Monday, May 7, 2018

How media slants stories





Monday, May 7, 2018


If I had a nickel for every time I heard a reporter, or an editor say over the last two years “We got to get ride of this guy in the White House,” I could fund my own presidential campaign.
Journalists are not unbiased – worse, they don’t want to be.
Our profession – which really isn’t a profession because unlike being an attorney there is nor bar we must pass or ethics board to judge us if we violate our own rules – is about power, not information, and our goal is to sway people to a preconceived point of view, not to give people facts and let them make up their own minds.
Some news businesses are worse than others – such as The Washington Post, the Hill, Politico, the Washington Examiner, the LA Times – all of which have a single mindset about destroying the current president. Most of the reporting is rehashed crap from The Washington Post – which is trying to prove it’s still a powerful player inside the beltway and is bringing down the craft of journalism in the process.
As I have pointed out before, local media tends to be better than national media, when it sticks to reporting on local issues – since they get their information directly from the source. But even they can sometimes run afoul of journalistic integrity.
Most media hides behind the illusion of “being fair,” believing that if they give their victim a chance to respond they’ve done enough to qualify as being objective.
Many reporters and editors envision themselves as “upper west side liberals,” and subscribed to all the accepted media such as The New Yorker and Atlantic and so automatically believe the propaganda those publications spew and thus believe all Christians are bigots and poor whites are trash.
Of course, only a handful of media people realize they are biased, assuming their somehow have the right take on the world, even though many get their information on a national level second hand, from skewed sources they would never accept if they were reporting locally.
We all know that any information that comes from a single source should be questioned, yet local media when dealing with national issues frequently accepts the diatribes of the Washington Post as gospel. Even the LA. Times, the New York Times, and Politico repeat the posts’ abusive reporting unquestionably.
Most reporters view the world through liberal shaded class, seeing what they want to see, hearing what they need to hear in order to support this skewed world view.
The myth of objective reporting is so pervasive, even reporters and editors believe it.
They subscribe to the idea that a story is objective if they somehow present “both sides” in an issue, counting words so that neither argument has priority (although the NYT gave this up completely when covering Trump.)
But this is an illusion, and mostly acts as cover for a media outlet when it is attacked as being unfair. Media can attack as much as they want as long as they get a response.
If someone doesn’t respond or refused to comment, they become guilty by default.
This kind of reporting often leads to “us vs. them” kind of journalism, good guys vs. bad, supporters of an issue vs. those who oppose it, when in reality issues are often much more complex, perhaps too complex for media to handle since our bread and butter is about conflict, not resolution.
Media tends to strip issues down to extremes, seeking out the most extreme groups – such as seeking out neo-Nazis to represent issues on the political right rather than more moderate republicans.
So, when we do a story about abortion, we seek out women libers and extreme pro-life, when many women fall in-between the two extremes.
This kind of reporting automatically leads to sensationalism, a tabloid journalism that deliberately stirs up people’s emotions rather than trying to find common ground.
This slams the door on possible new solutions.
News reporters deal with stereotypes, exaggerated examples to paint characters that are hardly realistic, such as calling all Christians anti-abortion, and all feminists dikes. In this view, all GOP seem like Nazis, and all Democrats, saviors.
While reporters love to tell you how someone else is prejudice, many reporters, editors, publishers constantly pre-judge subjects in creating thumbnail sketches of them in order to simplify them for their stories.
Journalists, editors and reporters get to pick who the good guys are, and who they want the public to perceive as bad – even when sometimes both sides exhibit deplorable behavior.
Reporters reflect the culture they are raised in, so that the change from street-wise reporting of the past to college trained, changes the way they approach stories – especially because most colleges have an extreme liberal bent.
Although this may not seem obvious, media tends to support the status quo – which is why it tended to support Clinton over Sanders, and later Clinton over Trump – because both Sanders and Trump represented a populist and perhaps less controllable element in modern politics.
This was why the alternative press of the past and even of today gets dismissed because it unlike major media challenges accepted doctrine.
Mainstream media changes slowly and only when mainstream society does – which is why it took media so long to jump on the anti-Vietnam war wagon or accept gay marriage.
One critic of my blog complained that I cannot argue with “facts,” about Trump when it is clear that she does not have access to facts.
Journalists are consumed with collecting facts which legitimizes their pre-conceived point of view and justifies their bias.
The more facts you put into a story, the more charts you show, the more polls you take, the less likely people will perceive your story as fake.
An NTY article on crime involving immigrants was just such an example, filled with charts and official quotes that gave it legitimacy, since it wanted to show how most immigrants do not engage in crime. But this wasn’t the argument. It is the amount of crime associated with illegal immigration.
Journalists love official sources, and so believe that if they stuff a story full of these, no one can possibly believe they are biased or have skewed the facts.
But many of the stories that we perceive as factual come on the heals of staged events such as the Democratic sponsored women’s march or the thinly disguised Democratic anti-gun walkout of school kids.
Another way of skewing a story is to dramatize it, using fictional techniques to sway an audience to a particular point of view. We get this a lot in magazines such as Newsweek and The New Yorker, and the New York Times magazine.
This works well in helping to support the misconception of good and bad guys, creating twists and turns in the plot that forces the audience to sympathize with the people we have selected as our good guys.
Journalists are constantly playing off people’s emotions, sensationalizing news so that people feel they have more at stake than they actually do.
We also break down news into episodes – what next – much the way contemporary TV crafts stories so that we have to keep following them to get to some eventual sense of resolution. This is what media does to the Russian conspiracy, the porn actress story, and such – each fully designed to create a continuing impression of impropriety largely created in media’s lurid imagination.
All this gives the audience the illusion that they actually understand what is going on, but it mostly media created myth, designed to manipulate them for a particular purpose.
Media creates myths using violence, conflict, disaster or scandal. This is the stuff we are best at and gets the most hits on a news website.
The more media stirs up emotions, the more likely you are being manipulated.
And you can tell what a news organization is selling right from the headline. This is the thesis statement for the story. The more lurid, profane and manipulative the better. Most people don’t read passed the headlines. In fact, you don’t have to. The headline says it all. And if it’s nasty or negative, that is the point of the whole story.











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