ChesusRice
Well-Known Member
 | This article is part of the Tobacco portal on Sourcewatch funded from 2006 - 2009 by the American Legacy Foundation. Help expose the truth about the tobacco industry. |
Echo chamber is a colloquial term used to describe a group of media outlets that tend to parrot each other's uncritical reports on the views of a single source, or that otherwise relies on unquestioning repetition of official sources.
In the United States, the Republican Party uses a network of conservative foundations, coordinated by the Philanthropy Roundtable, and described in an extensive report (March 2004) by Jerry M. Landay for Mediatransparency.org, supporting conservative think tanks, industry-friendly experts and subsidized conservative media that systematically spread their messages throughout the political and media establishment. Typically, the message starts when conservative voices begin making an allegation (e.g., Democratic candidates are engaged in "hate-mongering" with regard to Bush). Columns are written on this theme, first in conservative media (including blogs), but eventually appearing in mainstream media like the New York Times. This process can be used to turn an unsupported allegation or a partisan talking point into an "accepted fact."
Maureen Dowd, in a New York Times column run on 15 February 2004, described the deceptive condition as one where "the bogus stories ... ricocheted through an echo chamber of government and media, making it sound as if multiple, reliable sources were corroborating the same story."
To influence the media, conservatives have also set up several organizations that serve as recruiting, training and career advancement programs for budding journalists. On university campuses, conservative foundations support several networks of conservative professors, including the National Association of Scholars and the Collegiate Network of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which links and provides funds to more than 70 conservative student papers. The student papers in turn serve as conduits to the mainstream media, through organizations such as the National Journalism Center that provides training, ideological indoctrination and a job bank that helps conservative student journalists begin their careers with internships and permanent job placements at publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, ABC, CBS, Fox News, Time, Newsweek, and the Associated Press.
Opinion pollsters and image makers such as Frank Luntz, Michael Deaver, Ed Rollins, Wirthlin Worldwide and Zogby International help develop the messages that echo in the echo chamber, by identifying hot-button "cultural" issues such as guns, abortion, family values and the flag that have enabled the party of privilege to position itself as the party with which lower-middle and middle-class voters identify.
Part of the "echo chamber" effect relies not only on repeating a given stance through as many separate channels as possible, but on casting alternative sources of information and opinion as doing the same thing in the opposite direction. Long-standing accusations of the "liberal-dominated media", suggesting that the bulk of mass media today forms some sort of liberal echo chamber, denies the idea that the reverse may in fact be the case.
Although conservatives pioneered the "echo chamber" technique, they are not the only people to use it. The Hill newspaper reported that Kerry campaign officials Joe Lockhart and Laura Nichols asked House and Senate press secretaries "to schedule their bosses on television and radio so that Democrats could create an 'echo chamber' where the sounding of pro-Kerry spin would create its own reality," following the first 2004 presidential debate on September 30.
