Over the last few years, the country has lost some of its best journalists, most notably Tim Russet, Peter Jennings and Walter Cronkite, one of the greatest of all. Their successors lamented their passing promising to try to carry on their proud tradition.
But have they?
With a few exceptions, the members of the mainstream mass media have failed to live up to that legacy. In large part, the newspaper and television coverage of events is either shamelessly excessive or terribly shallow and incomplete.
When it comes to covering the big stories like severe hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, or earthquakes, the media reports from the scene, ad nauseam. The death figures change by the hour from being ridiculously small to being record-breaking. Every detail of the disaster is reviewed and repeated, incessantly. We are forced to see the worst of the tragedy until it saturates our consciousness. We are invited to look at as many ruined buildings and shattered lives as possible.
When 9/11 came into our lives we were shown footage of the crash not just dozens of times but hundreds or even thousands of times, as though picking at a wound.
Then here was the tsunami in Indonesia, the flooding in New Orleans, the terrible storms in the Midwest, the landing on the Hudson, and then the earthquake in Haiti. The media could not seem to spend enough time on these events. The anchors were obliged to leave the warmth of their studios to venture into these crises. Reporters informing us of killer weather must actually be in that weather to report on it even if they are falling down or can hardly see.
During these disasters, no other news occurs or, at least, is reported. There is no war overseas, no crime in the streets, no child lost or abandoned. There is just the one main story that is designed to reveal just how loving and compassionate we all are.
But then, for all other news on regular news days, the journalists can’t seem to get or share all the information necessary to tell the story.
Here are some cases in point.
The governor of New York at the time was accused of having an expensive night with a prostitute. Every day we heard about him and the prostitute and how much she charged to fly to give him service. What they did not report immediately or even weeks later was that this john was a regular customer for many years dating back to the days that he was the state’s attorney general. At that time he vigorously prosecuted the major houses of prostitution except for the one he frequented.
When reporting on economic news, the media neglects to connect all the dots. For the past few years, the country’s recession has caused a high unemployment rate. The current administration is trying to help by pumping money into the economy causing a large budget deficit. It has been two years now and the unemployment stands at just under 10%, twice as much as it should be. When this is discussed, it is rarely, if ever mentioned that when the last great recession occurred during the Reagan administration, Reagan tried for five years to reduce the unemployment rate he inherited from his predecessor. He lowered taxes for the rich and thereby incurred record deficits.
It took FDR nine years to end the depression after creating record deficits and finally needed World War II to get us back to “normal.”
Our President has been forced into a record budget deficit because of the disaster left him by the former administration. The deficit is now $13 trillion with Obama’s first year shortfall of more than $1 trillion. The right wing media is howling that we are at $13 trillion because of Obama. No one has mentioned that the $12 trillion deficit that Obama did not cause, came to us from Reagan and Bush, the Right’s heroes. The deficit actually decreased under Clinton, the Right’s villain.
The country suffers from serious immigration problems. Poor, unskilled, uneducated masses are coming into our country illegally. It is estimated that there are now 12-20 million document-free immigrants in this country, breaking laws and taking jobs away from Americans who really need the work. No one mentions that this problem got bad when Reagan gave those in the country illegally at that time amnesty and did not secure our borders. This gave tens of millions of poor Latin Americans hope that if they could get here illegally, get good paying work without having to pay income or payroll taxes, they too would eventually be handed keys to the Promised Land as did their countrymen before them.
During the Presidential campaign, the minority-party candidate made two strange, but unchallenged, statements. To this date I have not heard one media person point out the absurdity of the comments.
The first was a reaction to the opponent’s promise to eliminate tax cuts for the rich that were put in place by his predecessor on a temporary basis. The reclaimed taxes would be used the help fund needed services. The candidate from Arizona accused his Democratic rival of being in favor of using taxes for the redistribution of wealth. Not one person so far has reminded the senator that government exists to provide needed services by redistributing wealth. All taxation dating back to the Dark Ages has been collected for the redistribution of wealth, be it from the farmers to the rich nobles or from the taxpayer for the services needed by the population whether they be national defense or urban planning and development or welfare for the poor. I have not heard one media person ever point this out.
The second was regarding not deporting the many document-free immigrants currently in our country. The compassionate conservative minority-party candidate responded by saying that these are G-d’s children and therefore cannot be deported. No one reminded the senior senator from Arizona that by that logic all living creatures are G-d’s children. How can we ever go to war? Aren’t the enemy soldiers G-d’s children? How can we slaughter animals? Are they not also G-d’s children? And by the way, John, didn't G-d deport his first two children from the Garden of Eden? Did he not later deport his chosen people from the Promised Land? Can the media ask questions?
We have been in Iraq for more than eight years now. We have almost complete control of the country and all of its records. And yet the media has been unwilling and/or unable to ascertain and report how many people have died as a result of our invasion. The media has never to my knowledge even reported that they weren’t reporting it. So while we hear, as we should, exactly how many of our troops have died, we don’t hear that at least 50 to 150 times that many Iraqis have been killed during this period. The media just can’t figure out how to find this information out or even that it is important. Would you want to know that, let’s say, from 200,000 to 600,000, mainly civilian Iraqis, have been killed?
There are notable exceptions to the rule of poor reporting. The PBS News Hour (the Lehrer Report) goes into the major news in depth, trying to cover every angle. The BBC World News is also excellent and much more thorough than its American network counterparts.
What these good news shows prove is that good journalism is still possible. We don’t want fluff. We don’t want to see and hear the same big news story until we are numb but we insist on hearing the whole story with the necessary facts and figures on the rest of the news. We want to be treated like intelligent, well-educated adults. How can we learn and grow to make intelligent decisions if we cannot get news that actually teaches us about our world and its inhabitants?
If we want a strong fourth estate, we have to demand it.
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