You clearly have a terrific grasp of this absurd situation, but let me suggest that the media, too, could not be in business without our money and support. They can’t sell it if we don’t buy it. And cumulatively we have bought it all from Fox to CNN to MSNBC to the NYT.... Air time is expensive. When you stop and realize that even Howard Stern has his followers who are willing to pay for his air time, it is an easy jump to accept that the media is getting away with all its manipulations and biases because we let them stay in business. The media wouldn’t exist without its listeners/watchers and if we stopped buying the garbage they sell, politically or otherwise, they’d either be out of business or would have to give up manipulating and start reporting.
“The media wouldn’t exist without its listeners/watchers and if we stopped buying the garbage they sell, politically or otherwise, they’d either be out of business or would have to give up manipulating and start reporting.
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At the micro-level, I agree totally.
At the macro-level, I think you are at least partially wrong.
US population 300 million, assume (argument) 100M regular consumers of print and TV media. I made this number up.
1) To alienate any large % of their customers, print and TV media have to change their message quickly. Slowly-changed messages might be subject to the ‘boiled frog rule’.
2) In dealing with such large human markets, assume a certain amount of entropy (e.g. a certain number of households WILL turn tv on each night at prime time and WILL tune to xyz network, regardless of what they say on that network). Meaning if XYZ has a 15% market share of 100M regular viewers, even a 10% loss of mkt is only 1.5M viewers and XYZ will continue to receive ad. revenue.
3) Any large changes in viewer behavior are likely to be played out over years, not days or months. This means that, say, the penalty for CBS trying to unseat the sitting president in 2004 with fradulent documents is only going to be visible in retrospect 10 or 20 years from now, assuming there is a penalty.
4) The media really are so big as to be immune. Viacom (CBS owner) airs fradulent documents with the presumed intent of electing John Kerry in 2004, less than 3 months before a national election. What are the actual consequences, aside from a few firings, for the parent company?