Posted on 08/23/2002 8:10:42 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
I finally read veteran CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg's interesting little book, "Bias," which discusses some of the ways in which the media, specifically network news, distort the news to promote or at least reflect a liberal political agenda.
Goldberg's book is certainly thought provoking but it is hardly a ground-breaking revelation; every thinking American who owns a TV set knows how the big three TV networks in particular slant the news towards a liberal or left-wing agenda.
The problem is not the media covering the news from any particular ideological, political or religious vantage point, but the media distorting the news they're supposed to be reporting upon objectively. This is particularly disturbing because the media outlets that the vast majority of Americans rely upon for news are giving their viewers and readers a distorted view of the world.
How is a democratic society like ours supposed to survive and succeed in an increasingly complex world when a majority of its people hold a distorted view of that world?
When people start basing decisions upon such distorted views, real people in the real world can and will get hurt.
Take two issues Goldberg discusses in his book, AIDS and homelessness. Now AIDS and homelessness are certainly real problems that affect real people and cause a great deal of needless suffering, but the media may have made these problems worse by reporting on them in a distorted and misleading way.
In the case of AIDS, the media in the name of sensationalism and ideology has harped on the problem of "heterosexual AIDS." That is the transmission of AIDS via heterosexual sex something that is only happening when women contract AIDS from men who engage in sex with other men or intravenous drug use.
Rather than trying to expose the danger to which the homosexual and bisexual lifestyles put men and their sex partners in, the media has ranted on and on about condom use and safe sex. Nor have any of the numerous stories about programs to encourage gay teenagers to come out and embrace the homosexual life mentioned the possibility that such efforts may be putting the teens in danger of getting AIDS or encouraging the spread of AIDS to teenagers.
The media's reason for this distortion is two-fold: first, because homosexuality, bisexuality, drug use and the possibility that some middle-class, white Americans may be engaging in them are ugly facts of life that might turn off viewers; second, because the media doesn't want to alienate the powerful gay lobby and its political supporters with suggestions that the gay lifestyle might be unhealthy or a threat to society. Nor for that matter does the media pay any real attention to the real AIDS crisis in places like Asia and Africa where millions of the world's poorest people are in danger of dying from AIDS.
The media's treatment of the so-called homeless problem has been even worse and more distorted than its treatment of homelessness. The media portrayed the homeless as white middle class people who were simply down on the luck when the majority of homeless people are and were drug addicts, alcoholics and the mentally ill.
This was done largely because the media wanted to use the homeless issue to make Republicans, particularly Ronald Reagan, look bad and second, because any close look at the homeless problem would reveal its true causes to be a number of failed liberal policies.
First; the aggressive protection of the rights of the less unfortunate often involved the release of thousands of mental patients and mentally retarded people from state institutions.
That had been something that was egged on by sensational TV and newspaper stories about the horrendous conditions in such places and by budget-cutting conservatives. These people had nowhere else to go.
Sadly enough, Geraldo Rivera (one of whose early big stories was about the horrible conditions in a New York State mental hospital) and the other media types didn't draw the obvious conclusion that no matter how bad the state homes and hospitals were, they were far better than the streets of Manhattan. Or the attempts to legalize begging which gives the homeless a source of money to buy drugs and booze to feed the habits that keep them on the streets with.
Second; various big government urban renewal problems, which involved the demolition of large areas of mostly downtown areas of our cities. The areas demolished in urban renewal often included the flophouses, cheap hotels and other low rent places where the lowest of the lower classes used to live.
When these places were bulldozed often only to provide big construction projects to generate contracts for politically connected businessmen the poor had no place to go but to the streets.
The sad thing about the media's reporting on these two issues was that the American people opened their big hearts and responded with kindness, compassion and charity.
Millions of Americans collected food, money and clothing for the homeless, virtually every church established a homeless shelter and massive efforts to educate people about the danger of AIDS were launched.
Unfortunately, these efforts were often wasted, the homeless shelters didn't provide the homeless with the drug treatment and mental health care they needed. AIDS education has done little or nothing to discourage the risky behaviors that really put people in danger of contracting AIDS.
This is the real danger of the distortion of news stories by any group for any reason, no matter how well intentioned. It makes people waste their time, money and effort on futile efforts to solve false problems while real crises get worse.
The solution then is not the creation of alternative or conservative media outlets or the promotion of conservative journalists. If the new journalists act just like the old ones, we'll just see the same distortion of news stories for different reasons. No, the solution is to promote objective journalism and journalists who are dedicated to the truth rather than
ideology.
(Daniel G. Jennings is a freelance writer and journalist who lives and works in Denver, Colo. He has worked as a reporter and editor for daily and weekly newspapers in five states.)
Free Congress Foundation
Sun Rising in the East...
Its kind of like addressing the case of a rooftop sniper with a public anouncemet "Attention! There is a sniper in the neighborood! The public is advised to wear bullet proof clothing."
I would like a list of how many limousine liberals have actually taken home a homeless person and fed him, cleaned him up, and gave him a steady job, in which to better himself.But, but...but didn't Hillary, approach a homeless man in Wisconsin or NY(?), October 2000 and ask for his vote or vote for the local Democrat limousine liberals. And when he proceeded to hit her up for some money/smokes, she backed towards her limousine and told him of the importance of his vote...lol.
"Yer burnin' muh eyes, b*tch!"
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