HAS THE MEDIA GONE TOO FAR?

Has the condescending lecture of the network anchor gotten old? Are you sick and tired of "reporters" who couldn't tell the story straight if their lives depended on it?

I am about fed up with a news industry that fundamentally fails to do its job, and which every day strays further and further from its purpose. I'm tired of partisan lectures and propaganda dressed up like the news. I have had about all I can take of the self-important blowhards who seem to think their role is to rudely mock and shout down the people who we elect to office.

If there's one group of people I trust less and have more contempt for than politicians, it is reporters. We are a nation awash is news products which contain virtually nothing of subsance or worth. We have channels full of 24-hour crap, and hardly a reporter anywhere who can actually tell it to us straight.

The media has called itself to some position of importance and significance in our society, taking upon itself an air or power and superiority that is almost comical. They have almost made themselves a special class of people whose every notion or whim is "right" and any contrary view is "wrong." They are collectively the most arrogant and self-important group of people in our society today.

They are so wrapped up in recirculating their own speculation that they seldom truly report. They are so bound up in the cliches of their trade that they become useless.

Here's an example. For two months the various news organizations, around the clock, talked about the potential Republican vice presidential candidates. Over and over reporters said that Mitt Romney was the most likely, with the Minnesota governor or some executive thrown in as well. There was a conventional wisdom and these blowhards repeated it and amplified it over and over and over. And yet it was completely baseless. Mitt Romney had never even met privately with John McCain. There had never even been an interview.

Just as real reporting would have discovered -- while commentators opined on a Democrat "Dream Team" -- that Barack Obama had neither met with nor vetted Hillary Clinton.

The news business is very good at baseless commentary, but essentially incompetent at real reporting.

Ideally, the news business is nothing more than a pipe. Its job is to gather and transmit information. Like the water pipe that leads from the main to your kitchen sink. You turn on the tap and you should get, unadulterated, cool, clear water. You don't want to taste the pipe. You just want water.

The news should be like that. It should be free of the bias and opinion of the reporter, it should just be information. We all have a brain of our own, we don't need things interpreted for us, we don't need them spun. Just give us the information and we'll go from there.

Instead, virtually every newscast or significant newspaper story smells of the rotting carcass of agenda and bias. So-called experts and analysists are nothing more than shills selling snake oil. Paul Begala and Donna Brazile are not analysts, they are Democrat propagandists on the evening news. Karl Rove is their Republican counterpart. No one gives an honest opinion or legitimate insight. They merely spin and confuse, putting predictable political slants on everything they say.

We are not informed by the news, we are shaped by it. At least they hope we are. It's as if they think we are a herd of mindless sheep looking to their televised selves for the guidance we cannot provide for ourselves.

There is a palpable antagonistic air to so much of the media, whether in the news magazines or on the evening news or the weekend talk shows. It is clear they neither like nor trust the American people.

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the Republican and Democratic national conventions. At each, reporters outnumbered delegates and officials more than 3-to-1. The vast majority of these media people were doing nothing but regurgitating what others had said, over and over and over. In almost every situation, the priorities and topics of the reporters were very different from those of the delegates. For all the news media, for all the coverage, all you got by watching TV at night was the opinions of the anchors and reporters, you don't learn a thing, truly, about the convention or the delegates.

Nothing is more emblematic of that than the frequent sight during convention coverage of various talking heads in the TV networks' skybox studios prattling on while in the distant, out-of-focus background some legitimate newsmaker was giving a speech. It's as if the media feels that its people and what they have to say is more important than the people who truly are the news and what they have to say.

But I do know that, in this day of technology, we don't need reporters as much as we used to. Speeches, press releases, official reports -- we can see them all directly ourselves via the Internet. If we have the time to do some reading ourselves, we don't need the news media.

More news programming with less true content, reporters with plenty of self-esteem and not a bit of competence, clear political agendas on the part of some reporters and networks. That's where it stands today. The media isn't the solution, the media has become the problem.

Charlie Gibson made that pretty clear the other night as he tried to trip up Sarah Palin.

Excellent Observation!

Unfortunately I think viewers will gravitate towards those news outlets that more accurately reflect or reinforce their own world views. IE conservatives watch FOX and libs watch everything else. I think it is impossible to eliminate bias. After all we are dealing with humans and we are very flawed. The internet may provide the answer but is just as likely to enflame each side passions with uncorroberated and baseless attacks.

“The more bleak it appears for Obama, the more they will stretch. Just like Dan Rather in ‘04, someone will get so carried away, it will cost them their career. Who will it be?”

In my house, that has already happened, and his name is Charlie Gibson. Has Charlie admitted his inexcusable mangling of his “exacts words” of Gov. Palin’s prayer request? There we have incompetent and arrogant all rolled into one.

Unfortunately I think viewers will gravitate towards those news outlets that more accurately reflect or reinforce their own world views.

Ultimately, it still comes down to economics. The news outlet that best delivers audience for advertisers becomes the most successful. News consumers drawn only by their own biases to news sources reflecting similar biases will work only so long as the consumers maintain those biases.

Reality has a nasty way of eventually intruding upon biases that are not grounded in fact. However, if they are grounded in fact, they really aren't biases, are they?

However, the above analysis is predicated upon a "free marketplace of ideas." The minute such ceases to exist, so does the ability of "reality" to correct bias. Therefore, maintaining "freedom of the press" and economic freedom is essential.

The real, long term answer for the "biased press" issue lies outside of the press all together. The long term answer is rooted in an" educated" citizenry.

The current, public, education system turns out more than a few "indoctrinated" citizens, but precious few, truly "educated" ones. Truly "educated" citizens think critically and know how to properly use logic.

Such "educated" citizens understand that mere presentation of information does not necessarily equate to presentation of "truth" or reality. These "educated" citizens know enough of human nature to examine the motives of those who would "present" to them and to view the information thus presented in light of those motives as well as to critically examine and verify the presented information.

Until we can get our mass education system to routinely produce such "educated" citizens, we will have to continually confront the problem of bias in the press as well as other places such as entertainment and art.

If you have ever been involved in a story that made the paper or the evening news, you know darn well that very little of what made print or got aired was factual and correct. But they get away with it because a relatively few people were involved in the story compared to the number that consumes the story.

Absolutely. Personal experience is a great teacher.

The most effective weapon we have against the media is how consistantly wrong they are about everything they report. Even on subjects where there is no partisan spin involved, they will always get the story wrong in most important respects.

One thing I've found to be pretty consistantly true among most people I meet is that everyone has some subject that interests them that they know quite a bit about. They may well ride the short bus where everything else in the universe is concerned, but everyone has some one thing that they consider their own.

I'll ask them to consider any report of substance they might have seen somewhere in the media about that particular thing. Then I'll ask them questions about how accurately it was reported. The almost universal response is that the press got it wrong every single time.

My response to which, is that if they screwed the pooch so badly about this one subject, how can you trust them on anything else they report?

This can be particularly effective to get people to start questioning what they see/hear.

>>>Ideally, the news business is nothing more than a pipe. Its job is to gather and transmit information. Like the water pipe that leads from the main to your kitchen sink. You turn on the tap and you should get, unadulterated, cool, clear water. You don’t want to taste the pipe. You just want water.<<<

That’s the ideal. The problem is that we’re human beings, not pipes. We all come to the table with biases and preconceptions.

Information is more like a buffet table. We get all sorts of flavors and tastes. What we don’t want is contaminated food, diseased food, or pollutants. Otherwise, I may not enjoy the dull flavor of doctrinaire liberalism, but I shouldn’t demand that the food be banned.

Unfortunately the so called “educators” are the very people that distort or omit the facts to promote their own agendas.

Your assertion is definitely true at the college level. (Remember Ward Churchill?) However, I think that at the lower levels of education, the blame does not belong directly with the “educators” unless you count failure to resist “political correctness.” Rather it is more the fault of the “administrators,” unions and lawyers.

The single, most effective steps toward correcting the situation IMHO would be tort reform and disbanding of the NEA and AFT. The next most effective reforms would be return of effective control of school systems entirely to the local school board (including text book selection) and abolition of “tenure” below the college level.

The final step would be “merit pay” for teachers. A test over grade appropriate material (for each grade) is administered at the beginning of the year with the exact same test (randomized order) re-administered at the end of the year. The teacher’s “merit pay” would be based upon the average increase in the amount the students learned (how much better the average test scores were from the beginning of the year). Just like the SAT and ACT, the tests would be the same for everyone and given to the same group that started the year. Since the compensation would be for a net change in performance, it can be assumed that the change is the result of the teacher’s efforts. Even if the students did poorly on the first and second tests, but still better on the second test than the first test, the teacher obviously did his or her job.

… I hate what the politicians have to do to win elections. It's almost a farce.

Ever heard the phrase “bread and circus?” It comes from the time of the Roman Republic and refers to what politicians of that day did for votes. I am afraid that neither political corruption nor election shenanigans originated with our republic. Unfortunately, all we can do is work for reform and pray for our nation’s welfare and repentance.

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