May 24, 2002
I don’t know if it’s a function of becoming older, or whether I’m really noticing things for the first time which have been there all along. Today, I’m thinking about the bias that permeates our news coverage. In the Golden age of news, reporters like Edward Murrow were impartial, almost dispassionate as they researched and told the news. As what I call the Tabloid age began, many news outlets saw significant consumer drain as people were enticed to the flashy, opinionated, and frequently exploitive forms of journalism. The bottom line is that somewhere along the line, news had stopped being about the news and had become a business. A business needs to make money and follow trends, so they did. USA Today struck first with color papers and “soft” news pieces. Today even the Wall Street Journal has some sections printed in color and a style section; in the Wall Street Journal for God’s sake!
It’s not just the packaging that changed, either. The Media seem to go out of their way to manufacture stories. Recently, I’ve noticed that the media have been reporting that the President is making poor foreign policy decisions and that it is affecting his approval rating. In truth, the President’s numbers are the same as they have been for months. To me, this sounds to me as if the media are drumming this story over and over again in an attempt to have a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then later, they can look back and tell everyone how they broke this story months ahead of everyone else. It’s wrong. And before you start saying that I’m defending our current Republican president, let me tell you that I think that this has happened to every modern president in one form or another, Democrat or Republican. To the media, it’s just business.
Choose a tragedy; weather, murder, the media will sensationalize in the name of Journalism. Our TV news in DC is really guilty of this. We frequently joke that their bumper (the tease of news they show during Prime Time) should be “Panic Now, more at 11.” No occurrence is sacred to these people. Their reporters frequently show up at the homes of murder victims to interview family members, or they stake out suspect’s houses and try to interrogate anyone who goes in or out. Recently, the body of a missing intern was found after a year of searching. After about two hours, the news was reporting that “sources” indicated that she had a fractured skull. THEY JUST FOUND THE BODY – this isn’t CSI people; the police investigators need time to determine what actually happened. Sure, she might have had a fractured skull, but they can’t determine what the cause was; it could have been animals after the fact. This is just reporting for the sake of having a “scoop.”
Sometimes there are more nebulous goals at work in reporting. The Washington Post, which I enjoy reading, would like to see the development of what is currently green space around a local Metro stop. They haven’t actually come out and said as much, but their coverage of the debate between the two sides has characterized those against development as being anti-jobs and almost hippie-esque in their refusal to give up a park for an upscale townhouse development. The paper’s position (I assume) is that if they were to overtly come out for the development, it would diminish their status as an impartial reporter. However, they don’t seem to have any problem with trying to influence the outcome with biased reporting. It’s not just the Post that does this, every major paper in the US has it’s own tilt on events and will try to use it’s influence subtly, if possible.
We have lost sight of the basic fact that the idea for news is to inform. Reality TV, talk shows, and others have blurred the lines between news and entertainment. We are more interested in the personality of our TV anchors than with the quality of the news that they deliver. Is it too late to turn back, to return to a time where news was reported for the sake of informing the public? Was there ever really a time like that
