Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Quote of the Day

Steve Jagler, executive editor of BizTimes, on the shock that Republicans received on Election Day:
Here’s a hint. If you are a conservative, and your only sources of political news and analysis are Fox News, Limbaugh and conservative talk radio yackers, you do not have a realistic prism of the world.

And if you are a liberal, and your only sources of political news and analysis are MSNBC, Current TV and The Huffington Post, you do not have a realistic prism of the world.

Believe it or not, it is still possible to find journalism that is committed to the honest pursuit of the truth, wherever that may lead, rather than just spoonfeed a preconceived political agenda that tells you what you want to hear. We just have to look a little harder and think a little deeper to find it.


4 comments:

  1. I think Steve Jagler, who I am unfamiliar with, is getting at the truth of the situation. For America to be a true democracy, the media has to do its job, that being to honestly inform the people about issues dealing with politics, economics, what have you. Voters must make informed choices at the ballot box.
    Only parts of the Fairness Doctrine remain on the books, and those aspects need to be enforced.
    Newt Gingrich's "reform" which led to the 1996 revision of the Telecommunications Act let huge corporations dominate local media markets. Local newspapers were soon owned by one company, local radio stations soon were owned by a relative few, local TV was soon owned by a relative few, and Rupert Murdoch's fledgling Fox Network was let off the hook for being foreign-controlled media, which let Fox accumulate more stations and rise to prominence.
    These were all bad things, and our media today has suffered. News staffs stripped to the bone, network feeds, all pushing this lite, biased and homogenized version of the news.
    It has taken blogs like Cognitive Dissidence to break into the journalism environment to show what a crock the corporate media has become. Democratic voters got to find out valuable information so that they could vote in good conscience.
    Up until blogs became part of journalism, we were spoonfed 24/7 a big lie for the most part. It really does take a lot of effort nowdays to find honest reportage, and Capper works hard and does a great job of doing what he's doing, which is helping people understand the true workings of our local government.

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  2. I think Jager is making a false equivalency. There is a decided difference between propaganda operators like FOX and the fat drug addict who deliberately concoct a universe of lies while promoting racism and advocacy journalism in which the point of view is readily apparent.

    Accessing multiple news sources to arrive at a more coherent understanding of events is useful. But I wish good luck to anyone who decides to engage in a snipe hunt for objective journalism. There is always a hidden bias in reporting, whether it is subconscious, cultural or merely an inability to distinguish a reliable source from a bent one. What is typically misconstrued as objective journalism is the managed timidity of CNN, NPR and PBS, which leave the helpless viewer with the feeling that it is impossible to reach a conclusion on any issue.

    We'll have to leave it there.

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    Replies
    1. "Objectivity" to me is in the eye of the beholder. To me, and I'm not some kind of journalism major, there always is some kind of advocacy going on, subconsciously or not. Fox certainly is advocacy: "We report, you decide." I can't stand Fox, so I seek my news elsewhere.
      Milwaukee had a lot of competing newspapers back circa 1900, each open about their philosophical viewpoint. It was a much healthier environment for journalism to flourish, and the public was better served by it.

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  3. Meh...Yet another "both sides are equally at fault" bold piece of journalism.
    Jagler misses the obvious conclusion that the right-wing media operate on faith, not numbers, and completely believed their own bullshit, while the lefties made the correct call.
    Why does he think that makes both equally at fault?

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