Two excellent posts bounce off an article in The New Criterion that explores why people in the US are so angry at the media.
Kenneth Minogue has a lengthy essay (about 6 thousand words) entitled Journalism: Power without Responsibility.
I have to be honest. I couldn’t wade through it.
However, two posts responding to Minoque are much clearer reads.
Jay Rosen of Press Think breaks down the essay into something less academic and more understandable.
“At a public meeting in Jackson, Miss., last week, a listener to NPR programs on Mississippi Public Broadcasting asked me if I had detected a sense of outrage growing in the country,” wrote Jeffrey Dvorkin, ombudsman for NPR (March 8). “If my inbox is anything to go by, I certainly have.”
Not just Dvorkin, but probably every ombudsman (male and female) could give the same report: a rising hostility pours in through the inbox. “The reasons for this cyber-outrage might be worth pondering,” he said.
Yes, the reasons. Who really knows how to explain the kind of rage and discontent–primarily about “bias”–that visits the ombudsman’s inbox anywhere there is such a box in the American news media today? If it’s deserved, how did journalists come to deserve it? If it’s not, how did so many Americans come to believe it?
Dvorkin’s reasons are semi-plausible– and totally familiar: “AM talk radio and cable television slugfests have given many the sense that this is what journalism should be.” Or: “E-mail makes our natural sense of impatience more pronounced.” These I would call factors. They are a long way from an understanding of causes, a long way from any why.
Given the small discussion here at BDBO yesterday regarding a CBC radio show, I know the anger is also showing itself in Canada, but not to the same extent. Jeff Sharlett picks up on the theme of religion and the media, looking at patriotism, expectations, myth in The Media Do Suck.
Published 3 years, 8 months agoThe rage that results when the picture does not come out as expected, or worse, when you discover that someone has been taking pictures of you without your permission, is to be expected. It is not particularly “conservative”; it is, rather, a modern manifestation, intimately linked to the fact of religious pluralism, the undeniable truth that there are many, many ways to believe or to not believe or to avoid thinking about the question of belief all together.
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Bene, I am not surprised that many people are becoming enraged at the Mainstream Media. If anything, I have been wondering why it has taken so long for this to occur. I don’t trust half of what I read in the newspapers, or hear on the radio, or see on TV.
Case in point:
Several years ago I was in South Africa with my bride-to-be. Her parents called us quite often in a panic because, according to the news at the time, there was a full-scale war going on in the streets due to Apartheid and the opposition to it.
The company I worked for at the time was, and still is, a multi-national corporation with a branch in The States. Our manager of quality control went to New York for some conference or other, and taped a news broadcast of the supposed street war allegedly happening in Johannesburg.
When he returned to South Africa, he showed us the tape, and asked us if we could spot the problem with what was being shown. It took us several minutes, but one sharp-eyed individual suddenly noticed the licence plates on the vehicles. They were not South African vehicles at all, but were in fact in Zimbabwe, and the footage, which was supposed to be depicting what was happening in South Africa at that time, was in fact, several years old.
I am of the opinion that the media only reports what they want their audience to hear, and slants it in such a way as to sway public opinion in the direction the media desires it to go. There is no such thing as an unbiased news report; no honest effort is made to report both sides of a story, and the truth is only what the media tells us it is.