There are a couple of factors that contribute to the liberal leanings of the journalism wing of the entertainment industry.
* Motivation - some journalism professors and guest speakers ask their students why they want to be journalists. They often say: "to make the world better". This encourages activism rather than objectivity.* The nature of the news is exception-oriented. Nobody reports on the 100 million cars that got to their destinations safely each morning. Only the accidents get noticed. There's no news in the 270+million people who HAVE homes either. If all I covered was crime, poverty, and misfortune, I bet eventually I'd start trying, through my coverage, to improve the lot of those suffering rather than simply reporting it and trusting people to do the right thing.
* Many of the alphabets see sensationalism as the way to improve ratings at the cost of being accurate and objective. I remember hearing over and over how I was supposed to be at risk from AIDS even though I've been in a real marriage for 25 years and wasn't getting a blood transfusion. Goldberg really hit on how this kind of propaganda was ginned up to avoid stigmatizing gays. It also hurt our ability to stop AIDS by diluting focus on the behaviors that causued its spread.
Carried to its extreme, we end up with CNN and other news organizations paying thousands of dollars to Saddam's henchmen for the privilege of spreading his lies from Baghdad. Meanwhile their anchors in the US refused to wear flag pins on their lapels so they could stay "objective".
67 posted on 10/24/2003 1:04 PM EDT by Dilbert56
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