US state media and hawkish propaganda

[Rabid]

That's why the presidential candidate I'm supporting is pushing for a guaranteed income & guaranteed employment for journalists & affiliated jobs, to ensure the Press' independence and the quality of its work ; so that journals & journalists can concentrate themselves on doing their jobs without having to worry about paying the bills.


[mind you, he's someone who talks a lot about Nationalizations and the notion of Public-Services, so...]

[Stark]

Given the choice, people do not choose to provide fair or balanced news and media magnates are both power brokers and business players. Who knew?

[Flagg]

People want to hear news sources they agree with anyway. That's why Fox News and MSNBC are so successful.

[Aaron MkII]

MSNBC, left version of fox?

[Flagg]

I would say no, because they admit they are left leaning while Fox lies. But they are definitely left leaning.

[Dalton]

The problem with news nets these days is that they're mostly corporate-owned partisan outlets that cater to demographics in pursuit of a profit. Additionally, with the dissolution of the Fairness Doctrine during the Reagan administration's deregulation-fest, maintaining fairness was no longer required. I'm pretty sure too news used to be a public service required by the FCC as part of broadcast networks' rights to use public airwaves, even at a loss.

[Dalton]

On a related note, Mike Wallace has died.

[Stark]

Dalton, what's the state of required viewing time for channels or networks in America?

[montypython]

The problem with news nets these days is that they're mostly corporate-owned partisan outlets that cater to demographics in pursuit of a profit. Additionally, with the dissolution of the Fairness Doctrine during the Reagan administration's deregulation-fest, maintaining fairness was no longer required. I'm pretty sure too news used to be a public service required by the FCC as part of broadcast networks' rights to use public airwaves, even at a loss.

I hadn't realized just how far the effects of this sort of deregulation had affected social discourse on top of capitalist intrigues for class warfare against the middle and working classes, it's like a perfect storm of fascist-like elements without admitting it.

[Alkaloid]

This notion that you somehow you have to have done something to earn so-called journalists' credentials? Stop."

Sorry, but that's bullshit. I'm no more qualified to be a journalist if you give me a pen and tell me to write an article than I am to be a surgeon if you give me a scalpel and tell me to operate. Journalism is a profession that requires proper training in finding sources, vetting information and journalistic ethics if nothing else. If colleges are not providing that training and journalists and editors are not holding themselves to the standards they were taught they should that doesn't mean that anyone is a journalist, just that the journalists we have now are bad at their job.

[Stark]

I think it's probably much more a top-down incentive or culture driven problem than a bottom-up bad training problem anyway.

[Block]

I think it's probably much more a top-down incentive or culture driven problem than a bottom-up bad training problem anyway.

My brother says most of the pressure they get from above is mostly about making things sensational, not wasting time with actual in-depth reporting because it doesn't sell, stuff like that. So yeah, I'd say it's a reflection of shallow ad driven culture.

[Stark]

You could say its a cycle because what's profitable is driven by what people buy, but the media is so evasive and (figuratively) monolithic I don't think what people want is as important as what they are seen to want.

Anyways blaming new journo grads is probably wrong.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah.

That's something I think is underrated in a lot of talk about modern capitalism- the disconnect between what people really want, and what the company can get people to buy using a combination of good marketing and "you can have any color you like, as long as it's black."

It's just sort of... assumed that homo economicus will always go for whatever is in their interests and will want the things it makes sense to want. But if that matched up with real life, there'd be no such thing as an advertising industry: all you'd bother to do is publish little blurbs saying "hey, we're selling cars and we think they're pretty good, come buy one" to raise awareness.

Instead, people create demand, and then present the existence of demand as evidence that something needs to be supplied. People watch the 24-hour news cycle and lots of people view content about the latest runaway bride or celebrity scandal or whatever, so that must be what they want, as opposed to the only thing on TV. And anyone who drops out of the system entirely because it just fails to connect with them- well, unless I'm mistaken, people who stop watching TV aren't counted in TV ratings, so that won't change anything.

[Dalton]

Dalton, what's the state of required viewing time for channels or networks in America?

Either I don't understand the question or that's a thinly veiled reference to 1984.

[Stark]

Sorry, you mentioned how there used to be a requirement around "news time" for channels. In AU there are many such regulations around educational and local content, so I was curious what it was like in the US the days.

[Vehrec]

Stark, I don't know exactly what is required, but it's a lot less than it once was for educational programing, and even then the educational programs offered were frequently jokes. For instance, the Sailor Moon dub in the states was given a little moralizing section of about 30 seconds at the end, and this was considered to qualify it for the Educational/Informative tag in the corner of the screen.

[Dalton]

Remember all those GI Joe and He-Man PSAs? Those were a result of government mandates requiring a certain number of minutes on each network being devoted to that sort of thing. The type of programming wasn't specified...and hence, knowing is half the battle.

[Gandalf]

Remember all those GI Joe and He-Man PSAs? Those were a result of government mandates requiring a certain number of minutes on each network being devoted to that sort of thing. The type of programming wasn't specified...and hence, knowing is half the battle.

My favourite examples of those are the moral moments from the ends of The Simpsons episodes The Telltale Head and Bart The General.

I thought that the He-Man PSAs and The Simpsons' moral moments were because the FCC had specific rules about cartoons? The rationale being that cartoons are for children and therefore must have child appropriate content.

[Dalton]

I really need to find a link, because I think I heard about it on one of my podcasts. It was a way to fulfill the obligation without giving up airtime on more profitable programming.

[Bakustra]

Before 60 Minutes and CNN, roughly speaking, TV news lost money. It was produced because it was prestigious to have a news service and because people had not yet become so alienated as to lose sight of the fact that the news, the distillation of the torrent of information based on what is meaningful, is important for its own sake. Since then, TV news had made money, and it has done so through sensationalism, abandonment of journalistic principles, and corporatism. In the process, journalists have gone from being at the fringe of the middle class (local newspaper and TV reporters still are there, but their influence is tiny nowadays) to being well within the moneyed classes, so that their historical ability to speak for the little guy has become hampered by their distance from that little guy because of economics.

In the final analysis, this sensationalism draws ratings, but its transgressive nature means that it will always push too far and alienate people, because they cannot live their lives with a semblance of mental health and internalize the, to be blunt and legalistic, terroristic broadcasts of the news. This caused more and more people to abandon the news programs, and the only thing which keeps Fox News and MSNBC from dying from this is because they are able to appeal to people with master narratives that provide context for the fear and outrage and channel it away from eroding mental stability altogether. But this can't really continue indefinitely either, because they still rely on fear, outrage, and their parent, transgression.

Back in the 1970s, the Big Three got their asses handed to them by the Japanese auto industry in large part because they were no longer led by people who understood the business of building cars, but instead by people who understood how to make money. They couldn't respond effectively because they were essentially clueless. They blamed the UAW, the government, OPEC, and all that, but in the end, they only survived by throwing out the Wall Street crowd and replacing them with car people.

So perhaps the only way that news media will survive in the long run is to abandon the almighty rating as their measure of success. Throw out the motherfucking marketers, put a boot in the asses of the ad people, and toss all the cultists of mammon into a well. But this culture has poisoned the journalistic end too. There are no "reporter people" who can credibly replace the current leads, and the ogliopoly of media renders this even more unlikely. So the only way to get to this only way may be for publicly-funded news media to take center stage, but I am not sufficiently learned or geniusitic (I am enough to neologize, though) to say how NPR or PBS could hope to do so.

[Rabid]

So the only way to get to this only way may be for publicly-funded news media to take center stage, but I am not sufficiently learned or geniusitic (I am enough to neologize, though) to say how NPR or PBS could hope to do so.

Maybe the US could look at how the BBC function and inspire themselves from it ?

[Bakustra]

So the only way to get to this only way may be for publicly-funded news media to take center stage, but I am not sufficiently learned or geniusitic (I am enough to neologize, though) to say how NPR or PBS could hope to do so.

Maybe the US could look at how the BBC function and inspire themselves from it ?

Perhaps, but the BBC managed to establish itself early in the history of British broadcasting, and its primary method of funding itself would be difficult to get people to accept. I'm not sure that an American equivalent would be able to do as well, and, like the Post Office, it would become a target if it succeeded.

[Skywalker_T-65]

This is why I prefer my local news station. Not going to get much national/international news, but at least they aren't making stuff up or anything like that. Too bad local news has more or less died out in a lot of places.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Anyways blaming new journo grads is probably wrong.

This is entirely anecdotal, but when I was (briefly) enrolled in a journalism program (at American University, a relatively good program, though certainly not "elite" or whatever), it was the nature and personalities of the grads themselves that most turned me off about it, as opposed to my cynicism for the sensationalist 24-hour news cycle. To put it simply, most of the people that are going into journalism aren't going into it because they have any interest in fair and balanced reporting to begin with, but out of a desire to feel important by interacting with important people. Everyone wants to be the White House correspondent or something glamorous and on CNN, while nobody gives a flying fuck about, say, the court house beat, crawling through archives and public records, or any of the dirty investigative work required to actually find anything significant/interesting.

They don't want to investigate, or find the truth, or anything. They want to smile for a camera while standing next to Obama.

So, while the system is certainly to fault, I don't have any faith in the journo grads, either. Most of them are worthless sycophants.