I no longer watch network news or read newspapers. I have never trusted the media in this country, and I’m not about to start. It has nothing to do with whether or not there’s a liberal bias, either, so please hear me out.
Here are a few things that I have learned over the years, each supported by facts that I have personally experienced:
1.) Bad news draws more attention than good news.People, humans in general not just Americans, will pull over to gawk at a train wreck long before they’ll stop to admire a patch of flowers.
So, can the media really be “blamed” for reporting bad news out of Iraq? Not entirely. After all, what is the primary reason the media exists? If you answered “To keep people informed,” smack yourself for not paying attention and go to the back of the room.
2.) The media does not exist to keep you informed.Do-gooders take note: The media exists for one reason and one reason only, and that is to make MONEY. They are a business. The only difference between the media and Chrysler, Trend Realty, and Chevron is that they are peddling advertising instead of cars, houses, or oil. They get more value for their product if more people pay attention to that product, so the media will broadcast/print that which causes the most people to stop and look. That means car bombs going off in Iraq.
Face it, the United States and its international coalition have managed to bring electricity to areas of Iraq that have never known it before, have brought water to more areas than the Baathists ever did, have built schools, have built public buildings, have rebuilt mosques, and so on, but how many of you are going to sit through a half hour broadcast of that? Yet, when you see a burning automobile sitting in a crater that was once a roadway, I bet you stopped, didn’t you?
Like every other business out there, the media is constantly striving to improve and increase the
marketability of its product. To do so, they have to push it, often by making claims that dance around that grey area between truth and fiction.
3.) The media claims to be objective; it isn’t.I don’t recall precisely where I found this statistic, but I do remember seeing it in several different places: Ninety percent of those who make up the nebulous glom that we refer to as the media are registered as Democrats.
Now, that, in its own right, isn’t a bad thing. Contrary to what some would have you believe, there
are good Democrats out there; I happen to know quite a few of them. However, with that kind of disparity in political representation among its members, is it any wonder that the media is often accused of being biased?
No matter how hard one genuinely tries to be objective, opinions and subconscious thoughts will tend to float to the top and taint one’s reporting, if only a little. I do not believe that the media is engaged in a wholesale agenda to further the cause of the Democratic Party.
However, I don’t deny that some members in particular are. The president of CBS News said in a New York Times interview that he would never report anything good about George Bush. Openly admitted it. Dan Rather stood by the Air National Guard memos, even after they’d been proven to be forgeries. Does anyone other than Rather actually believe that something can be “fake but accurate?” Think I’ll ever trust CBS after that?
There are those that claim that the media does nothing different than what right-wing talk show hosts like Hannity, Limbaugh, Ingraham, and others do. There’s only one major problem with that, though: Hannity, Limbaugh, Ingraham, and others openly acknowledge and even outright brag about their bias (each of whom, in case you didn’t already know, is conservative, right-wing, and even *gasp!* Republican). None of them claim to be objective. The media does.
The only mainstream reporters that I’m aware of who openly admit their bias are Andy Rooney and John Stossel. Rooney, a World War II veteran, openly admitted that he is a cantankerous liberal-Democrat; I actually heard him say it on the air. More power to him! Frankly, I think he hits the nail on the head more often than not. I love listening to Andy Rooney and I respect his opinion, especially since I know and appreciate where he’s coming from. John Stossel, God bless him, openly admits that he is a Libertarian. Stossel happily points the finger at just about anyone who massively deserves to be singled out as an idiot, right-wing or left. He’s gotten ABC’s panties in a wad on more than one occasion by refusing to toe their line. I’ll say it again: God bless him.
So where are the others? Why hasn’t any of the media luminaries ever admitted their political affiliation? Why hasn’t any of them ever admitted that they are less than totally objective in their reporting, especially when their on-air bias is obvious?
4.) The media will misrepresent facts if it suits their cause. Way back in 1976, CBS ran a piece about the violent nature of Viet Nam veterans, most suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, homelessness, and the like. It was an impressive piece of journalism, except that there wasn’t a word of it that was true. Turns out Viet Nam vets suffered from PTSD at roughly the same rate that vets from Korea and World War II suffered. CBS had scoured Washington, D.C. looking for the homeless, the alcoholics, and the mentally messed-up, then asked whether they were veterans. The result was countless hours of footage of one homeless, alcoholic, screwed-up veteran after the other, most of whom had served in Viet Nam, and who were now serving the purpose of CBS News.
And it’s not just CBS; some high muckity-muck over at ABC News admitted after the 2004 election that she wasn’t even going to report on the Swift Boat Vets’ attacks against John Kerry except that there was so much information about it on the internet she couldn’t afford not to. She claimed it wasn’t newsworthy, even though a candidate for the office of the President of the United States could have arguably been charged with commission of a treasonous act. That’s not newsworthy!?!?
None of the major news networks have reported a thing about the money scandal at Air America radio. I have yet to hear a thing on the mainstream news about the University of Oklahoma suicide bomber. (Fox News finally said something this past week, but even they reported it as “Breaking News” almost three weeks after it actually happened!)
I personally caught CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN misrepresenting information during the 1990 University of Florida student murders. Each was trying to scoop the other, so rumor got reported as facts almost regularly. That bordered on the excusable, given the media frenzy, but when they got even the simplest of information wrong, like where some of the murders had occurred, I learned right then and there that the news media doesn’t give a rat about actually reporting what was happening.
The big wake-up call for me came when the South African government released Nelson Mandela from prison (yeah, I know, I’m showing my age here). All the networks showed Mandela standing before a red draped podium as he addressed the press. My wife’s uncle, who was one of the few people who owned a large satellite dish at the time, had taped the live feed that was sent from South Africa to the main network offices in New York. Mandela hadn’t spoken from a red draped podium; Mandela spoke from a podium that had been draped with the Communist Russian flag. EVERY ONE of the big networks, ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN, had airbrushed the hammer and sickle out of the image for the final broadcast. Why?
Does it even matter why? The networks all changed that image to hide the fact that Mandela was a Marxist. Granted, that information wasn’t anything new; that’s primarily why Mandela had been arrested in the first place. This wasn’t something that happened in South Africa and got sent to New York, this happened at four different art departments at four different news agencies, all on the same day. Still think the media can be trusted?
Most recently, even after a report questioning the staged interview of troops in Iraq by President Bush, Michelle Kosinski reported on the heavy rains from a canoe in a flooded area in the northeast. It would have been very convincing had two locals not walked right in front of her during a live broadcast proving the water to be, in actuality, only ankle deep. You can see the broadcast for yourself right here: http://thepoliticalteen.net/2005/10/14/todayshow/
Am I the only one that finds this is just a wee bit hypocritical? I mean, is it really okay to call the President on misrepresentation (and justifiably so), and then in the very next segment do the exact same thing yourself?
The media regularly crosses the line in trying to make the news rather than reporting it. Investigative journalism is one thing; skewing facts, deleting facts, or worse, creating “facts,” is as morally reprehensible as clubbing puppies. It is the disingenuous misrepresentation of information that often gives rise to calls of media bias, and justifiably so.
5.) The media will report personal opinion as fact.I have to admit that I miss Peter Jennings. He had a great presence, a bright, clear speaking voice, and a warm personality, and I don’t just say that because he was Canadian.
But I could not watch him very often. I caught Jennings interjecting his personal opinion into newscasts
as news on so many occasions that I eventually stopped watching ABC News altogether. And Brokaw. And Rather. And...
I don’t have a problem with an anchor stating their opinion; it’s a God-given right to express one’s self that no one, not even a reporter, should be prevented from exercising. It is important, however, that opinion should be stated as such, not as news. (see #4.)
6.) The media is it’s own modern political entity.Prior to 1972, politicians had played the media as gigantic public relations firms, luring reporters to staged news events to promulgate their own agenda. Even political organizations used the media to publicize and stage disingenuous demonstrations, such as the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War’s infamous throwing of medals onto the White House lawn. Members of VVAW contacted the media solely so that the news cameras would publicize their staged event as a spontaneous and genuine protest.
Since Watergate and Viet Nam, however, it has been the media that has wielded its influence on the American political scene. Anyone who watched the Election of 2004 could see it, though it didn’t happen only in 2004. The media chooses and selects which candidates to cover, and as such, presents the public with
their choices for election.
How else does one really explain the disappearance of Howard Dean from the race for the Democratic presidential nomination? Right-wing talk shows had a field day with the now infamous scream, but it was only schoolyard ridicule; there was no substantive challenge to Dean’s position. Howard Dean’s volumed exhaust had nothing to do with his policy, his politics, his stance on the issues, or his opinions. Yet after that one utterance, the press left Dean by the wayside and he showed very poorly in the next primary.
Kerry eventually received the Democratic nomination, an individual who, as I said earlier, could arguably be charged with treason after both his meeting with North Vietnamese officials in Paris in 1970, and his perjury (yes, it was perjury) before Congressional hearings in 1971, in which he claimed to have personally witnessed atrocities committed by American troops when we now know he was privy to no such experience. Before, the media would have never let anyone with such “qualifications” anywhere near the White House. In 2004, with the blessings of a sympathetic media, however, this man was just a few percentage points shy of it.
Because the media controlled what information people received, though the internet is now changing that, thank God, the media could guide public opinion in any direction they desired. They could portray any political candidate as they saw fit; just look at the Nixon-Kennedy debates of 1960. Information really is power, and those that wield that power are well aware of what they have and how to use it.
So I don’t trust the media any more. Sometimes I get so damned irritated whenever I hear people trying to argue a point based on solely what they’ve heard on the news, though I also get irked when someone passes it off as simply a “liberal bias.” Take what you hear on the news as a starting point, with a grain of salt, and then do your own research. The sources are out there. Be as objective as possible; as Americans you should want the truth in order to make an informed decision, not just dig up whatever facts support what you’ve already decided to believe. You deserve no less.
The media might have a bias, liberal or otherwise, but one can temper what one receives from the media with the knowledge of what "angle" it’s coming from. And remember this: Power begets the need and desire for more power. The media does not have a bias so much as they have an agenda, and that agenda is to further the influence of the media.
Semper Fi,
The Almighty Mattski
