My Meandering Media Monolog
So, how do you take in your information? Do you study the motivations and the practices of the news organizations that broadcast to you, or do you blindly accept when the likes of CNN, FOX and MSNBC tell you something is so?
Newscorp, Time Warner and General Electric, the parent companies of the big three 24 hour news networks each share a motivation: To make money. But it is how they go about it that affects their news coverage. For instance, General Electric is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of windmill turbines. So then, it is no surprise that much of their news network’s political positioning leans to the left since a progressive government is more apt to provide incentives for alternative energy sources than a government controlled by big oil interests. Newscorp is headed by the infamous Rupert Murdoch who seems to have a mission to support the right wing. Why? It’s a product of the old quid pro quo with indirect advertising and regulatory favors in exchange for positive coverage. Very similar motivations govern the political positioning of pundits and the weighing of messages at CNN. CNN is probably the most sinister of the big 3, with their marketing concept of “the most trusted name in news” belying their skewed reporting and political “balance”.
How else does one explain the presence of advertisers such as Boeing, Kerr Magee and McDonnell Douglas on cable news? I know I am in the market for a new f-18 since my old one started having electrical problems a few months back. It’ll have to wait until I get that oil rig I’ve been saving up for.
The big problem here is when you have a commercial entity charged with providing to you information. The news you receive is parsed, filtered, re-interpreted and re-written to meet the profit objectives of the company. Ask yourself, how much “news” comes out of these networks any more? Think of Ted Turner’s CNN, the international bureaus, reporters and journalists that used to span the globe not only there, but for all the major networks. Ever since they became profit centers for their parent companies, these bureaus started disappearing, journalists were replaced by studio-bound, taste-making pundits, editors were replaced with producers and objectivity and interest in the facts went the way of the covered wagon.
No where to me were these skewed practices more evident than this past week at the Democratic National Convention. With each and every speech or comment, a contrarian position has been offered up by the network pundits, stirring up controversy and constantly questioning the viewer’s own ability to judge for themselves. This practice of the “instant op-ed” seems designed to question the viewer’s own sensibility. Sensationalized claims of party dis-unity, rifts and Clinton-Obama conflicts were unnecessarily blown out of proportion. Apparently, viewers are not to be trusted to make up their own minds any longer. These news networks expend an awful lot of effort making sure that THEY do the thinking instead of you.
My suggestion is to watch political events on C-SPAN. It’s a “just the facts, ma’am” experience with little to no interjection by announcers of any kind. There are no inserts of political ads guised as “news”. What you see there is what the convention goer sees, with no Wolf Blitzer or Keith Olbermann framing it all for you afterwards.
My father’s generation grew up with an implicit trust of the news networks. Journalists like Walter Cronkite took their charge seriously, acted within the boundaries of being a “journalist” first, a “broadcaster” second. It is very difficult now to convince this generation that the news has changed, that ABC isn’t just ABC any more, but a corporate conglomerate owned by Disney, married to those corporate interests in profits and earnings first, truth second. It is almost as if American’s today need to take some lessons from the old citizens of the USSR, who learned early on how to parse the truth from the daily edditions of Pravda and Tass. American’s have no skill in this, most are ill-equipped to understand the complexities and too under stimulated by the generic presentation of news that is bound by journalistic integrity. They want it to be sensational, every story a riveting, marginalized controversy. And these networks are willing to deliver it, on demand.
As a democracy, we are bound to this simple fact: We cannot function without factual information. On either side of the aisle, if we allow mis-truths and slander to become an acceptable journalistic practice, if we allow our decision-making to be guided by unproven, unsourced pieces of information guised as truth, we will descend into a polarized, privatized shell of society unbound by pride, national identity or constitution. If we become too lazy to demand this from ourselves and our media, this American experiment will go the way of Rome.
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