Saturday, January 15, 2005

Is the Media Fair? -- The Misanthrope's Perspective

In the United States today we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club—the "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history."
Spiro T. Agnew (1918 - 1996), U.S. vice-president

Are American journalists reporting national news fairly? No. The Misanthrope believes the media actually leans right or even nationalistic in its coverage of politics. Conservatives know this and realize that by bashing the media as liberal they are cut more slack.

“I admit it,” William Kristol said, “The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.” It is this myth of the liberal media that empowers conservatives to control debate in the United States to the point where liberals cannot even hope for a fair shake anymore.

However, the problem is that people do not know the definition of news. Let’s take David versus Goliath as a metaphor for this example. Goliath beating David is no big deal it is expected. Goliath squashing every David that comes by eventually becomes a business success story. Everybody loves a winner. A reporter will eventually look at the situation and asks questions about why Goliath is beating all the Davids. The reporter looks to see if there are unfair business practices taking place. Goliath knows that a reporter is snooping around and will mount a campaign saying that the reporter already has an agenda and is looking for ways to support it. The people who love a winner and the people profiting from Goliath will also rally around behemoth. The reporter is labeled liberal, the reports are discounted, and the people continue to pay hirer prices because there is no competition.

It’s unfortunate but the mass public has shown little to no interested in serious news, whether there is too little time or they feel that it doesn’t matter anyway, but in either case there is someone willing to take advantage of that apathy.

As far as the war on Iraq, all the media wanted to side with President George W. Bush and the media blindly went along rather than research or question what was going on. It was difficult for the media too, because Bush used access and favoritism against reporters that didn’t side with the administration. He still has not met for an interview with a New York Times reporter. As a result of not having a strong enough media, or citizens who care enough, we are once again stuck in a war quagmire where thousands of people on both sides are dying unnecessarily.

Honest journalists are rarely appreciated by the citizens they serve, even less so by those on which they report. Large corporate entities own the major media and they are in the business of packaging news in order to sell advertising. The public will ultimately get what it wants, hence the rise of poor journalism and the rise of people and agencies that know how to manipulate the press to their advantage. A recent case in point is the Armstrong Williams case, we can expect much more such corporate and government agenda-pushing reporting.

(resource: What Liberal Media? The Truth About BIAS and the News By Eric Alterman; 2003 Basic Books)

1 comment:

Clupbert said...

Honestly this post is amazing. Calling the media conservative is only in response to it's liberal label. I think that you should read this post(http://www.blackfive.net/main/2005/01/aiding_and_abbe.html) that has deciminated among the conservative blogosphere. As we saw in the Rathergate affair, corporate execs are far from in control of what the organization reports. The Bush admin can choose to admit whoever they want. They don't think the NY Times is fair to him and it isn't. Dick Morris has a good bit about the times in his book, "Off With Their Heads". And as for investigative reporting, it is dominated by liberals who have an agenda. It is not like they want the truth. John Stossel is one of the best there is and happens to be conservative and wrote a book on how investigative journalism has an agenda. In any giant complex entity, there will be bad things that happen. The press likes to report those, as to magnify the situation and give an unrealistic perspective. It happens with everything from military ops in Iraq to the overall war on terror to wal-mart.