As I've stated in the title of this first post, words are powerful, and they mean things. This might be so obvious that the mere thought immediately makes anyone who hears it glaze over, but it is an absolutely crucial concept. The way things are worded can also tell you much about certain viewpoints or biases a person might have. The ability to sense bias and turn a critical eye to whatever you are told is perhaps one of the most important skills that an American citizen should have. It is also important to understand that whoever is reporting something has an agenda. To further this agenda, you will see stories emphasized or downplayed depending upon the bias of the source. What becomes the Wall Street Journal's front page story can be buried in page 12 of The New York Times.
To get back to the issue of bias--I usually take a critical view towards the modern media; hence, this blog is entitled "Into the Wasteland". I nearly called it "Wading Through the Sewers". I often envision today's journalistic environment as a Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic wasteland where there are no rules except what you can enforce through your own might. Journalistic standards have gone by the wayside in many ways.
However, this is not to say that I wish to go back to the old systems of disseminating information. In fact, if were not such a cynic, I could have called this blog something to the effect of "An Exciting, New Frontier". Admittedly, our current way of getting news is better than the old method. In days of yore, the mass media was too much of an oligarchy--rule by a privileged few. In the waning years of the 19th century, power was concentrated in the hands of a few infamous newspaper owners, with William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer being some famous examples. These two men were the fathers of so-called "Yellow Journalism", which is a term used to describe a pattern of journalism that focuses on the sensational (or uses outright lies) to support a particular agenda. Because of Hearst and Pulitzer's unquenchable thirst to sell newspapers, this nation was dragged into the Spanish-American War back in 1898. Many of the reasons they used to support the war were later proven to be outright fabrications. This problem continued on into the age of television--while I believe that bold-faced lies became more rare as an actual tactic in reporting, you still had an oligarchy of sorts. Men with names like Murrow, Cronkite, and Brokaw were unquestionably good journalists, but their viewpoint was reliably old, male, white, and liberal. In the age of network television, it was easy to enforce this dynamic because people had no alternatives.
This is no longer the case. In 1998, Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, an internet publication, was the first person to break the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The story was one that Newsweek had, yet declined to publish. But Drudge broke the news, and started one of the most famous firestorms in recent American politics. Another example of this new hierarchy is the now famous "Rathergate" incident. In 2004, bloggers were able to expose that a memo that supposedly proved George W. Bush was AWOL as a national guardsman in the early 1970s was a complete fraud. Although CBS tried to push these documents upon the public to further their agenda, the collaborative efforts of many on the internet forced them to apologize and fire Old Media icon Dan Rather.
But as the great economist Thomas Sowell famously stated, "There are no solutions, only tradeoffs." In this case, the sheer number of news sources has led to a complete breakdown in standards and ethics, as well as a general inability to decide as a consumer what sections of the massive amount of information being disseminated is actually relevant and important. There is also a major tendency in modern times to gravitate only towards news sources that fit into one's own biases. Because there are now options that conform to every imaginable taste, falling into this bad habit has become extremely simple for all of us--myself at times included.
You might ask yourself (assuming you have made it this far without keeling over, of course) if there is a point to all of this. I would be remiss if I did not assure that there is. I do have three points that I feel would make us better citizens:
- Everyone is free and open about their point of view. We can argue about whether objectivity in journalism ever existed--but in any case, I now believe it to be an antiquated relic. We must move from a fantasy world where we rely upon the "objective" opinions of purportedly fair journalists, and instead admit that we are now consumers in a marketplace of competing biases.
- Sensationalism is shunned. This is a pipe dream, of course--enjoying the sensational over the substantive is undoubtedly human nature. But if all of us decided that we would shy away from this form of news reporting, it would fall by the wayside. News organizations should not always be searching for the next crisis.
- Historical context is always given. As it has been intelligently pointed out by some students in this class, the utter lack of historical perspective seen in reporting today is appalling. Everything always is happening for the first time, and everything is the biggest crisis EVER. It becomes very frustrating.
So there you have it! I hope you all have a wonderful time writing about Mass Media and Politics this semester, and I wish you all the best.
One final note: in the interest of disclosing my own bias, I actually decided to take the quick, down-and-dirty test at http://www.politicalcompass.org/. My results are below. Please post your results if you decide to take the test, or if you've done it in the past. It is hardly the most accurate indicator of political leanings, but it might give a general picture of what you actually think.
-Caleb Stone
