Mainstream media pushes self down staircase
Only 6% of Americans today trust news media, according to an study released last August by the Media Insight Project. Partners in the MIP include the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the American Press Institute.
One can easily imagine the newsroom flailings that totally unsurprising finding surely inspired.
"I don't understand," a bespectacled bylined sort fussed. "We sculpt stories with liberal bias, champion every oddball perspective to crawl off campuses, and are indefatigable in our slurring of the United States of America's history, cultural identity, military, law enforcement, and traditions.
"And no one surpasses our contempt for those irredeemable deplorables who cling to God and guns. They lack our superior, formal education backgrounds. We are clearly of higher humanity, a fact of which we remind our audience regularly.
"So, why don't people like us? Why are newspaper sales plummeting? Why are cable news ratings vanishing into Sarte's Nothingness?"
Respect for the press has throughout our country's history been a given. The concept of independent and plucky printing press Davids, compelled by sincerely embraced public interest passions, challenging political and economic Goliaths is indeed a noble one.
Many are the accounts of investigative reporters and gutsy editors ripping away pretenses of propriety, speaking truth to power, and advocating for the legitimate interests of rank and file citizens who
lack meaningful access to influence,
When reporters face off against officials at news conferences, they are, ideally, us -- asking difficult and probing questions whose full, honest answers we who would chart the course of democracy must have.
To whatever extent that cherished and laudable ideal might once have been reality, though, it has in recent decades been quite strangled and put down.
Gone now is the romantic notion of a scrappy, dogged, and invariably principled reporter barging into the dark-windowed planning lairs of unscrupulous banking barons and shifty office holders.
In 2016 place of that, we have sniffing, espresso-sipping liberals not long off the campus -- or, at least, with its wooly-headed, dream-utopia foolishness still knocking about in their otherwise barren skulls -- wagging mock-professorial fingers and weaving trendy inanities.
It is a news media that daily ridicules the American people with its disdainful airs and repulsive slanders. And seemingly undergirding its awkwardly contrived presentations is a bundle of pompous philosophical whims:
1) Theirs is the superior aspect, regardless of millions of dumb, working and tax-paying citizens across the country not being able to grasp it. All contrary opinions are wrong, and wrong has no right; certainly, not to equal and faithful visibility.
2) That it is an entirely proper function of the news media to select for publicizing only those happenings and viewpoints conducive to advancing their harbored sensibilities.
3) Logically proceeding from the above-enumerated elitist prejudices is coverage-coloring contempt for genuinely open democratic processes that make possible the input of all citizens, not only those inhabiting journalists' snow-globish social, political, and formal education worlds.
At last count, I believe, the lion's share of news media outlets are the kept propaganda sirens of a mere 6 mega-corporations. And they are of a part with entrenched status quo political and economic powers indifferent to real people. (Critics point up the revolving door maintained between these divisions, through which scheming system players pass to and fro without check.)
It is understandable, then, that so many Americans applaud the looming passing of an industry largely hostile to them.
"Isn't there some way to force people to buy newspapers and watch TV news?" The fuming reporter was unmindful of hammering sounds rising from the avenue.
"Hold it!" An affluent editor went to the window. "Shit! They're building guillotines!"
end
Only 6% of Americans today trust news media, according to an study released last August by the Media Insight Project. Partners in the MIP include the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the American Press Institute.
One can easily imagine the newsroom flailings that totally unsurprising finding surely inspired.
"I don't understand," a bespectacled bylined sort fussed. "We sculpt stories with liberal bias, champion every oddball perspective to crawl off campuses, and are indefatigable in our slurring of the United States of America's history, cultural identity, military, law enforcement, and traditions.
"And no one surpasses our contempt for those irredeemable deplorables who cling to God and guns. They lack our superior, formal education backgrounds. We are clearly of higher humanity, a fact of which we remind our audience regularly.
"So, why don't people like us? Why are newspaper sales plummeting? Why are cable news ratings vanishing into Sarte's Nothingness?"
Respect for the press has throughout our country's history been a given. The concept of independent and plucky printing press Davids, compelled by sincerely embraced public interest passions, challenging political and economic Goliaths is indeed a noble one.
Many are the accounts of investigative reporters and gutsy editors ripping away pretenses of propriety, speaking truth to power, and advocating for the legitimate interests of rank and file citizens who
lack meaningful access to influence,
When reporters face off against officials at news conferences, they are, ideally, us -- asking difficult and probing questions whose full, honest answers we who would chart the course of democracy must have.
To whatever extent that cherished and laudable ideal might once have been reality, though, it has in recent decades been quite strangled and put down.
Gone now is the romantic notion of a scrappy, dogged, and invariably principled reporter barging into the dark-windowed planning lairs of unscrupulous banking barons and shifty office holders.
In 2016 place of that, we have sniffing, espresso-sipping liberals not long off the campus -- or, at least, with its wooly-headed, dream-utopia foolishness still knocking about in their otherwise barren skulls -- wagging mock-professorial fingers and weaving trendy inanities.
It is a news media that daily ridicules the American people with its disdainful airs and repulsive slanders. And seemingly undergirding its awkwardly contrived presentations is a bundle of pompous philosophical whims:
1) Theirs is the superior aspect, regardless of millions of dumb, working and tax-paying citizens across the country not being able to grasp it. All contrary opinions are wrong, and wrong has no right; certainly, not to equal and faithful visibility.
2) That it is an entirely proper function of the news media to select for publicizing only those happenings and viewpoints conducive to advancing their harbored sensibilities.
3) Logically proceeding from the above-enumerated elitist prejudices is coverage-coloring contempt for genuinely open democratic processes that make possible the input of all citizens, not only those inhabiting journalists' snow-globish social, political, and formal education worlds.
At last count, I believe, the lion's share of news media outlets are the kept propaganda sirens of a mere 6 mega-corporations. And they are of a part with entrenched status quo political and economic powers indifferent to real people. (Critics point up the revolving door maintained between these divisions, through which scheming system players pass to and fro without check.)
It is understandable, then, that so many Americans applaud the looming passing of an industry largely hostile to them.
"Isn't there some way to force people to buy newspapers and watch TV news?" The fuming reporter was unmindful of hammering sounds rising from the avenue.
"Hold it!" An affluent editor went to the window. "Shit! They're building guillotines!"
end
posted by DC Larson at
October 05, 2016
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