Fairly Unbalanced: The State of the Modern Mainstream News Media

The internet, if it can survive as a free and neutral venue for the exchange of ideas, will be the salvation of us all.  Imagine a time before the web, when the only sources of information were newspapers, radio newscasts, and more recently network news.  Now we can have direct reports from bloggers who were on the scene, or instantaneously discuss the discrepancies between different networks’ coverage of an event with people all over the world.  We can access news reports from foreign news agencies such as the BBC, and get an outsider’s prospective on American politics and news events.  Unfortunately all this progress has not worked to reduce bias, inaccuracy, and sensationalism on the part of American cable news, but has rather worked to increase it.  To maintain their dwindling audiences, the networks have had to cater to their ideological bases and play up controversies and scandals to grab ratings, rather than striving for objectivity and rational discourse.   I would like to take some time to expose the bias, journalistic laziness, and irresponsibility of two major news networks.

First, permit me to turn my wrath on Fox News.  I will admit that they are just as unprofessional, sensationalistic, and biased as any other large news company, but this story just grates me.  You can find it online at:

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/05/07/wikipedia-purges-porn/

The long and the short of it is that Fox did a story where they discovered-shock and horror!-that there were sexually-explicit images and images depicting the naked human form on Wikipedia pages concerned with sexually-explicit topics and human anatomy.  Allow me to dissect some of that article:

“These images were and in some cases still are easily accessible to anyone, including school children, many of whom receive unfiltered access to Wiki projects in schools across the country.”

Is that not the idea behind the internet, Ms. Winters, to enable people to have access to information at any time?  And is it not the responsibility of the parent and when the child is in its care, their school, to prevent their child from being exposed to whatever they may feel is “inappropriate”?  Some parents might have no qualms about their children learning about sex and sexuality, and others may; likewise some parents might be opposed to their children learning about the beliefs or practices of other religious faiths they may consider to be “evil” or “occult”, or to learn about potentially-disturbing things such as the Holocaust or harlequin ichthyosis, but the duty is theirs to prevent their children from such exposure.  Whenever a parent or group of parents seeks to restrict the legal and constitutionally-protected behavior of adults to preserve their child’s “innocence”, they are seeking control.  Should we tell Catholics to hide from the light of day because some extremist Evangelicals consider them evil and don’t want their kids exposed to them, or should the parent, if they’re so inclined, take it upon his or herself to protect and educate their offspring as they see fit, to actually “parent” their child.

“A child doing homework research on the educational website could easily stumble upon pornographic photos — including close-ups of genitalia and people having sex and masturbating.”

First off, Fox and Fox viewers, I’m sorry to say it, but people have sex and masturbate.  Secondly, I take issue with the adjective “pornographic”.  Granted, as a member of this internet-savvy generation I know that people often do post actual pornography on Wikipedia for the purpose of trolling, but not all images or photographs of a naked human, or even of one or more persons engaged in a sexual act, are “pornographic”.  It all depends on the intent of the artist(s) and the context.  A page from the Karma Sutra is a historical and cultural document, not pornography.  Sandro Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” and Michelangelo’s “David” both feature full-frontal nudity-female and male, respectively-but are considered great works of art, not hardcore smut.  Likewise, as anyone who’s spent long enough online can tell you, some people can get a thrill out of anything, and nothing, no matter how non-erotic it might have originally been intended to be, can become some freak’s fetish.

The internet is not a babysitter!  It’s no more a place for a child to be alone than New York City!  It’s like leaving your kid off at a Bar in Brooklyn!

I hate lazy parents, and if there is a type of person I could possibly hate even more than lazy parents its lazy parents who expect everyone else to do the job that they won’t.  Sorry folks, but the web is a place for grownups.  Monitor your kids online and get some sort of parental control setup on your computer or from your web provider, but don’t expect adults to adjust their behavior just because you can’t keep junior from stumbling across boobies online.

Now, to MSNBC:

http://radioequalizer.blogspot.com/2010/05/msnbcs-brewer-im-sorry-terror-suspect.html

Anchor Contessa Brewer was disappointed, frustrated, and even a bit angry that the failed Time Square bomber turned out to have “ties to any kind of Islamic country”, and was not a angry, middle-aged, white Christian male-in other words, the stereotypical Tea Partier according to the mainstream media.  What’s more, she says that she feels bad that this incident will be associated with Islam, saying that the false and unfounded fear of Islam is used by the prejudiced and ignorant for the purpose of “writing off people who believe in a certain way or come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way. I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry.”  Really, Miss Brewer?  I’m sorry, but what did Fort Hood Shooter, murder of thirteen people and attempted murderer of thirty more, Nidal Malik Hasan shout out as he opened fire on his fellow American citizens, his supposed brothers and sisters in arms, but “Allahu Akbar!”, the slogan of a religion of violence, submission, and savagery, and the battle cry of Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and every other militant expression of Islam?

I could understand the Obama Administration spinning an event in a cynical attempt for positive approval ratings or to promote a policy, but what’s really disgusting is a news network taking the talking points of an Administration as objective reality.  That usually only happens in countries where there is not the supposed freedom of the press we have in the United States.

As disgusting and unfortunate as it all is, the current state of the mainstream media is the result of our nation’s current political and cultural climate.  The “culture war” which has been raging in this nation since the beginning of the abolitionist and prohibitionist movements-since the Great Revival, the explosion of strange Christian sects during the Commonwealth Period under Cromwell’s Commonwealth, or since the days of Martin Luther even!-inherent in American culture and politics since the days of the Pilgrims at Plymouth.  Both sides have such radically different religiously-inspired worldviews-which, contrary to the intentions of the Founding Fathers, influence national politics-which are so extreme and repellant to the average person that the different factions must speak to their true believers in code and double-talk, deceiving the average person into supporting their cause while they assure their followers of their commitment.  The reality is that the leaders of both movements want to radically and fundamentally change the character of this nation.

The liberals and progressive want the U.S. to be remade into a European-style socialist social democracy, replete with cradle-to-grave nanny state social services (single payer “free” health care, “free education”, crippling taxes on those who still work, etc).  This is all motivated by well-intentioned but naïve concern for the less fortunate, resentment of the wealthy (which manifests in wealthy liberals as guilt, which they try to negate by being charitable), and an almost religious belief that utopia is achievable if our nation could just emulate Scandinavia.  I have no idea what creates such an ideology, though I suspect that it is either some pathological disorder arising from a defect in the part of the brain involved in empathetic feelings, or the insane belief that the lyrics to John Lennon’s “Imagine” constitute a legitimate cosmology.

The right is a little different.  There is the big business side, the corrupt interests whose only concern is the almighty dollar and short-term profits, and then there are the actual cultural conservatives.  The corporate types are only involved in politics for their own short-term financial benefit;  hence their support of low taxes, free trade, outsourcing, no border or immigration enforcement,  fewer consumer and environment-protecting regulations, and no minimum wage.  I disagree with the outsourcing, although I don’t blame the companies so much as I do the worker’s unions and the government’s regulations and failure to enforce protectionist policies, which are the only way this nation could profit without outsourcing with the current labor climate; the lax immigration enforcement; and some of the environmental protections, but the rest I don’t mind.  We need to prevent corporations from actions which harm the property of others or infringe upon their rights, and to do so we must limit the political involvement of big business.  Sadly, that is something neither of the two main political parties will do willingly, as they are dependent upon Big Business for campaign money and influenced by the favors and promises of lobbyists.

The social conservatives, however, are real threat because they, like the liberal progressives, are motivated by irrational dogma and seek to remake the world.  The seek to turn the United States into a de facto theocracy, to ban abortion, contraception, pornography, and immodest dress, and to either criminalize homosexuality or have it categorized as a mental illness.  They would drag this nation kicking and screaming back into the era of prohibition, the Hayes code, and the comic-burning hysteria of the 1950’s, and seek to rewrite history itself so that this nation’s founding fathers would have been devout evangelicals instead of Enlightenment deists, agnostics, and moderate secular Christians who intended for this nation to be an enlightened secular republic.  A recent example of that could be seen on Glen Beck’s television program, in which he quote-mined and selected out-of-context snippets of writing by the Founders to insinuate that they would approve of prayer in public schools, the words “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and on our currency, and the Ten Commandments in public court houses.  As much as I might enjoy Beck’s Obama-bashing-simply speaking the truth about him is apparently “bashing” by the standards of the pro-Obama media-the enemy of my enemy is not my friend if he’s as dishonest and delusional as my other enemy.

And so here we are, trapped in the crossfire between two extremes.  There is no objective reality anymore, because every fact is contested, and every tiny bit of data has political implications.  Is the earth warming or not, and if it is, are humans to blame?  Is evolution real or not?  Are the Tea Party people all GOP Astroturf plants and ignorant racists, or a legitimate expression of widespread popular opposition to the President’s policies?  The truth hardly matters when it is simply denied on the rare occasions it can actually be uncovered and proven.  “Hox genes, the fossil record, vestigial traits, selective breeding?  Eff that noise!  The Bible done says that Gawd made the world in seven days!”  “The situations in Greece and California?  Whatever, keep of expanding social programs, deficit spending, taxation, and government employees!”

One plus one still equals two, “A” is still “A”, and yes Sculley, the truth is out there…you just won’t find an unbiased presentation of it on the news.

So how’s that for fair and balanced?

4 Responses to “Fairly Unbalanced: The State of the Modern Mainstream News Media”

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   May 15, 2010 at 5:56 am

   Your blogs continue to be patronizing and riddled with clichés. We all know what you’re saying, come up with an original take on something, for once, instead of regurgitating what everyone on the internet has already discovered.
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