On the "Left-Wing Media"
Yesterday I sent out a widespread e-mail blast about the introduction into the House of Representatives of a Constitutional amendment to roll back the effects of Citizens United. One of its recipients came back with a “yeah, but …” expressed thus:
This red herring sent me right up the wall again, and this is what I shot back:
Take a look at the nature of the TV news coverage. Do you hear “This is what Hillary Clinton thinks about the Trans-Pacific Partnership currently being negotiated in secret?” or “Here’s where Jeb Bush stands on the issue of the 16,000,000 illegal immigrants living in this country?”, let alone “And here’s what they said last year on the same subject” or “This differs from what these other 2 contenders from their own party are saying”? That is, anything that could help the average viewer become an informed citizen capable of casting an informed vote?
No! What you hear is “Who’s ahead in this poll or that survey” or “Look at this picture of a candidate ordering a taco” or “Maybe Joe Savior will jump into the race” — all trivial superficialities, no depth, no context, no substance, but each and every one designed to suck in short-attention-span eyeballs with “Real Housewives of New Jersey” scandal-sheet irrelevancies that, not at all incidentally, also help boost their ratings and the fees they can charge for advertising.
And don’t give me that crap about it being “left-wing media”. Not only are they all dumbing down the real news in pursuit of the holy dollar, whatever political biases they’re allowed to let glimmer thru the MTV-level cavalcade of trivia are being dictated from the top by their owners, who (you may notice) don’t comprise a lot of sandal-shod, tree-hugging Earth mothers wearing peace medallions. Instead, they all belong to the “Big 6” multi-national media conglomerates, the poorest of which is CBS Corp., with its measly $13 billion in annual revenue.
Powers behind a couple of these thrones are Rupert Murdoch at Fox and Sumner Redstone at CBS, also not exactly paragons of leftist politics.
TV is the worst, but newspapers are headed down that same road, due to the awful Telecommunications Act of 1996 (signed by corporatist President Bill Clinton, husband of current corporatist front-runner Hillary Clinton), which essentially lifted the lid off the ability of huge conglomerates to monopolize all the media outlets — TV, radio, newspapers — in a given market. That squeezed out all the small, locally owned and operated, independent operators and homogenized not only the news but also the entertainment available to us over the public airwaves.
I could go on, but you get the idea. I put in 3 years working for The Spectator back at UW-Eau Claire and at one time even toyed with the idea of a career in journalism. I’m devastated to see the sorry state this once noble profession has been reduced to.
Thanks for letting me vent.
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
— John Kenneth Galbraith, American economist
The big money is being spent by both parties so why is the media so slanted left?
This red herring sent me right up the wall again, and this is what I shot back:
Take a look at the nature of the TV news coverage. Do you hear “This is what Hillary Clinton thinks about the Trans-Pacific Partnership currently being negotiated in secret?” or “Here’s where Jeb Bush stands on the issue of the 16,000,000 illegal immigrants living in this country?”, let alone “And here’s what they said last year on the same subject” or “This differs from what these other 2 contenders from their own party are saying”? That is, anything that could help the average viewer become an informed citizen capable of casting an informed vote?
No! What you hear is “Who’s ahead in this poll or that survey” or “Look at this picture of a candidate ordering a taco” or “Maybe Joe Savior will jump into the race” — all trivial superficialities, no depth, no context, no substance, but each and every one designed to suck in short-attention-span eyeballs with “Real Housewives of New Jersey” scandal-sheet irrelevancies that, not at all incidentally, also help boost their ratings and the fees they can charge for advertising.
And don’t give me that crap about it being “left-wing media”. Not only are they all dumbing down the real news in pursuit of the holy dollar, whatever political biases they’re allowed to let glimmer thru the MTV-level cavalcade of trivia are being dictated from the top by their owners, who (you may notice) don’t comprise a lot of sandal-shod, tree-hugging Earth mothers wearing peace medallions. Instead, they all belong to the “Big 6” multi-national media conglomerates, the poorest of which is CBS Corp., with its measly $13 billion in annual revenue.
Powers behind a couple of these thrones are Rupert Murdoch at Fox and Sumner Redstone at CBS, also not exactly paragons of leftist politics.
TV is the worst, but newspapers are headed down that same road, due to the awful Telecommunications Act of 1996 (signed by corporatist President Bill Clinton, husband of current corporatist front-runner Hillary Clinton), which essentially lifted the lid off the ability of huge conglomerates to monopolize all the media outlets — TV, radio, newspapers — in a given market. That squeezed out all the small, locally owned and operated, independent operators and homogenized not only the news but also the entertainment available to us over the public airwaves.
I could go on, but you get the idea. I put in 3 years working for The Spectator back at UW-Eau Claire and at one time even toyed with the idea of a career in journalism. I’m devastated to see the sorry state this once noble profession has been reduced to.
Thanks for letting me vent.
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
— John Kenneth Galbraith, American economist
posted by Richard S. Russell | 3:31 PM
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