Saturday, December 15, 2018
When a newspaper tells you, it's giving you all the news that's fit to
print it, shouldn't give you fits to actually read it.
While I love purple prose – or any other color -- the fact is it has no
business being in a black-and-white publication that is supposed to be fair and
objective.
Media objectivity has always been a myth.
But until recently with added ability to access information on our own
without the benefit of media spin, we can better gauge what is fact and what is
fiction.
The sad part, however, is that many who accept news as objective do not
want to grow up, and believe they are getting free and unbiased reports in much
the same way they believed a very fat Santa Claus was able to squeeze down a
very skinny chimney with a bag full of uncrushed presents.
Media manages it somehow, only the presents they leave under your Christmas
tree are more like time bombs than gifts from a well-meaning Santa, intended to
– at best – cloud your judgment and at worst, brainwashing you into believing
something that is largely myth.
Many people prefer the myth, and media such as The Washington Post sell
news like Macy’s sells holiday shirts, giving these people what they want to
hear, rather than what is real.
When the New York Times tells you, it’s giving you all the news that
fits, it means fits its agenda and the target audience’s, which is usually very
liberal, allowing people to be comforted what they already believe.
The fastest news is really a commodity like ketchup and you tend to
look for the flavor you like best. It is also like a Christmas present in that
you've already sat on Santa's lap and get what you ask unless you happen to be
a Trump supporter and then you get cold usually well-ignited in advance so that
you burn your fingers when you reach into the stocking to find out just what
you already knew you would get from a questionable media.
Unfortunately, there are people especially young people who still
believe in the myth of media as an objective source of information, something
by which they can evaluate public policy and make clear unbiased decisions
about who should serve in office and who should not.
It is a sad day when these people especially if they're relatively
bright wake up and mommy tells them just like then she did when she had to tell
him there was no Santa Claus media is corrupt.
I mean you have to look at all those tearful faces and understand they
are now looking at themselves and wondering what could be next maybe there is
no tooth fairy and maybe even no Easter rabbit.
While some parents will warn
kids against myths such as Santa Claus to spare them at a young age against the
pain of discovery later, nobody warns them about newspapers and other media and
the myth of an objective press.
So most of us have to live with the shock of waking up one day and as
with discovering that Santa Claus is really Dad dressed up in a Santa Claus
suit, we wake up and find that media like the Washington Post is really some Democratic
clown dressed up as a legitimate news organization.
This is the kind of shocked that even years of therapy can't make you
recover from because once this myth has curled its hooks into your consciousness
you can't get it out of your head again and will always keep assuming that the
myth is real.
We really clearly need to redesign our journalism schools to dispel the
myth of a free and objective press so as to prevent people from being duped
into this psychological trauma when they find out the truth later.
But this of course presents us with a massive problem since journalism
schools and journalism professors and journalism courses are designed to spread
the myth not dispel it and so it keeps becoming it's self-perpetuating Santa
Claus syndrome.
It might be more effective to establish anti media courses that every
student must be required to take in order to be aware of how they will be
manipulated when they go out into the real world and find out that there is no
Santa Claus after all only dirty old men and women dressed up in journalist’s
clothing who are trying not to deliver presents but to steal your soul.