The media play us like a fiddle
You know those long, scary caveats in the pharmaceutical advertisements, the ones that say this is a wonder drug but of course it might kill you? The press ought to be required to issue similar qualifiers.
When the founding fathers—we’d be so much more advanced if there had been founding mothers—envisioned the Fourth Estate’s essential role in the maintenance of a democratic republic they could not have envisioned polls, audio and graphic hype accompany news, television, radio or the Internet.
They did understand muckraking. They endured plenty of it. But they could not have foreseen the operatic ways by which, in the interest of ratings, the media manipulate our emotions, obscure the big picture in the deluge of isolated events and bloviation, and bend news by the questions they ask.
They could not have foreseen CNN and Fox cable news literally beating the war drums to accompany news of President Bush’s now disgraced intrusion into Iraq. They could not have foreseen a New York Stock Exchange whipsawed by the latest out-of-context news, with our entire economy hanging in the balance.
They could not have seen public opinion played like a fiddle by the jacked-up urgency of the latest trivia. They could not have foreseen trailers promising to tell us the latest horrible news and then stringing us out minute by minute while we’re told about some ditz’s latest misadventure or the various ways pharmaceutical makers scare us.
The media is hard at work making nervous wrecks out of the public in the same way that chicken hawks in Washington played us into a bankrupting war by scaring us half to death.
What the forefathers hoped is that the media would act as a balance against manipulation. The fact that the newspapers of the day were inclined to muckraking certainly might have given them pause, just as the power of big business caused Thomas Jefferson to worry publicly about corporations. But nothing in their ken could have forewarned those visionaries of the power of a press that could play us like a casino.
The house always wins. That’s what gamblers should know. And we are gambling with our republic when we trust media giants like Fox and Time Warner to balance our interests against those of their corporate masters. The big picture is continually crushed under the melodramatic pile-up of trivia
Witness the Sarah Palin spectacle. First the press is knocked out by her down-to-earth persona, her good looks. There are shovels full of laudatory stories. McCain is brilliant for picking her. He will capture the Hillary women. He surges in the polls. Then the doubts set in. Now McCain is a fool and Palin an incompetent. Up and down, back and forth the public is whipped and played.
The truth is somewhere else. Palin isn’t a demon. She isn’t many people’s dish of tea either. But meanwhile the public has been pumped up, degaussed, jerked every which way—all in the interest of ratings, of giving us soap opera news because of the assumption we’re not mature enough to prefer Masterpiece Theatre. We don’t deserve serious, thoughtful information because we’re stupid, and the poor press has to live with our stupidity. The poor quality of news presentation isn’t the media’s fault, it’s ours.
It’s not unlike the current situation in which we have to rescue robber barons who have been cheating us because, if we don’t the economy will collapse. Or, umm, we have to kill Iraqis because Osama bin Laden, a Yemeni with a Saudi passport, is hiding in Waziristan. You get that, right?—DM
“First the press is knocked out by her down-to-earth persona, her good looks. There are shovels full of laudatory stories. McCain is brilliant for picking her. He will capture the Hillary women. He surges in the polls.”
What were you reading? The press, particularly feminist journalists, were painting her stupid, uneducated, worthless and shameful for not aborting a disabled child. You must have seen a news clip of people cheering in Dayton or Minnesota used as a springboard to insult and demean. Despite her popularity (and I don’t think McCain will win) her treatment by the MSM (except Fox) has certainly set back the woman’s movement, both by the outrageous hate fits from the left, and by terrifying anyone who wouldn’t want to be subjected to what she has experienced.
Dear Norma,
You’ve given me some pause. You make a worthy point. On the whole, however, given Hillary Clinton’s strenuous campaign, I can’t help but feel that we’ve drawn closer to the day when a woman will occupy the White House. I certainly wouldn’t want it to be Sarah Palin, but that is no excuse, as you say, for denigrating her. I think the country suffers greatly for its sexism. Thanks for writing.—DM