101ORD makes a great point. The dissemination of information used to be the nearly sole province of "Big Media".
Freeper conservatism_is_compassion has contributed some great commentary over the years on this subject, the bottom line being that there has NEVER been objective media, it is a myth.
The individual elements of the media would figure out what the message was, package the information into a format that would convey that message most effectively, and distribute it. It wasn't a monolithic enterprise where they were all faxing the talking points to each other, but when they all share pretty much the same world view, that didn't have to happen. The message would be uniform enough.
Uniform enough, then when they would begin reading, watching and listening to each other, they would plagiarize words and phrases to the point where it sounds like an echo chamber. Rush Limbaugh does an interesting exercise where he takes sound bites from various news outlets and makes a collage, and the effect is both hilarious and sobering at the same time. Of particular note was the media's use of the word "gravitas" to describe George W. Bush. While I (and many others) understood the meaning of the word, it is both a word rarely used in conversation and heard and read even less in the media. However, once it was used, it began to bounce around to the point it was ricocheting all over the place, the effect like putting dye in tanks of fluid to see if they are leaking into each other and finding out the leaks are pervasive and saturating because all the tanks are the same color in a short period of time.
For me, a real turning point was when I saw the documentary narrated by Charlton Heston:
Vietnam War - The Impact of Media
It wasn't that I didn't know this, I just hadn't paid much attention or focused on it. But it crystallized for me for good when I saw this. (If you haven't seen this, I suggest you watch...everything you have seen in the media regarding our military since 2003 makes complete sense.
In particular, the video discusses the treatment of the Tet Offensive by the media in 1968. It is shameful, yet fascinating, like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
But we were a captive audience. And many people, no, MOST people trusted the media. They TRUSTED people like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather to tell us the truth, and assumed they did so. It was only with the passage of time that we could look dispassionately on that time, and realize just what took place.
The Internet has changed all that. Personally, I have not read a newspaper, read a magazine (such as Time or Newsweek) or watched a full news broadcast in nearly a decade. I consider myself far better informed than the majority of people I know.
But that comes with a price. With that freedom of not being beholden to Big Media comes responsibility...the responsibility of having to vet information myself and not depend on someone else (such as ABC, NBC, CBS, NYT, LA Times, Boston Globe, etc.) to do it for me. And this is sometimes not only difficult to do, it is occasionally impossible to do, and I am left with having to make a best guess. And not being infallible, I make mistakes in judgement.
This is where a site like Free Republic becomes invaluable. Here, there can be generally open discussion about an issue. Many different people can view the available evidence and with a multitude of perspectives (some useful and some not so useful) an issue can be attacked piecemeal and broken down, much like a bunch of people with hammers and chisels working on a gigantic boulder.
I have found that on FR, any opinion or theory, no matter how crackpot or politically incorrect, can be promoted by a poster. However, I have also found that if you have a point of view, it is not going to be simply accepted as another valid theory, but can and WILL be deconstructed by participants. It is done with experience, humor, anger, insight, ignorance, bias, prejudice and wisdom. What results is, if not a good handle on an issue, is a wider perspective on that issue.
We saw that with the Dan Rather issue.
And I think we are doing that now with the Trayvon Martin shooting. We have all been into dozens of threads on this, and have seen the gamut of opinions and wide disagreement on everything from the general philosophy of the situation down to the minute details such as the condition of the weapon after it fired.
It is both critically useful and maddeningly frustrating to approach the issues this way, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Thank God for this forum.
Hear! Hear!
Thanks for the link, I’ve not watched the documentary narrated by Charlton Heston, but I will. Nice post, too. :)
I couldn’t agree with you more. I likewise have not watched the old MSM in well over a decade and even Fox News doesn’t interest me much now. FR has become the number one place to come for nearly everything I want to know about. Even local events to some extent. Having multiple views from people of all levels of society and experience analyze and opine on the news of the day is 1,000Xs more interesting and informative than the old MSM and its plastic templated narrative.
1010RD makes a great point. The dissemination of information used to be the nearly sole province of "Big Media"."...Well done. Can you imagine what the narrative would be like had this happened before the Internet? If all we had were the Big 3 to get us information?"
Freeper conservatism_is_compassion has contributed some great commentary over the years on this subject, the bottom line being that there has NEVER been objective media, it is a myth.
The individual elements of the media would figure out what the message was, package the information into a format that would convey that message most effectively, and distribute it. It wasn't a monolithic enterprise where they were all faxing the talking points to each other, but when they all share pretty much the same world view, that didn't have to happen. The message would be uniform enough.
Actually, “the wire” obviates the need for any faxes of talking points. If you work for a newspaper which is a member of the Associated Press, you take on the mission of writing for the AP wire. And getting your reports shared over “the wire” and published by newspapers all over the country is a big deal for a journalist. To hit the big time, you need to please the journalistic community - and the journalistic community wants stories that bleed so that they can lede. They want "Man Bites Dog," not “Dog Bites Man,” stories.It doesn’t take a fax of “talking points” to do that. But that does have political implications. If traditionally the important and prestigious jobs were done by white men, it is “Man Bites Dog” if a black or a woman becomes the head of Hewlett-Packard. If half the crime is perpetrated by the 10% of Americans who descended from slaves, then it is “Dog Bites Man,” and not jazzy enough to emphasize in the paper, if another black - possibly, tho we can’t actually be certain at this point, Trayvon Martin - attacks someone of a different, or the same, race.“Man Bites Dog” stories are inherently interesting because they are inherently atypical of what usually happens. And even if you didn’t deliberately focus on the negative, sudden unexpected changes are typically negative - it is so much easier for a house to burn down than it is for a house to be built suddenly and unexpectedly. But the negative, and the Man Bites Dog, emphasis of journalism inherently tends to make news reports seem to constantly tell you that the world is in a mess and getting worse. And of course, “Things can’t get worse!” is an extreme radical statement. What follows from it is (as Shakespeare put it), “Desperate ills are by desperate measures cured, or not at all."
101ORD makes a great point. The dissemination of information used to be the nearly sole province of "Big Media"."...Well done. Can you imagine what the narrative would be like had this happened before the Internet? If all we had were the Big 3 to get us information?"
. . . But we were a captive audience. And many people, no, MOST people trusted the media. They TRUSTED people like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather to tell us the truth, and assumed they did so. It was only with the passage of time that we could look dispassionately on that time, and realize just what took place.
The Internet has changed all that. Personally, I have not read a newspaper, read a magazine (such as Time or Newsweek) or watched a full news broadcast in nearly a decade. I consider myself far better informed than the majority of people I know.
But that comes with a price. With that freedom of not being beholden to Big Media comes responsibility...the responsibility of having to vet information myself and not depend on someone else (such as ABC, NBC, CBS, NYT, LA Times, Boston Globe, etc.) to do it for me. And this is sometimes not only difficult to do, it is occasionally impossible to do, and I am left with having to make a best guess. And not being infallible, I make mistakes in judgement.
This is where a site like Free Republic becomes invaluable. Here, there can be generally open discussion about an issue. Many different people can view the available evidence and with a multitude of perspectives (some useful and some not so useful) an issue can be attacked piecemeal and broken down, much like a bunch of people with hammers and chisels working on a gigantic boulder.
I have found that on FR, any opinion or theory, no matter how crackpot or politically incorrect, can be promoted by a poster. However, I have also found that if you have a point of view, it is not going to be simply accepted as another valid theory, but can and WILL be deconstructed by participants. It is done with experience, humor, anger, insight, ignorance, bias, prejudice and wisdom. What results is, if not a good handle on an issue, is a wider perspective on that issue.
. . . It is both critically useful and maddeningly frustrating to approach the issues this way, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Thank God for this forum.
The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . .It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity,
and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam SmithPure and simple, we come to FR to pool our “incredulity” so that we can muster enough skepticism to have a chance at attaining a modicum of wisdom.