as beliefs on the part of the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense and other high level American officials. So people were misperceiving the situation because their own government had led them to misperceive it. The degree of misperception and misinformation varied a little bit, depending on which television news sources Americans watched. Mr. Murdoch’s Fox News produced the greatest level of misinformation simply because Fox News presented the greatest level of official Bush administration sources. What was interesting in some of the polls in the United States is that other national television networks produced very high levels of misinformation not that far below Fox. So we had CBS and NBC and ABC producing very high levels of misinformation because they also featured government sources in their newscasts.

In your job you demonstrate that most distortions do not come from a perverse mind which decides to manipulate people but from an internal logic of the television news system. Television journalism is increasingly making a selection in the direction of dramatization, high personalization and fragmentation because it works it that way. Is that true?

Not entirely. I think that the two work together. I think those who are in government have professional communications consultants very prominently shaping their public discourse according to what they understand to be are the standards used by journalists. So this is the spin operations of government communication and the two go quite well together. It’s not that journalists are ignoring things that government officials are saying:. Journalists are reporting them precisely as government officials want them to be reported. I do think there is a great deal of manipulation but it’s a manipulation of the press because they know that the press will report what they say on to the public. There is manipulation but it’s manipulation of the news logic itself. In the United States, the press and government communicators work very closely together, with of course a lot of conflict because journalists don’t like being manipulated and government communication officers become frustrated when journalists don’t report exactly what they want said. So there is tension in the relationship.

When we move from a national scale to a global scale there is a difference. At a national scale, you have a government and you also have big economic interests which are supposed to dominate and define the agenda of the news. But if we move to the international level there isn’t a single power conditioning news broadcast everywhere. For example, Al-Jazeera is not dependent on the United States. Although national news broadcast is dependent on other powers there is no single power which is able to define what the main trend in news will be. In this more “out of control of one single power” situation we have some clear trends depending on the logic of the medium because the selection is made in terms of dramatizing international relations. Coming to our research the main damage this causes is that the image of the “other” worlds is represented in a way which is going to radicalize and compromise international relations.

I suppose that’s true to an extent. Again journalism is crisis driven, and looks at very personal and sensational images. On the other hand, events such as the war in Iraq are hard to represent as not very serious and as a rather unilateral assault by the United States on people who did not invite the invasion. It’s difficult to find a balance as to how these events should be represented. One thing that we found in studies of the war and various incidents surrounding the war, such as the Abu Ghraib prison situation, is that of course these events are portrayed differently in different nations. So you find that the United States tends to present the line from Washington rather closely and carefully. For example, what happened in Abu Ghraib was not until very recently described as torture but as rather isolated incidents on the part of poorly trained soldiers. Whereas, early on in Europe, and interestingly enough in the nations of Europe less closely defined in public opinion to the war and in sort of cultural terms to the United States, we find more of a balance between torture and isolated abuse of prisoners such as in the British press and we find stronger uses of terms such as torture in the Italian and the Spanish press. So there are national differences. And then of course, Al Jazeera to some degree representing the Islamic communities of the world, or at least addressing them as an audience, was much more likely to talk about torture. So reality is always in the eyes of cultural filters and also different kinds of public and their political attitudes. In general, yes, there is too much sensationalization in the news. It is not clear however, what another news system would look like that would still get people to watch it.

No one can be an expert to tell us what the imagine of the United States is in the world, from China to India to Japan to Malaysia and to the Arab emirates, but we can try to put it together from the experiences of different people. From the United Sates we can ask people like you what the representation of the Arab world is in the United States. But in the western world and even in Europe, which is geographically closer to Egypt or to Libya, we don’t have any idea in the news and television broadcast of what the normality is in Egypt. And these are huge countries not directly involved in the clash between the west and the east but it’s very difficult to have a small perception of their culture and their normality from the point of view of television news.

I think that there could be a lot of improvement in the ways most nations cover international crisis, but there is also a cultural tendency in many countries to see things through particular value systems. In addition, there is a tendency in some countries to see things through state control, which is very hard to change without changing the state that is controlling the news. Adding to that is the reality that these are often very dramatic events where there is a large degree of human suffering. I think to ask for the news to become deliberative in a deeper policy oriented way about these kinds of matters may be asking a bit too much, particularly in the case of the United States since the government itself doesn’t seem to be deliberative about its own policies so that you don’t sense that there is some deeper reality behind the news that people are just not getting. Certainly in the United States the deeper reality behind the news is world opinion, which clearly American news does not represent well to the American people. So there are ways in which all news systems could try to locate their journalism within the larger regional or global contexts by addressing: what do other countries say about this, what are other countries doing about this, are their peace initiatives that we need to try to support? These kinds of things would be useful in most countries journalism because most nations tend to look at the world through their own eyes, although this is less true in some cases than others. Many of the smaller European nations and indeed the EU movement has led to a broadening of perspectives and a tendency to look at common responses and potential common initiatives. The EU, for example, acting as a policy entity with regard to Iran has been a very interesting development which surely changes the nature of national news about that aspect of the Middle East.

Is there any particular point that needs to be corrected in the public agenda at the national scale, or at least is a partial correction of the damages of the fragmentation of images based exclusively on violence possible? Take the example of the effect of the Danish cartoons in Europe. The situation of violent attacks of hundreds of people on European embassies and consulates, continuously repeated in a way that it seemed like these countries were completely involved in the attack. Although it is similar to the situation when you have riots in western cities and hundreds of people are involved, while at the same time millions are leading a normal life and are not involved. So it’s difficult to explain that not all the Libyans are attacking the Italian consulates but just some hundreds of boys. It’s easier to explain this when it’s your own reality, closer to yourself, people can understand that some hundreds are different from million. It’s much more difficult to explain this difference when you are talking about a country no one can easily see, like Libya and Egypt.

I think it’s right but again it’s not clear how you change the news systems. A possibility is not to spend so much time thinking of changing news systems, that are unlikely to change and less likely to change altogether toward a better model of news, as to try and create inviting places on the web for citizens to come and see issues in better terms. Though this creates problems for those who don’t have access to the internet, but this should a goal.

So there is an alternative, but not in trying to change the logic of news?

I think that news is facing an interesting dilemma around the world, people are just tuning out. And you would think that this would lead to much more dramatic efforts to change journalism but it seems not to have done that. I think journalists need to be brought into conversations nationally about the future of their own product and the future of their own profession. There are interesting efforts. The BBC is trying to slowly and carefully redefine itself as a tool for citizens rather than just as an information source. The integration of television news with various kinds of internet and web technologies might eventually get us to a point where there is more citizen to citizen communication, more deliberation and indeed some day perhaps, even to a point where citizens are beginning to shape the news agenda and the way it is covered. Right now the coverage patterns are driven by marketing and very bad thinking often about the impact of news.

Today, the difference between BBC and Fox and even between BBC and some Italian channels is immense. Looking at the BBC’s international coverage seems to be like being in an agora where everyone can discuss and deepen their understanding about issues.

BBC is beginning to provide us one possible model for a change, where there is an international forum. They are conducting polls and discussions amongst listeners and viewers. BBC’s “I Can” which is only available nationally, in Britain, might be a place for citizens to actually define their own issues and learn more about them together and with the reporting staff of the BBC. So there are some models that might prove useful.

So as you said in the beginning, we need more BBC.

I think that is just one model. There are lots of other interesting models such as One world television, a web based television, which produces a lot of high quality journalism. And there are many others, not only BBC.

Lance Bennett is professor of political science and director of the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement at the University of Washington, United States.

This interview was published in Reset, Number  97.