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.