In a truly despairing bit a couple of days ago, fueled by an absence of the proper medication and an excess of Pinot Grigio, I wrote:
The arrogance of the established media and the inane pandering of our political class are not things inflicted upon us. They are, by and large, our own creation.
Today, via Jeff Goldstein, I find a bit by Stanley Kurtz ["From Biased to Partisan"]. In it, he writes:
True, nowadays all the network newscasts are liberal. But CBS has had that reputation longer than the rest. Gradually, with the exit of moderates and conservatives to other networks and the alternative media, CBS's audience is probably now composed largely of liberal Democrats. In the middle of the most divisive presidential election in years, we have to assume that the CBS audience itself is far more interested in helping John Kerry than in getting to the bottom of the forgery issue. So as the country increasingly divides into two media camps, the "mainstream media" is becoming more openly partisan. And it's the audience that's driving this — not only, or even primarily, the journalists, liberal though journalists may be.
Which is half my point; the other is that media excesses at the other end of the political spectrum are (duh) driven by the other half of the audience.
Still another half of my point (which makes for a full 150% of pointy goodness--you get your damn money's worth here) is that characterizations of bias originating from anywhere in the political spectrum often treat the media as though it sprang into existence ex nihilo, and just whimsically creates the truckloads full of crap that are routinely dumped onto the unsuspecting heads of the American public who, after all, Just Want The Truth.
Both sides point to media's bias in favor of the Other Guy, and even co-opt terminology to describe "their" media--witness Kurtz's characterization of Fox News as "alternative," which would no doubt send a significant portion of IndyMedia's readership into paroxysms of Bush voodoo doll-stabbing. Overly clever linguists claim that the so-called "liberal media" is really just a propaganda front for the true elites, which are (natch) the corporations and the conservatives, and at the same time, conservatives foam about the media's shoddy portrayal of their causes.
The underlying assumption, in all of these seemingly contradictory cases, is that the media ought to portray the truth objectively because that's what people really want.
But people, by and large, don't spend their days focusing on getting the truth. People want to be happy and comfortable. They want to be confirmed in their beliefs and don't want to feel uncertain or stupid. If they're routinely exposed to something that makes them feel unhappy and uncomfortable and stupid, they'll go elsewhere if they can and, America being the Land of Twenty-Seven Orange Juice Varieties, there are plenty of places for them to go.
Every excess, every bucket of partisan bile, every distorted half-truth, and every fraudulent and biased story serves a need of the media consumer.
When Americans want something, they get it.
It's not "the media's" fault.
It's ours.
