What I've Been Sayin'

[filkertom]

The press is the problem. The mass media are the enemy.

Comments

[archanglrobriel.livejournal.com]

*nod* I've suspected as much for years, but the question I'd like to see answered is why? Who's the man or men behind the Almighty Oz curtain who's deciding that the Conservative Republicans are Good and Progressives are Bad? Rupert Murdoch? Who? And how do we fix this?
I am getting a little tired of hearing all the analysis of what's going down without suggestion one about how we correct the problem. As it stands now, it doesn't sound like we're ever gonna get a fair shake from the media and unfortunately, they're right about what that means as far as the political power of the progressives goes.
So....now what do we do?

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

Why is easy. You're a newspaper owner, or a TV network owner. You are by definition rich, and you have got that way by outdoing your competitors in sheer soulless rapacity and ruthless opportunism. Which party is pledged to allow you to continue doing just what you've been doing, overlook any crimes you might happen to commit, bleed the poorer majority dry to put a few more pennies in your pocket, and ask nothing in return but that everything your paper prints, or your network broadcasts, is designed to brainwash and subjugate the electorate and keep them in power for ever?

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

Hence my thought that perhaps, with a concentrated effort, it whould be possible to get significant liberal investment in a major media chain (most of which are public companies). With enough shareholders holding enough shares, the composition of the board can be changed, and editorial policy as well.

I doubt such a monolithic effort can be launched and succeed in the community, though. It's much easier among those on the right, whose tendency is to follow where led, than among the left, which has a tendency to disintegrate over small things.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

You betcha.

The problem, as someone pointed out, is that while reporters may (and there's no real proof of it) have both a liberal and truthful bias, their bosses don't. Guess who gets to decide what runs?

Maybe we should begin a liberal media-investment campaign, to buy a competitor to Faux News.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

The audience has free will.

Placing the guilt on the media alone ignores the basic dynamic of the relatively free market in which the media operates. If the audience used it's brain cells, and honestly didn't care about Clinton's behavior, they'd have stopped watching, and the media would have seen the ratings shift to other matters. But that didn't happen.

Or, alternatively - if the American public are such sheep that we allow ourselves to be so thoroughly manipulated by the media, we deserve what we get.

[nomaddervish.livejournal.com]

I don't really think it was a question of whether people cared about Clinton's behaviour or not, but rather just "big story! shocking revelation! everyone (on TV) is talking about it!", so most people assumed that everyone (not just on TV) was talking about it and joined in until the next shiny object came along and "everyone" started talking about that instead.

And I guess that all falls under your "alternatively" clause... I think it probably is closer to being based in manipulation than what people are interested in.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Free will, maybe. Free choice... not so much.

[kengr]

Yes, the audience has free will. what they *don't* have (except for the *minority* that can find things on the web that don't follow the mainstream media) is a *real* choice.

The free market can't work when all the visible choices are the same amnd the alternatives are hard to find or otherwise not visible to the consumers.

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

That's only true up to a point. When you live someplace that only gets one newspaper, or gets a few newspapers all owned by the same people, what choice do you have? When Clear radio owns all but a few stations, and those few they don't follow Clear's lead in everything, then what? For the longest time we didn't have much choice, it was either reading their bias slant or being ignorant, not following the news at all.

Today we have choices, thanks to the internet, and it's showing. Newspaper subscriptions are down, TV and cable news ratings are lower and still dropping. More people are learning they get better news by surfing the web than they do watching the tube, and the liars are finding it increasingly hard to get away with their slander when readers can double check with a quick google search. It's not predominant, but the net is getting more popular as the main source of news, which is why the bad guys are now so hot on getting service providers to offer access for pay, so they can shut out competing voices just like they did by buying up all newspapers, tv and radio stations.

Minor Rant

[louisadkins.livejournal.com]

I just wish I knew of a way to correct this, but it seems like so many people are satisfied to be... sheep. They blindly follow, and ignore anything else you put in front of them, in regards of the matter. If you hand them hard evidence, it was "contrived by the overbearing liberal media." If you try and explain something, then you are accused of being "under the influence of the overbearing liberal media." I wounder, does this state of being qualify as actual lauindering of the brain? So many people have been convinced into the mindset that they should not and can not change their minds on these things.

[wormquartet.livejournal.com]

This is what I've been saying too. And it wasn't always this way. The media used to function unofficially as another branch of government which kept the others in check by informing the general public about what was really going on. The media showed us what was really happening in Vietnam - the immolations, the executions in the street - and this is arguably what ultimately stopped the war.

Nowadays, there are still media outlets that will take chances and report real news - but the major players (which are still viewed by the masses as the only "real" media) would rather play ball with the government and report the "easy" news. Part of it's probably the fear of being cut out if they report anything they're not supposed to, part of it's the fear of being branded too radical (which has become startlingly easy,) and part of it's probably networks' ties to corporations that make money from the defense industry.

Blaming the people rather than the mass media for believing what they're fed certainly has some merit, but it's useless because it offers no solutions. "You're ignorant for watching Fox News!" is no way to change somebody's mind, and "you deserve what you get" is a disgustingly defeatist attitude. The mass media was never perfect, but at one point, it WORKED. I suspect that what would conceivably work now would be building up some of the more reliable independent news sources. As Jello Biafra likes to say, "Don't hate the media, BECOME the media."

-=ShoEboX=-

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

Things have been particularly egregious in the past 20 years or so.

I do wonder what would happen if the Fairness Doctrine were brought back.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link--the old farts among us have known this, and had this sort of disgruntled awareness of it, but until you remind us with specifics, we don't realize how *much* of it has piled up over the years.
Unfortunately, I don't see it changing for the better in the major "legitimate" media unless there's some alternative choice and competition.
The net, TIVO-like delayed choices, cable, and various forms of computer games are already denting broadcast and newspaper numbers. I suspect it doesn't explain the whole sag in their numbers, though--I suspect the games have soaked up a lot of people's time and enerngy, just from comments I see on lj, but that's kind of specialized audience. I think people are just watching less major news and reading the paper less because it isn't giving anything like real news content, and they know it.
Some papers, regionally, like the Sacramento Bee, have retrenched by improving their local coverage and avoiding national controversies as much as possible--you can almost see them saying, "National scandals are not our focus, really they're not!!" This is still a huge improvement over the last ten years from the nadir of right-wing idiocy that it had deteriorated to under some very bad editor/ownershership.
I think major media haven't *really* begun to acknowledge the dent that computers are making. Haven't really begun, in their slow, giant manner, to turn to grapple with the insurrections. That's why I'm very concerned about efforts to control and subvert the net and isolate it into fragmented layers of paid market. The stuff people get on dial-up from AOL isn't, eventually, going to remotely resemble what content you can get on a DSL line or faster in future technologies, for instance.
The differences are already visible in broadcast networks vs. cable content just in the ads, soap operas, and news shows available. Anybody who says that doesn't matter, isn't aware of how much difference it's made to consciously promote condom use, family planning, and safe sex on the soap operas in Mexico. They have stats on the changes there. So the media people do know that it makes a difference what they promote.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

Max Headroom (the series) was not entertainment. It was prophecy.