Pubdate: Tue, 15 Sep 2009
Source: Columbia Journalism Review (US)
Column: Behind the News
Copyright: 2009 Columbia Journalism Review
Contact:  http://www.cjr.org/
Author: David Downs
Note: David Downs is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco. A 
former editor for Village Voice Media, he has contributed to Wired 
magazine, the Los Angeles Times, The Believer, and The Onion in 
addition to other publications.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?420 (Marijuana - Popular)

ROCK BOTTOM

Get stoked: The MSM Are Acting Less Childish About Pot

The strain of "reefer madness" that's been infecting American 
newsrooms since at least 1911 appears to be abating amid some 
sobering new economic realities. Salacious stories about cannabis 
continue to move newspapers just as briskly now as they did in the 
early Twentieth century, when the drug became illegal. But the 
fever's changed gears.

"The de facto ban on serious, cogent mainstream media discussion 
about the topic has been lifted," says Stephen Gutwillig, State 
Policy Director for the Drug Policy Alliance in Washington. "They've 
stopped acting like they're in sixth grade. There's less puns and 
'scare quotes.' The Wall Street Journal did a front-page story last 
week that treated medical marijuana like just another industry story."

Recently, The New York Times ran a classic, "Style" section hit piece 
on cannabis, but then followed it up, almost as a mea culpa, with an 
extremely insightful and bold "roundtable discussion" with leading 
thinkers on the topic. The Economist now stands alongside the 
National Review in calling for legalization, and even the staid 
Congressional Quarterly Researcher devoted its entire June issue to a 
thorough review of the topic.

Watchers say demographic changes (about half of the adult population 
born since 1960 has tried the drug by age 21) and the Obama 
administration's progressive outlook have combined forces with pure 
capital interests and technology to effect a pushback against 
traditional law-and-order voices on the issue.

Ryan Grim, author of the history and analysis This Is Your Country on 
Drugs and senior congressional correspondent for The Huffington Post, 
says winds of change are, indeed, blowing in the opposite way of 
historical precedent--not just in the culture at large, but in journalism, too.

"Some people have referred to it as 'the drug war exception' to 
journalism: where you're supposed to get both sides of the story, but 
for some reason, with drug war reporting it doesn't apply," says 
Grim. "It hasn't in the past, but it's starting to change."

Take, for example, the hysterics of Teddy Roosevelt's Opium 
Commissioner, Hamilton Wright--whose journalism in the early 1900s 
('UNCLE SAM IS THE WORST DRUG FIEND IN THE WORLD,' read one 
Wright-inspired New York Times headline in 1911) encouraged the 
'reefer madness' that stayed with the country and its journalism 
until late in the Twentieth Century.

"They gave [Wright] 5,000 words to spew out this unsupported nonsense 
like, 'There is an epidemic upon us!'--things that weren't even 
remotely true," Grim says. "And the ironic thing was, the press at 
the time was significantly funded by advertising for patent 
medicine--opium elixirs and other unregulated stuff--which is now infamous."

According to a Congressional Quarterly Researcher analysis, the 1930s 
emerged as the golden era of cannabis prohibition agitprop, with even 
The New York Times stating in 1934, "The poisonous weed...maddens the 
senses and emaciates the body of the user.... Most crimes of violence 
in [the West], especially in the country districts are laid to users 
of the drug." The canonical propaganda film Tell Your Children 
appeared in 1936. In 1937 Congress passed the Marihuana Tax Act, 
effectively prohibiting the drug.

It was the Nixon Administration that gave newspapers the War on Drugs 
to fight all-time peak levels of cannabis usage by high schoolers, 
which in turn led to the hard line "Drug War" of the '80s. It wasn't 
until the '90s that the reform movement--then a generation 
old--became professional enough to push back against media 
portrayals, says Grim.

"You had NORML in the '70s, but it was more of a theater agitprop, 
and not the kind of organization that was sending out press releases 
and producing annual reports and generally trying to play within the 
confines of the media game," Grim notes. "That definitely has 
changed--and it's not surprising that after the movement has started 
professionalizing itself, it has been able to get the ear of some 
different people."

As a result, information and perspectives about pot's role in 
American society are now coming from multiple sources. "People are 
now interviewing other medical professionals, cops who are for or 
against the war, specialists, the whole variety of voices are in 
articles that in the past would have just been totally dominated by 
one position," Grim says. And the press have been using data whose 
gathering was funded by the Marijuana Policy Project in computing the 
possible benefits of legalization.

The Bush administration proved powerless against popularly led 
medical cannabis initiatives metastasizing across the country. And 
with Barack Obama's landslide victory, and its hands-off approach to 
state reform, the topic is now wide open. California governor Arnold 
Schwarzenegger and gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom have called 
for a dialogue on the subject. California State Assemblyman Tom 
Ammiano is sponsoring a bill this fall to legalize personal 
possession of small amounts of cannabis in California--a fact that, 
in a turn of events that would have been almost unimaginable in 
previous decades, has made him something of a media darling.

"My schedule for media is very heavy and it's very diverse," Ammiano 
says. "There's so much media around every day and internationally 
that I can pick and choose."

As for the coverage itself: a lot of it has been good, he says, "but 
it needs to get better. Certainly the Fox Network doesn't really 
treat it with any kind of gravitas. Those people still have that 
puerile Cheech and Chong attitude. They don't see it as public 
policy, they see it as something to tie to prostitution. There has 
been more serious discussion in the Wall Street Journal, [in] The 
Economist, [and among] people like Milton Friedman--and there have 
been very thoughtful editorials about it," Ammanio says. And "CNN 
treated it in a more adult fashion."

At the same time, though, the influence of network television is 
waning amid the rise of an old-style partisan press on the Internet. 
Just as "we're seeing a rapid decline of straight media on electoral 
campaigns," California political consultant Larry Tramutola points 
out, the Web is diversifying the conversation about marijuana. The 
debate "may be decided in the blogosphere," Tramutola says. "It may 
be decided on informal networks."

That shift means that the goal posts of the mainstream coverage of 
that debate have moved, as well, says Richard Lee, sponsor of Tax 
Cannabis 2010, a direct democracy initiative to legalize marijuana in 
California. "We've seen a big change in the media," Lee says, "where 
for years we were the one whacko little quote at the end, and the law 
enforcement got the majority. Now it seems the opposite. We seem to 
be making the front page more than ever." In fact, Lee says, 
"reporters keep telling us how difficult it is to find opposition quotes."

Lee describes a recent appearance he made on Fox Business Channel. 
"Instead of debating somebody who was against legalization," he says, 
"the person they had on there was just quibbling about how much money 
could be made when [marijuana] was legal. It's like this professor 
somebody and they were like, 'There's lots of good reasons to 
legalize it, but I don't think we'll be getting as much money as some 
of the proposals say.' I wasn't even really debating the guy."

Indeed, some of the billions of dollars of cannabis revenue have 
begun circulating into the legitimate economy, sobering the 
discussion for reporters amid record shortfalls in government revenue 
and a massive recession. In cash-strapped Oakland, voters just 
approved a medical pot tax by a margin of four to one. Furthermore, 
medical cannabis now comprises a significant percentage of print 
advertising at many urban weeklies.

"The Wall Street Journal is not going to joke about it if it's real 
money," Grim points out.

Still, change comes in increments. "People are seeing the reality of 
change on the ground when a shop opens up and the sky doesn't fall," 
Grim says. "It's the change that begets change, because people's 
fears are not matched by the reality of what's happening."

And one of the changes is journalistic--a shift in the terms of the 
legalization conversation itself. "I think editors are realizing that 
people want more honest, unbiased coverage of the issue," Richard Lee 
puts it. "Newspapers are to a certain degree mirrors of our society. 
To the degree that our poll numbers [about marijuana] are up and more 
people than ever don't think it should be illegal--the coverage reflects that." 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake