Our major media are slanted. Worse, they are often very sloppy. They do not do their research. They blow up details and fail to see the bigger picture. They omit context. This is why they are biased. This is why they produce fake news. Yesterday at 9 a.m. I wrote briefly about Sweden’s immigrant problems. The media had jumped all over Trump because of something he said in which he may or may not have misspoken. Whatever he may have said that was inaccurate meant very little in the context of his remark, which was that Sweden has a problem that he doesn’t want to see happen in America. The press skipped over that part and went for his jugular, trying to discredit him.
To write that blog, I had to do a little research on Sweden. I’ve never been there. I explained exactly how we must connect the dots from published accounts. What I came up with as one example of severe immigrant problems in Sweden was a place named Rinkeby. The media didn’t do this research. It didn’t talk about Sweden. It brushed aside what Trump’s real message was. It simply attacked Trump.
At 8 p.m. yesterday, something happened in Rinkeby, on Monday night. When I wrote in the morning, it would be afternoon in Sweden. I could have no knowledge of what happened next, which was a riot in Rinkeby. That’s the Fox headline today, February 21, that I’ve placed on this blog.
How much research did this take? Maybe an hour or two. I’m definitely not a Trump fan. I haven’t criticized him either, simply because I am reading so many excellent libertarian critiques from others. If I do not have something original to say, there is little point at my age in simply being part of a chorus. I’m not saying anything about immigration either. My focus at this moment or in these blogs is MEDIA.
One does not have to be either a Trump fan or a Trump critic to be able to see that the media’s output cannot be accepted at face value. One has constantly to evaluate it, check it, interpret it, corroborate it, discount it, reject it, hunt for relevant parts of it, and discard its editorializing. The media supply many useful facts. The problem is finding them and figuring out what is factual as well as what has been left out that changes the meaning.
It’s my impression that the quality of stories in the major papers (New York Times and Washington Post) has declined in the last 50 years. It used to be that a story made sure that it had in it “what, who, how, when, where”. The “why” required more supposition and speculation. That was more for an editorial. Today, one can read a story and be left wondering about the basics, whereas there is a lot of implicit editorializing within an article. In a TV show or press conference, the reporter asking questions can ask this huge long question, basically making a speech. They cannot even ask direct questions, or else they don’t ask pertinent questions.
The MEDIA have been involved in propagating war fever for a very long time. The yellow press urged war against the Spanish in 1898. The press carried atrocity stories about the Kaiser. The government subsequently learned how to use all kinds of media, including the motion picture industry, to gain support in its wars.
The media can and do act independently too. But if its major voices all align on one crusade and if they are taking a biased position, be it on attacking Iraq or supporting Obamacare or attacking a given person, then the larger society has a problem. If the media all fail to tell the complete story or tell a fake story, then we as readers have a problem. We have to undertake the labor and research to decypher what we are reading. Time and again, this is essential. The poison gas story in Syria that almost resulted in a big U.S. bombing campaign against Syria is an example. The fake stories of Gaddafi’s imminent conduct of genocide in Libya is another case. The media’s constant harping on Russian aggression in Ukraine and Crimea is another recent example. The media and public completely failed to do their homework, or even apply common sense, on the propaganda that led up to Bush’s Iraq aggression.
The media are not some side issue. They are part and parcel of mass murder and war crimes, as in the case of Iraq. The government does not have all the blame. It falls far more broadly upon all of us who may have supported and accepted the government’s aggression. Major media are complicit.
9:24 am on February 21, 2017
