» Why the right-wing corporate media is good for you (and for America) ... again!
16 September 2006 - 10:27am
Why the right-wing corporate media is good for you (and for America) ... again!
By media girl
You know the mainstream media doesn't tell you everything it knows. That's obvious. Some of the reasons why are obvious, too: limited space in newspapers, limited time on news programs, limited resources of news departments, limited number of reporters.... Some things are bound to slip through the cracks.
Like the things back then.
But you have to wonder if those reasons are sufficient for the utter lack of substantive coverage of these following stories.
Top 25 Censored news stories of 2007
- Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
- Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
- Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
- Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US
- High-Tech Genocide in Congo
- Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy
- US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq
- Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act
- The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
- Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians
- Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed
- Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines
- New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup
- Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US
- Chemical Industry is EPA's Primary Research Partner
- Ecuador and Mexico Defy US on International Criminal Court
- Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda
- Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story
- Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever
- Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem
- Gold Mining Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers
- $Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed
- US Oil Targets Kyoto in Europe
- Cheney's Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year
- US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region
What this amounts to is a list of 25 stories that alternative media will have to pick up. Come on, bloggers, pick one and write about it. Because the New York Times won't write about it. And Fox News won't talk about it.
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media girl also blogs at other places.
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» Why the right-wing corporate media is good for you (and for America) ... again!
Comments
what happened to Cyrus Kar? Or is that too old?
Another casualty of war?
"[L]ack of substantive coverage" is not the same as censorship. There are actually a lot of topics that nearly nobody is interested in reading about, much less writing about.
Lots of blogs are recirculating this "list of censored topics," but it's all just the same list. That doesn't count as writing about the topics. I'd say the bloggers find the topics just as boring as most people, so the list is all they care to deal with.
The list is "all just the same list" because it's from the same source.
The question is why you believe that news should be only what people want to hear, rather than what is really happening (which presumably is what people should hear)?
Mediagirl,
People in the business of selling newspapers, etc. can only sell what people want to buy. If newspapers were completely cost-free for everyone involved, people still wouldn't behave differently; they would simply not bother to read newspapers that didn't publish what they want to read.
There's no way to fix this without establishing a Ministry of Truth and enforcing a compulsory reading program.
News is news. You can think news stories are just like movies or paperback novels, but it's a different business altogether, and while newspapers etc. may add some fluff stuff, they don't avoid stories for being too controversial or exposing too big of a story because they think people won't read it.
You have to wonder why would they ditch a story that would raise alarm bells in people? Those kinds of stories sell big time.
Funny you mention a "Ministry of Truth," because that's what we have now: enforcers who threaten publications with lawsuits and editors/reporters with career implications for reporting too much. Inconvenient truths for elected officials lead to inconvenient consequences for those who report them. For the rest, chalk it up in part to multinational corporate ownership of media, and the big business of
buying influence and legislationlobbying Congress and the White House.I've been in the print media industry for a decade now, as an editor. I've focused, the entire time, on presenting the news I felt readers would most be interested in reading. I've never been threatened by a lawsuit, probably because I insisted on rigorous fact checking and therefore didn't libel anyone.
Consistently, the biggest problem in the normal course of business is people who try to get spin, or even outright lies, published. These are usually people who consider the news "advertising by other means" and are actually just trying to sell a product or service by, for instance, creating a scare over a competitor's product or service.
I've pissed off more than a few industrial moguls in my time with my approach, and some of them have canceled their subscriptions, but my bread and butter is the majority of subscribers who apparently are, according to our renewal rate, getting what they want to read.
If there were some pervasive pattern of corporate influence, I would have noticed by now. The only pattern of influence I see is the interests of subscribers.
Interests of subscribers, or Very Important Sources? (What would a DC media outlet do if they got shut out of all White House staff contact?)
Then there's the "objectivity" of journalism, which only rarely means fact-checking. All too often, it just means giving opposing lies equal time.
Yes, that's what we get today from the news media. Fair and balanced, but not true.
If I only wrote for sources, there wouldn't be enough subscribers to cover my salary. And the revenue from advertising is secondary to subscribers. In other words, the more subscribers, the more money advertisers will pay per square inch. I've never had an advertiser threaten to pull advertising because of editorial content, but if they did, I'd just say, fine, I'll sell the ad space to someone else. And that's just common sense. You keep up your subscriber base first and foremost. You monetize eyeballs, and the more eyeballs, the more money.
...is that the people don't want the news. We don't want know what's really going on. Even from our so-called "hard news" sources?
That's a pretty sad and cynical take on the public, and the role of the news industry -- all the more so if true.
...sort of. People *want* the news to the extent that it makes them feel "plugged in" to the rest of what people feel "plugged into." Essentially, the news sells culture and fashion. They find it comforting to hear that they heard the same things other people heard. I always try to work in some "trivia," though, so that readers can say they got an extra informative tidbit from me, or better yet, a slap in the face for the proletarian pablum. But yeah, you do news for a while, you get way cynical peddling public truths.
...and how much of that is mis-reading the public?
It's not all that uncommon for businesses to underestimate or misread their market. We see how local news has been peddling fear for at least 25 years. Sure, it gets people's attention. But is that what they want? Or are these news shows making money off of shouting fire in a crowded theatre?
Will we see the same kind of behavior when news is more competitive? When people view television on demand, instead of just turning on the set and watching whatever is on? When your choices of newspapers are more than just what the major conglomerates are peddling in your area?
Are online news consumers as lazy about their consumption as your average couch potato or bleary-eyed sports pages reader?
Misreading the public, i.e., one's subscriber base, is the deadliest mistake. Local and national news has been peddling fear for two reasons. The first reason is that journalists often don't recognize that the latest fear campaign is a covert marketing ploy and unwittingly consider it straight news. The second reason plays off the first; the public likes scary news. Just like people come to gawk at crime scenes and other tragedies. Skeptics and cynics like to get their news from a variety of sources, and justifiably refuse to rely on a single source. But most of them, if there's competition, simply shop for their favorite source and stick with it. Sort of like picking your favorite sports team.