🆘 The 🇺🇸 media polarization – or war – is given full blast.
Concretely here, Fox versus CNN. This is where media should never go. Period!
Worldview-shaping media corporations that – deliberately – choose to become an integral part of one or the other political campaign marks the decay and eventually the end of journalism and public education itself.
It’s nothing new that media are related to politics and to parties. What is new – and devastating for the profession and for society in general – is that political sympathies are no longer limited to editorials or opinion pieces but is spreading into source and news selection, reporting and analysis that many media do.
It’s marks an overall move from impartial coverage in service of the public and its education into partisan, ideology-production, construction of a media rather than a real reality and political correctness. Or propaganda.
The readers, listeners and viewers are the losers. Because good professional journalism with facts, diversity, balance and at least attempted objectivity with many perspectives and different voices is now a phenomenon of the past.
And that sort of journalism and media have always been essential in any definition of democracy. When the citizenry feels that it can trust no one and people sense that they are being taken for a political ride, they stop engaging in what is going on and turn to entertainment and various forms of escapism. One should not blame them.
We are now seeing also one of the consequences of the – stupid, and I said so at the time – commercialization of leading media and the erosion of all ideas about public service thanks to it. What counts today is only visitor numbers, clicks, income from advertising and smart marketing where you ought to “sell” yourself simply by means of better quality information and analysis. Public service that should be above that trend has been swept into the maelstrom of journalism’s erosion.
And remember what is happening in the US media will soon happen, or has already happened, in other Western media too.
Left for concerned, curious citizens is now only to surf the Internet, pick up as many and as different perspectives from many and different media – worldwide – and piece together what they believe/judge/know may be a true, consolidated view on things that interest them.
That is also the only way to avoid fake news and its much more important twin: omitted news. And what does that take? It takes knowledge. When somehow you know something, you can smell a media rat – a false narrative, a slanted or planted story, a media lie. If you know nothing, you’ll be the victim of everything.
Thank God there is an Internet! And when that somehow gets equally corrupted by, e.g. Google, Facebook and NSA, there will be many new Internets.
Piece together our own worldview out of the ever-growing huge media jigsaw puzzle.
Because, literally, you can no longer trust any single source.
Notes
- If you want to venture into your own Internet-based search for trustworthy news and analysis, scroll down till you see some media sources in the right-hand column here. Or go to The Transnational’s media and education sections here.
- In yesterday’s analysis of the US elections, there is more about the polarization of the media.
- Kit Knightly at OffGuardian has an interesting take on this – “Censoring Donald Trump is more “dangerous to democracy” than anything he could ever say” and it contains videos where you see leading media cutting off president Trump while he speaks about the election result (as he sees them). This is not about pro- or anti-Trump, it is about principle: Should private corporate media exercise censorship over what is correct and not correct politically? Many media have spearheaded fake and omission – and lies. With what right do they now set themselves up as judges – even over a democratically elected president (like him or not)?
If you think this is an important issue and a help in your own search, please…
Good analysis..we need professionel journalism