On Why The News Lies to You (With Video Tape)
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If you look for the bad in people expecting to find it, you surely will. – Abraham Lincoln
Many people have a problem with the news, and i have to say at this point, it’s their fault. We let this happen. Just like newspaper headline editors, broadcast news editors don’t put things in the news we’ll ignore.
Let’s look at the reasons.
Many people believe the news lies to them, but instead of this by gathering multiple sources, and making informed decisions, and having a debate about it, they:
a) They avoid the news entirely. – Cause knowing what’s happening in your world is a burden I suppose.
b) They complain that the news is depressing – They’ve tried to put “feel good” news out there. That failed horribly. So they created “news magazine shows.” One is called Entertainment tonight. People don’t want “feel good.” They want to know what happened and moved on, ergo why headline news , charlie rose , et. al. are so popular
c) They segregate themselves to one news source. – One source of information has never served anyone well, one source isn’t going to do it now. The Intelligent person should, and can look at, and examine the opposing viewpoints. Avoiding the other viewpoint because one just don’t like it isn’t respecting ones own intelligence to aggregate and discriminate information. Thou, one should avoid those who scream at the top of their lungs. Firebrands by their nature burn things down including those they support.
d) They do selective acceptance – the tendency of accepting anything one believes in and dismissing as lies (contrary to facts presented) things one doesn’t like. Now , I’m all for the gut feeling, but i firmly believe there are people out there who would argue with me that grass is green. This area also usually falls into single minded political party affiliation. It’s always fun reading congressional transcripts and seeing one side argue something they argued against vigorously a couple elections ago, using the same argument the other side used before. So much for standing for what you believe in.
So what’s wrong with the news? The answer is You. The news lies to you because you let it. Honestly, do you really care about the Obama fist bump, or whether McCain said the “C” word to his wife in an argument many years ago? I recently overheard a conversation about whether it was apporiate for the president to give a student at a graduation ceremony a chest bump. Does that even matter (except to say, I’d take a chest bump from the president. That’s just cool damn it!)
But these afore mentioned matters make trivial diversions and keep a bar conversation going. But, I honestly don’t believe when someone walks into a voting booth, the presidents “chest bump.” was their greatest decisions maker on choosing a canidate.
However, many people are disgusted by the news and the reason why is both the inanity of it, and yes, “bias”. Yes, news is biased; the bias is of course editorial bias. Think back to a time when you watched local news. What was your biggest complaint? About 9:50pm there would be a quick news flash “Baby lifts car to save mom!”, then you’d watch the entire news real and the last story of the night was that a toddler moved his toy car and mom saw the spider and crushed it. Pretty soon however, we all got frustrated with this sensationalism and ignored it.
Newspapers however still do this editorial headlining today. We don’t expect it from the LA Times, or the Washington Times, but we do from the New York Daily News “(insert annoying shouting headline here), and smaller local papers like it doing it still.
On TV thou, this editorial grates at us “Being cute and flippant” is not only a no no, it’s just disrespectful. The Fist Bump described as “A terrorist jab.” is just offensive. The McCain “C” Word mention is just character assassination, and really shouldn’t be news. But it’s not going to get better until we make it better, and that’s going to take just being disgusted at the frivolity they pass off as news. Or Editorial passed off as news. I may not like Lou Dobbs or Bill O’Reilly editorializing but at least they don’t pretend to be unbiased. We all know where they stand and if i listen to them, I know where they are comming from. I can also agree they are intelligent people who have genuine beliefs.
In the end, the talking heads are the talking heads. They have been wrong enough times -when it counted- to show they don’t really know so much the better than us, but within all that talk is information; Information of motivation, opportunity, time and effort and yes, real news.
The news won’t mislead you, if you don’t let it.
OceansOfThought @ June 17, 2008