ML/NJ
Posted on 09/16/2008 5:33:03 AM PDT by shortstop
Have you had enough of the evening news?
Has the condescending lecture of the network anchor gotten old? Are you sick and tired of "reporters" who couldn't tell the story straight if their lives depended on it?
I am.
I am about fed up with a news industry that fundamentally fails to do its job, and which every day strays further and further from its purpose. I'm tired of partisan lectures and propaganda dressed up like the news. I have had about all I can take of the self-important blowhards who seem to think their role is to rudely mock and shout down the people who we elect to office.
I'm just tired of their crap.
If there's one group of people I trust less and have more contempt for than politicians, it is reporters. We are a nation awash is news products which contain virtually nothing of subsance or worth. We have channels full of 24-hour crap, and hardly a reporter anywhere who can actually tell it to us straight.
The media has called itself to some position of importance and significance in our society, taking upon itself an air or power and superiority that is almost comical. They have almost made themselves a special class of people whose every notion or whim is "right" and any contrary view is "wrong." They are collectively the most arrogant and self-important group of people in our society today.
And yet they are terrible at their job.
They are so wrapped up in recirculating their own speculation that they seldom truly report. They are so bound up in the cliches of their trade that they become useless.
Here's an example. For two months the various news organizations, around the clock, talked about the potential Republican vice presidential candidates. Over and over reporters said that Mitt Romney was the most likely, with the Minnesota governor or some executive thrown in as well. There was a conventional wisdom and these blowhards repeated it and amplified it over and over and over. And yet it was completely baseless. Mitt Romney had never even met privately with John McCain. There had never even been an interview.
It seems like real reporting would have found that out.
Just as real reporting would have discovered -- while commentators opined on a Democrat "Dream Team" -- that Barack Obama had neither met with nor vetted Hillary Clinton.
The news business is very good at baseless commentary, but essentially incompetent at real reporting.
Ideally, the news business is nothing more than a pipe. Its job is to gather and transmit information. Like the water pipe that leads from the main to your kitchen sink. You turn on the tap and you should get, unadulterated, cool, clear water. You don't want to taste the pipe. You just want water.
The news should be like that. It should be free of the bias and opinion of the reporter, it should just be information. We all have a brain of our own, we don't need things interpreted for us, we don't need them spun. Just give us the information and we'll go from there.
Instead, virtually every newscast or significant newspaper story smells of the rotting carcass of agenda and bias. So-called experts and analysists are nothing more than shills selling snake oil. Paul Begala and Donna Brazile are not analysts, they are Democrat propagandists on the evening news. Karl Rove is their Republican counterpart. No one gives an honest opinion or legitimate insight. They merely spin and confuse, putting predictable political slants on everything they say.
And that is not journalism or anything like it.
We are not informed by the news, we are shaped by it. At least they hope we are. It's as if they think we are a herd of mindless sheep looking to their televised selves for the guidance we cannot provide for ourselves.
There is a palpable antagonistic air to so much of the media, whether in the news magazines or on the evening news or the weekend talk shows. It is clear they neither like nor trust the American people.
Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the Republican and Democratic national conventions. At each, reporters outnumbered delegates and officials more than 3-to-1. The vast majority of these media people were doing nothing but regurgitating what others had said, over and over and over. In almost every situation, the priorities and topics of the reporters were very different from those of the delegates. For all the news media, for all the coverage, all you got by watching TV at night was the opinions of the anchors and reporters, you don't learn a thing, truly, about the convention or the delegates.
Nothing is more emblematic of that than the frequent sight during convention coverage of various talking heads in the TV networks' skybox studios prattling on while in the distant, out-of-focus background some legitimate newsmaker was giving a speech. It's as if the media feels that its people and what they have to say is more important than the people who truly are the news and what they have to say.
So how do we take it down? How do we knock over this self-appointed royalty?
I have no idea.
But I do know that, in this day of technology, we don't need reporters as much as we used to. Speeches, press releases, official reports -- we can see them all directly ourselves via the Internet. If we have the time to do some reading ourselves, we don't need the news media.
More news programming with less true content, reporters with plenty of self-esteem and not a bit of competence, clear political agendas on the part of some reporters and networks. That's where it stands today. The media isn't the solution, the media has become the problem.
Charlie Gibson made that pretty clear the other night as he tried to trip up Sarah Palin.
How do we stop them?
Pretty simple. Just turn them off. Let them talk into dead air.
Like the stuff between their ears.
ML/NJ
The MSM employees are aware of what they are doing.
Sarah Palin was out fishing with her husband. Her hat blew off her head and into the cold water. “I’ll turn the boat around so we can get it.” Todd told her. “That won’t be necessary,” she responded. She calmly got out of the boat and walked across the water, picked up her hat and returned to the boat. Reporters on shore, to their amazement saw the entire incident. The next day the headlines read, “SARAH PALIN CAN’T SWIM!”
We have always known that the networks were lefties, because we knew that they were omitting important facts or not asking the right questions. However, that subtle approach was effective on the uneducated. They really thought that the leftist dribble they were getting fed was balanced coverage.
Reagan's presidency started to change all that. The leftist media started to lose it. By the time George H. Bush ran in 1988, they were starting to let go of pretense. In a panel discussion that cycle, several anchors actually agreed publicly that the election was “too important for objectivity” because the common man wasn't understanding the issues when delivered in a mock balanced format. That was the beginning of open partisan coverage by the networks.
The next election cycle they were openly partisan, and the entertainment side of the networks also kicked in. “Designing Women” had several “vote Clinton” episodes, among others.
The Clinton years gave them a bit of a breather and with GOP candidates like Dole they decided they could safely go back to just being biased. W. changed all that, and with each passing year they have become more and more desperate to turn public opinion.
I think they have now crossed the Rubicon. Only their sycophants still believe that their reporting is anything but partisan or more likely just approve of it. Proof appears in Gov. Palin. They have openly mocked her, defamed her, repeated the nastiest lies with glee, yet the public seemingly ignores them.
But WE MUST STOP REFERRING TO THEM AS BIASED. They are post-biased. They are now partisan and we need to continue to drive that message home.
After being stationed overseas for the past year, I can’t tell you how little my TV was used, unlike when I still lived state-side. I lurked on FR for quite a while until I left the country and now this is where I come for all my news/political needs. What do I use my TV for now? A place to display all the coins I’ve received.
I would have to watch the shows to know who their advertisers are.
I have no clue who sponsors what. I just do not watch the MSM nor much print media.
A national boycott of their advertisers would help to express our disgust.
I get all of my news from FR. Haven’t watched TV news (other than for major breaking stories, such as on 9/11) in a decade. I rarely even touch newspapers — any topic they deign to cover is already discussed, and discussed more intelligently, here.
Barackfest ‘08 has finally opened the eyes of millions as to just how biased the media is. The free-fall in newspaper sales is only part of the story. Network News is no longer an evening family staple. And the unprecedented attacks on Governor Palin, and particularly her children, is mobilizing many to put the heat on advertisers who underwrite it.
“HAS THE MEDIA GONE TOO FAR?”
Who cares if they have? Does any intelligent person still watch or listen to the leftmedia?
There are a lot of folks who want to boycott the leftmedia. I don’t see the point. A boycott implies that once behavior changes, you’ll be back. I won’t be. The leftmedia can do whatever it wants or say whatever it wants. I’ll still be tuning them out.
But now days, the "water" travels through reporters kidneys and bowels before it gets to the kitchen sink.
“has the media gone too far?”
too far? the media has been far-left obnoxious revolutionary for a long time. it has already fallen off the far left scale. can it go any further?
IMHO
“If you have ever been involved in a story that made the paper or the evening news, you know darn well that very little of what made print or got aired was factual and correct.”
True, and sad. Part of the problem, apart from he bias, is that the reporters often don’t really know much about what they are reporting on. A journalism degree, or a degree in English or literature doesn’t qualify one to write about climate change, or the economy, or stem cells etc.
But the bias is clearly the biggest problem. I remember years ago thinking how terrible it was that the citizens of the USSR had the propaganda of Pravda as their main news source. Ironically we are now not much better.
Exactly why I kept my TV tuned to CSPAN during the RNC.
Exactly why I kept my TV tuned to CSPAN during the RNC.
Thats the money quote..
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