Blog
Big Media + Big Gov = Big Love
January 27, 2010
It has become increasingly clear to most Americans that the mainstream media is courting the current White House with the intensity of a 17-year-old boy. As I flip through the major networks, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC, it becomes painfully clear that there is an agenda they want to see pushed. When the president does this– elation. When the president does not– criticism. That is not news, that is a drama filled episode of HBO’s Big Love.
Coming from a traditional communications background, I am disappointed and deeply saddened at the loss of objectivity and standards within the news today. As an amateur historian, I am embarassed that the memory of men like Franklin and Jefferson are made a mockery by people like Matthews and Olbermann. Benjamin Franklin, who owned and published a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, once said that “a newspaper in every home” was the “principle support of…morality” in civic life. Unfortunately, the current news structure has become less about education and knowledge and more about persuasion and opinion. In today’s era of big media, there unfortunately is another quote from Franklin that comes to mind, “When truth and error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.” 50 years ago the media was there to tell the nation what the people thought. Today, the media exists to tell the nation what to think.
Any sane individual can clearly delineate the lines drawn in the sand. Victor Davis Hanson has done an excellent job recapping the media’s treatment of both Bush and Obama in a piece for The Corner. Specifically, Hanson noted the lack of “substantive criticism of Obama’s flips on renditions, military tribunals, wiretaps, intercepts, Iraq..” and the “Obama plan to run up more red ink in a year than Bush did in eight.” Apparently, an objective stance on the growth and over-reach of government is less important than ensuring the masses accept their fate and relinquish decision making in an appropriately jovial fashion.
In addition, Pew Research notes that this Administration has received an extraordinary amount of positive press, almost double that of Bill Clinton and George Bush. Their study has found that positive stories about this Administration have outweighed negative by two-to-one (42% vs. 20%) while 38% of stories have been neutral or mixed.
It seems objectivity is not only lost by those who produce the news, subjectivity is quickly overtaking those who consume it: According to the new poll out by Gallup, nearly half of Democrats (45%) say the media have done an excellent or good job as a watchdog of the Democratic Obama administration, compared with 29% of independents and 30% of Republicans. You can read the whole article here: Click to Read the Full Article
There are many speculating on why the mainstream media favors this Administration and why limited government never gets a fair shake, leave your thoughts in the comments and let me know what your take is. Me: I believe the news is there to inform, not influence. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.” This country was built on the ingenuity of free men and will continue to remain so only with the input of an educated, informed populace.
Regardless of our political affiliation, for now the writing remains on the wall; or in this case, the heart shaped eyes and dropping jaw remain on Chris Matthews:
You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.
Times, they are a changing. With the rise of blogs and social media, I hope we will fulfill the wishes of both Franklin and Jefferson in creating an educated, informed populace with the knowledge and know-how to steer this country from the bottom-up. Until then, I’ll take my news with a grain of salt…and a margarita.
Austin, while I agree with your longing for an objective news media, I’m not sure where the nostalgia for the “good ol’ days” in media comes from. I don’t think we’ve ever had an objective news media in this country. Even during post-revolutionary days, Thomas Jefferson was using the newspapers to systematically destroy the reputation of John Adams, all while completely disavowing knowledge of such actions. We can’t forget that role of newspapers in hyping the actions of Spain prior to the Spanish American War, either. Our history is replete with such actions by the media. I think the news media today is more objective than it has ever been, chiefly because there are so many avenues of accountability.
Another thing we can do is not confuse the windbags on Fox, MSNBC, CNN, etc. as dispensers of news. They are entertainers and nothing more.
I think you raise some very valid points.
According to the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists, there are 7 major violations of media objectivity: “misleading definitons and terminoloy, imbalanced reporting, opinions disguised as news, lack of context, selective omission, using true facts to draw false conclusions and distortion of facts.” I think both Fox News AND MSNBC can be faulted for violations regularly. When I refer to objective journalism, I harken back to 60 minutes, PBS, etc.
Why does media bias exist in the first place? The simplest answer is that objectivity, as marketable as it sounds in theory, doesn’t sell well in practice. The only real people to blame for our current predicament would be the same American public that cares more about the winner of American Idol than the next President of the United States.
Austin you are correct. It is important to separate objective reporting from “entertainment.” Unfortunately, mmost of us seem to prefer the latter. We can only remember from history Edward R. Murrow’s radio broadcasts from the war in Europe. Again from history for most “on October 15, 1958, in a speech before the Radio and Television News Directors Association in Chicago, Murrow blasted TV’s emphasis on entertainment and commercialism at the expense of public interest in his ‘wires and lights’ speech”(now know as wire, smoke and mirrors). “During the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: Look now, pay later.”
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by AmericaMajority: Big Media Big Gov = Big Love https://ow.ly/1nJFqI #majority #tcot #sotu…