Is the media still doing its job?

I've lived long enough to see many changes in the world.
When I ws a kid, the news was on ABC, NBC and CBS. I remember it being on for a half hour at 6 and 11. At 11:30, it was time for Johnny Carson.
We didn't hear much about cats in trees or water main breaks fifty miles away. Weather and sports took only a few minutes of the half hour and provided basic information like the scores of last night's game or whether we could expect frost tonight.
We didn't need more than one anchor and he didn't need an easy chair or a fancy set.
It was barebones news, just to keep us informed.
Fastforward to today with 24/7 news, weather and sports. But is it any better?
Now they tell me how to dress for the day. They solve the problems on-air of little old ladies who can't get the phone company to fix their bills. They tell me where to go to get good calzone. They tell me of the plight of a suburban school team that needs new uniforms. They tell me about car repair scams. But, they don't tell me the news.

I remember newspapers telling us more details about the world and events. I remember believing what I read and trusting those who wrote it. I barely remember, but our metro area had three daily papers. That became two papers, one which had better comics and one which had better news.
In the last ten years, they have merged and share editions on weekends and holidays. One still has better comics, but now I subscribe to my favorites by daily email because the paper tells me very little. The only reason I get a paper on the weekend is for the coupon sections. How sad that that is the best I can say for my local newspaper!

So, my question to you is:
Is the media/press still doing its job? Reporting the news?
Does it provide fair and balanced information? Did it ever?
Do you think the media now tells us what they what us to know versus what we need to hear?
Is the media a player in controlling citizens?

Ed.for spelling.



[edit on 5-2-2005 by DontTreadOnMe]

Was the media ever doing it's job as far as you or I were lead to believe? I have no doubt that it is a control mechanizm now. I can only wonder it if has always been.

I tend to think it may always have been telling us what we were supposed to hear.

I think the local news is the bigger change. That has gone from new, sports and weather to a dumbing down where we need to be told to turn off the stove before we go to bed and told to wear a coat tomorrow. Before we stopped watching local news, I began to feel they were trying to insinuate behavior into my life.

DontTreadOnMe:

Is the media/press still doing its job?

No.

Reporting the news?

It's reporting the news, only its individual 'brand' and 'style'.

Does it provide fair and balanced information?

No.

Did it ever?

Not really. The difference is that since the early years of the 1900s, reporting the news came with a slant of bias, and it has progressively grown more bias'd.

Do you think the media now tells us what they what us to know versus what we need to hear?

Both.

Is the media a player in controlling citizens?

Of course.

Simple, straightforward reporting of "just the facts" will do. Let the readers be the ones to interpret and form their own opinions and bias. We don't need to read smatterings of their 'facts' mixed with their 'brand' and 'style' of opinionated bias.



seekerof

Originally posted by Seekerof

Simple, straightforward reporting of "just the facts" will do. Let the readers be the ones to interpret and form their own opinions and bias. We don't need to read smatterings of their 'facts' mixed with their 'brand' and 'style' of opinionated bias.

seekerof

I'm going to point this out; "their" brand and style......a misleading statement, however unassuming the intention.

The media is owned by a handful of entities. These entities represent a smattering of the prevalent viewpoints available. "Their" viewpoint, IMO, is to perpetuate this confliction. The facts are facts........but with very little and very subtle changes..........The "facts" become " facts .

Very little needs to be changed in the expression of detail, but the amount of words existing in the english language(the one I know and have studied)
are ultimately a specification of a specification. We have gotten so literal that a lack of education in an of itself can infer base emotions from any given text. Imagine not understanding technical terms and having stock in the outcome of the situation.

The media is used and abused. The internet is a great invention if only for the reason that we can communicate are impressions in an "unassumed environment," though the impersonal nature will ultimately result in the confusion of ideals.

I challenge:..................To hear an interpretation of current events is to experience the chemical reaction induced unto your personage. However, the experience of your reaction is paramount, regardless of the subtlety, reflect on the quantification you can impose. Can you verify the "facts"? Determine objectivity. At the very least, can you construct an opposing arguement? Can you even find an arguement? Such is the point of the exercise; to look at possiblities.

If there are that many variables, then how could the media NOT be manipulated?

I think the US Govt should take over a channel, like channel 3 on regular non cable TV and call it like "Central News Agency" and just report on straight facts. It could be divided by worldwide news, and national news.

This way I dont get loads of boring bull# when I turn on foxnews or cnn. Or stupid commercials or stupid political arguments from somebody you never heard about and could care less what they think.

And at least if the Central news Agency screws up or reports something bias or as propaganda we can have more of a grudge and cause to weed out the bull# that the news is.

I think newspapers are tons better then TV but I would rather it have an official govt. seal on it.

There are media and media.

Each publishing effort, whatever the medium, has its own objectives - commercial, informational, propaganda, whatever.

One of the issues is (perhaps) that a considerably greater proportion of a population bombarded daily with 100s of 1000s of messages is by conditioning "dumber" than before and less able to form critical judgments about what the media they view are presenting to them.


[edit on 6-2-2005 by MaskedAvatar]

Do a net search for "Operation Mockingbird" then look into media ownership. I think there are some good threads arouns ATS on that last point.

No. Real "mainstream" journalism is no more.

.

Whether or not the media is doing its job depends on what you interpret that job to be.

With three well known journalists recently busted for taking [taxpayer funded] pay from the Whitehouse [Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher, and Mike McManus] to present White House propoganda as "news," not to mention the White House's pet reporter Jeff Gannon, aka Jame Guckert, being exposed as a non-journalist working for a non-media organization under an assumed name, it is pretty clear these people were doing their jobs -- but thier jobs were, clearly, to distribute propoganda under the guise of news while on the White House payroll, not to report news or actually operate as journalists outside of their [undeserved] reputations as journalists.

So sure. The media is doing its job. Is that job to report news and/or facts?

No. Not when journalists are on the White House payroll.

Information on the three journalists acting as White House spokespersons sans making the fact they were, in every legal sense of the term, public spokespersons for the Whitehouse on the Whitehouse payroll without disclosing that fact, as well as info on the Gannon/Guckert scandal are available on Media Matters for America at mediamatters.org...

There is also a good deal of talk about the Gannon/Guckert sitch on Daily Kos at dailykos.com... and --

Surprisingly, there is actually a decent article on all of the above on the CNN website at www.cnn.com...

Sure. The media is doing its job. The question is, What is that job and who is the media working for? These days, the answer is often yes, the media is doing a bang up job, working for the White House, to promote the White House.

Great site for investigating the shocking media biases in American TV (on both sides of the spectrum).

www.fair.org

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

Problem is, there are those who refuse to believe things that are right in front of them. I am willing to bet there wil be ATSers who start squawking that FAIR.org is totally biased against the right.

They might be right to an extent, but that doesn't mean that they are liars, but I'm waiting for those naysayers.

People will essentially believe what they feel they need to believe, I suppose.

j

My neighbor had a good definition of "liberal news" that we discussed the other night. It is that "liberal" reporting is such because it presents information, then it asks questions, and leaves it up to the reader to answer them, rather than answering them for us.

I suggest anyone interested look up a documentary called "the myth of the liberal media" . Has some great perspectives on the matter, some good interjections by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman as well.

Its hard to find so I'll try to give a brief rundown of the film.

They take a look at the structure of the entire idustry, the arrangements of the media companies. The overall assertion of conservatives, that the "media is 'liberal' " is based on some almost hilarious statistics. (They bring together information on how journalists vote, and they found that they vote democratically, hence they are "liberal". Then they try to sell us the idea that the journalists get to decide what gets printed.)

"...its like saying the workers on floor of a car factory get to design the cars they make"

They go further to talk about the "filters" of news, that the news has many filters, that can (ownership , advertising , sources , flak) For example, advertising is 100% OF REVENUE for television --talk about control! Then look at this frightening list of who owns who..

cbs - owned by westing house (publisher / arms manufacturer)
nbc -owned by general electric (no intro needed there)
abc - owned by disney (little more harmless but no less creepy)

There was also segments on anti-communism in the media, support of free market capitalism, but those^^^ were the main points that I think are most important for people to know, but I definitely advise you guys to search the file sharing networks for this one, a good watch indeed.

Does anyone know of any other connections between the media industry and those industries profiting from the message that they portray? That would be great to assemble a list of all the networks, who owns them, and what other industries those owners have their fingers dipped into. Research project perhaps?



[edit on 11-4-2005 by benign]

[edit on 11-4-2005 by benign]

darn annoying edits:

I'm not sure if those ownership connections are still correct, as this video is a little dated.

Does G.E. have any connection to AOL Time Warner? (msnbc)...

cmon people lets get on this. *kicks self*