Manstream news media is today's problem, enabling extremist partisan politics & an uninformed public
The mainstream news media used to have a redline separating labeled political opinion from labeled news reporting. Today, most "news reporting" is unlabeled political opinion, empowering hate
By Ray Hanania
FREE/Politics News Media/Friday June 14, 2024
When I first got into journalism, I was motivated by the excitement of the Watergate scandal driven by Washington Post Reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
I had been leaning more and more towards journalism and writing in the 1970s, thanks to a teacher who recognized my failing grades in English were driven by a lack of motivation or understanding on how it could help my untapped talents. I had wanted to be a doctor, and doctors really don’t know how to spell at all. Just look at their prescriptions. They do know how to charge and profit, though.
Back then news reporting was the heart of journalism. Yes, reporters came at stories based on their personal experiences and opinions. The events that impacted their lives impacted how they approached news stories, resulting in a semi-balance But they still were corralled by professional rules of journalism requiring fairness, objectivity and balance to write news stories.
The persistence to find information not based on personal preference or belief but on event driven facts, and then to craft a story based on what they found balancing differing conflicting views resulted in a quality of information that was amazing. They presented those news stories to the public to read, digest and come to their own conclusions. Opinion column clearly marked opinion, were offered to help readers interpret the facts and events. But the public would get opinions usually from both sides, with only a few exceptions.
I remember my father describing the Chicago Tribune as being a Republican and conservative newspaper, not because of the news reporting, but because of the newspaper’s Editorial positions which took everything and offered their “esteemed” professional opinion about everything. The Chicago Sun-Times was a “Democrat” newspaper and tended to editorialize along principles embraced by Democrat politicians.
The readers — the public — read all the facts and saw the semi-balance and made up their minds. The public was smart back then and they are still smart. But their approach to the news has been corrupted mainly by the Internet and Social Media.
Social media has basically allowed anyone to become a Woodward and Berstein, but it has also forced objective professional journalists to try to jack the system by spinning their news reporting to provide an edge driven by their “experience.” So they started to add “opinion analysis” into the news, crafting it in a way to get around those in the public who lacked professional experience of journalism training and education in journalism.
The internet and social media allowed anyone to suddenly become a journalist, not be writing news but by expressing opinions about news. They would read reports that they favored or agreed with and built on it, slanting the information one way or another.
I compare it to the Baby Boomer generation which watched programs on television, the social media of the times, like Dr. Kildare which starred actors Richard Chamberlain and Raymond Massey, or yhe competing program, Ben Casey, which starred actor Vince Edwards. Both were broadcast between 1961 and 1966.
As a young teenager, I watched the program with my parents and saw how easily it was to perform heart surgery. You just cut someone open, tie a few arteries and veins, and put in a few stiches. I watched enough that, like today’s social media bloggers and writers, I believed I didn’t have to go to medical school. It’s s easy. A few stitches, scalpel, and having seen enough TV surgeries was all that you needed. Just like for today’s social media posters who know how to spell (mostly) and can place nouns, verbs and adjectives in a relative order to create a “news story” advocating what they wanted to believe or favored.
Television was college, where my Baby Boomer generation was educated on everything. It has been replaced by social media, where today’s public gets all that it needs to “know the truth.”
It’s hard for the professional news media to compete with it, so instead of competing, they simply join the club and follow along. The media today panders to the populist views of the regional public.
Publications tend to simply blur the line between opinion and reporting, spnning “news” to satisfy their dwindling paid subscriber base.
It’s always about the money, people. And journalism is controlled by powerful moneyed corporate robber barons. Seven of the nation’s biggest corporations own more than half of the major news media.
Those corporations probably have expanded their control to even more. The news media doesn’t like to report about itself so we don’t get the truth and never have gotten the truth from a profession that supposedly is driven by providing the truth.
This change has resulted in an America that is driven by favoritism rather than facts. The news the majority favors is now the focus on the reporting. The media is so vulnerable financially they have to be “less offensive” to the public’s sense of understanding.
In the old days, the free market determined the balance between news media financial solvency. Today, opinions drive the success of publications. Liberals tend to get into “journalism” and communications more than conservatives, who tend to pursue money and fortune through business.
There were some early exceptions that resulted in one-sided reporting. Even back in the 1960s and 1970s, the media was pro-Israel mainly because Israelis, mainly a Western culture, understood journalism and the power of communications far better than the Arabs and Muslims who even today naively believe that truth, justice and honesty are all you need to win an argument. Sadly, that’s not the case then nor today.
When I entered journalism in the 1970s, there was only one other Palestinian Arab journalist at amajor publication, Aziz Shihab, who I knew and who worked at several Texas newspapers as a reporter and later copy editor and advertising officials at the Dallas Morning News.
There were far many more people with ties to Israel than Aziz and I who had ties to Palestine. And when I got into journalism, the road was filled with obstacles because of my heritage.
One editor told me once when I complained about one-sided coverage of the Israel-Lebanese war in which leaders of the Jewish community were not only quoted, profiled and even given Op-Ed opportunities 100 times more frequently than Arabs, that the newspaper business is a “business.” He said, “We don’t get any letters to the editor from Arab Americans. They don’t buy Ads. But the Jewish community is all over us if we publish something they don’t like and they buy Ads and write letters.”
My professor at Circle Campus, Milton Rakove explained that in a political way in his books, writing that the pro-Israel community dominated Chicagoland politics mainly because “Arabs don’t vote.”
It’s been an uphill climb ever since. But, instead of getting better, journalism has deteriorated downwards becoming more and more biased for financial reasons and social media pressures.
It’s hard to get truth and accuracy today from the news media. Every stody today is a “spin” of the preferred facts. Media people label opinions and facts they disagree with openly as “lies” and “untruths.”
It’s one reason why America is slowly collapsing inwards. The media and politicians say our economy is good, but people are struggling as costs for products increase while the size of products shrink. They are. lying. The economy isn’t good. Why lie? So they can help their candidate, President Joe Biden and counter the reality of a troubled, struggling economy.
But that’s not all the mainstream news media is lying about.
They are lying about the Gaza conflict, falsely claiming this began with the killing of 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7. The conflict began long before that when Israel was killing 10,000 Palestinians over the past two decades including 230 Palestinians killed by Israel in 2023 before Oct. 7, and 400 killed by Israel in 2022. A good resource is the Israeli Human Rights organization B’Tselem which provides accurate data the mainstrea news media ignores.
The Israel-Palestine war is not driven by one-sided violence and anti-semitism by Arabs.
And accusations of anti-Semitism are being broadened to include criticism of a foreign government’s policies. Meaning, it is ok to criticize any government or political party including the American government but don’t you dare criticize Israel’s government because you are slandering Jews. Criticism of Israel’s policies is not anti-Semitism, which is a serious and heinous sickness when it accurately involves hating of Jews because they are Jews. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whow as born in Warsaw Poland and his real name was Benzion Mileikowsky, the son of a extremist “Zionist” — Zionism is a political movement not a religion.
The Russian conflict in Ukraine is not really about one bad player and one good victim. Both have serious problems, although Russia’s tyrant Vladimir Putin is far worse that the Ukrainian history of brutality and corruption.
The media is playing the issue of “immigration,” and the growing problem of migrantss and illegal aliens who are entering this country illegally and without being properly vetted. Illinois is giving the “migrants” (a more acceptable word for “Illegal immigrants”) driver’s licenses. Essentially the undocumented and getting documentation to make their lives closer to but not really legal.
The list goes on and on and I will write about those issues in the future, including how the media is pushing the Hunter Biden conviction as an effort to falsely assert that Trump’s conviction has to have been fair because the conviction of Biden’s son, Hunter “proves” the system is not biased. It is biased. Hunter Biden is guilty of so much more wrongdoing but the media and the government are doing everything to marginalize Hunter’s crimes into the 3 counts of “drug use” and illegally buying a gun.
You have the choice to be lazy and accept the slanted lies being pushed by the partisan, biased mainstream news media, or by taking the time to hear all sides of an issue and use yourown brains to decide what is right and what is wrong.
There are no boundaries in attacking Trump or other extremist Republicans. Only boundaries to protect their liberal friends.