Balanced should mean in proportion.
But the main news reports always pervert it to “one for the left, one for the right”.
For example, a recent report said both sides of the health debate were running false ads. “On the one hand Republicans are running ads saying the plan is a plot to kill old people and that Republican voters will be refused treatment. On the other, supporters say health reform will save money when that isn’t proven, just assumed from experience of other countries.” And the implication is that both sides run the same number of ads and they are equally sleazy.
Often it’s even worse than one from each … I can’t remember the context, but there was some point during the last election cycle where somebody counted up all the Republican/conservative types getting airtime on the news shows versus the Democrats/liberals; and the former had a sizable advantage in numbers.
The thing that really pisses me off even more than the sort of deception you point out, is that it seems the political shows don’t even try to relate actual news, or determine actual truth. It’s entirely he-said, she-said, with a heaping side order of “let’s talk about what the polls say” and a bit of “who do you think has the advantage here” political wankery for dessert. Objective truth, what’s that?
Jon Stewart complained about it on Crossfire several years ago, and nothing’s changed.
So why watch or listen to “mainstream” media? Just pick the right specialty websites/shows/publications, and you can have exactly the news filter you want with no pesky dissenting voices permitted.
There is deception/flat-out lying happening on all sides of the health care debate, and it’s professional and in the public interest to point this out. Listeners can decide for themselves who the more egregious offenders are and how that might affect their positions.
What bugs me the most is when a false standard of “balance” is applied to science/medical reporting. What we end up getting, for example, is a story giving the same respectful attention to an infectious disease specialist and an antivaccine dingdong like Jenny McCarthy. That’s not balance - it’s insanity.
Reporters looking into what the facts actually are instead of just repeating what they are told the facts are…Checking up and calling bull when needed…Boy those were the days. Gone forever now, I guess.
Today’s version of ‘investigative journalism’ consists of interviewing some policy wonk or lobbyist and parroting their line of crap back at people as ‘news’. I’m not refering to one side of the aisle or the other, it’s all the bullshit, all the time, and they call it ‘The News’.
Which is exactly the same thing happening in the political sphere, Jack. The lying on the right is objectively worse than the inaccuracy on the left. This is not a matter on which reasonable people can disagree.
CNN had a debate over the presidents speech to school kids. They presented it like it was a huge conflict with people all over screaming about Obama indoctrinating kids.By giving it the time they did, they granted it a status it does not merit. They helped make a non story, a story which was exactly what the right wanted.
I want news reporting that doesn’t use loaded words. No matter who the president is, I want to hear “The president said earlier today…” not “The president claimed earlier today…” (Just an example.)
I want for Chris Matthews to stop talking over the last part of people’s sentences. I can understand why he won’t let them bullshit, but sometimes what they are saying qualfies the meaning of what they have said.
I want Walter Cronkite’s know-how and Frank Blair’s delivery.
And this is Sunday and I miss Tim Russert, damn it.
Beyond politics, I would really like to see balanced reporting getting chucked in favour of more realistic reporting for science and medicine, as well. One crackpot saying he thinks vaccinations give kids autism should NOT be given the same time, weight, and credence as the entire healthcare community saying they don’t.
A great point. That’s what I hate about all the contrived conflict and controversy. I saw CNN this morning and some young mother was actually weeping at the tought of the president forcing himself on her children. WTF??? So showing some hysterical fool overreacting is now newsworthy?
It’s so much cheaper than spending the money on investigative journalism. How having the nads to call BS when it happens instead of feeding it as legitimate controversy?
People need to start a campaign to boycott shows and their sponsors and support those few who actual inform and educate the public.
A conservative friend of mine did that to local conservative radio host who he called in to disagree with on a point and got yelled at for his effort.
An odd example of "balanced news’ is a recent story that appeared in many media outlets, TV and print, about a woman violating a restraing order that told her to stop harassing a TV weather man over his use of the term “onshore winds”. The told her side “He’s misleading people” and they told his side “She is breaking her court order by continually contacting me”.
So, both sides get equal coverage. What is unnoted, is that he is using the terms correctly and she is a real nut job, as can be seen from following links to her rant site.
So why didn’t any of the reporters ask the obvious questions? Like ask an independent weather man if there was any basis for her rant? Or ask the weather man for his side, not on the harassment but on the terminology?
This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. The “news” has never been about the facts. It has always been about selling newspapers, magazines, or T.V. ads where Lindsey Wagner talks about her dream mattress.
Some of you seem to think there was a time when the news was put forth by reasoned, informed adults who just wanted to present unbiased information, but does anybody truly believe William Randolph Hearst or Joseph Pullitzer gave a shit about balance? What you see today is just more of the same. Pullitzer was the original “yellow journalist” and today he has a fucking prize named after him!* It’s because of this that I just can’t get up in arms over how the “news” is presented.
*Here’s a thought that will help you sleep at night. A century later, Pullitzer has a respected journalism prize named after him. It could be that in 2110 journalists will be vying for the “Glenn Beck Medal for Superior Reporting.”
Oh please, you sound like a social conservative who’s pining for the “superior morals” of the 1950’s
American newspapers printed false reports of German troops cutting off the breasts of Belgian nuns in WWI to drum up support for the war and sell newspapers. Atrocities in Guatemala were grossly exaggerated in the 1950’s to protect United Fruit and sell newspapers. Is Hendrix playing the national anthem at Woodstock an act of treason? Betty Ford’s struggles with alcoholism were covered extensively by the media.
You’ve got the fact that news outlets need to compete for ratinggs so they don’t want to show a bunch of suits debating policy but do want to show the crap they show. There’s also the problem that the avrage viewer is dumb as a rock and discussing Medicare reimbursements or the public option is pointless, you might as well be speaking in a foreign language.
Then you’ve got the corporate ownership of the media. In the runup to the Iraq war a solid majority of Americasn were against starting a war but the media was full-on for it, little American flags in the corner of the screen months before it started etc. The only journalist who took any kind of anti-war/sceptical stance, a view shared by the majority of the country, was Phil Donahue. This got him sacked despite him having the highest-rated show on his network and he hasn’t had a serious job offer since. And let’s not forget that the people who sacked him, MSNBC, are a tiny part of GE, a company that makes a ton of its revenue from government contracting and almost zero from MSNBC. Go figure. Interestingly, ownership of media companies by corporations that do any military/government contracting is banned in every other democracy in the world.
So you couple the fact that the media is owned by corporations with the fact they can’t show policy/details stuff because they’d lose ratings/viewers don’t understand it and you get the sorry collection of crap that passes for journalism that we have now.
That’s why the Daily Show may be the best political show on television. Jon Stewart let’s both sides have their say, but isn’t afraid to call bullshit when the situation merits and doesn’t pretend that both sides of a given debate have equal merit. Look at the interview he did with the death panel woman a couple of weeks ago.
I agree 100%… but there’s a difference now. Back then, it was maybe a twice-daily paper, 2 TV news reports, and some radio news. This made them at least vet what they did somewhat; they had a limited number of minutes or column inches to work with.
Nowadays, they have effectively unlimited column inches and/or time with the web and 24 hr cable networks. They can literally print anything, no matter how frivolous, and I suspect that they have a hard time filling that time and/or space, so they print lots of absolute crap, that often has a partisan spin, or they give undue time to crackpot viewpoints and fringe ideas.
I mean, CNN.com seems to have an undue interest in trying to make everyone eco-friendly, and concerned about the third world. I mean, you have fairly momentous events happening for a region of the country, and CNN’s main story is something irrelevant to most readers about starving waifs in Gambia.
Maybe they’re trying to be the BBC, but at least there’s a BBC World that doesn’t concentrate primarily on the UK and actually reports on goings-on in Khartoum or Kathmandu, unlike CNN, which seems to be rather US-centric, and only interested in the third world as far as they can guilt us into being socially conscious.
I’d like an end to the endlessly repeated lie that the MSM are the “liberal” counterpart of Fox News or the Washington Times or Rupert Murdoch’s papers, to which the MSM’s behavior complained of in the OP obviously is a CYA response. There are no “liberal mass media” in America. Not even MSNBC. In America we have mainstream media and RW media and that’s all. LW outlets are limited to overtly political magazines like The Nation, and radio networks like Pacifica and Democracy Now! and Air America, and some blogs.