The Mainstream Media is Failing
The media is failing. They are failing us. And they are failing themselves. In so many ways.
One glaring example is all the coverage of Pres. Joe Biden. Think for a minute about the past couple of stories you’ve read about him. They probably fall into two categories: He’s too old to run for president again and He’s running neck-and-neck with Donald Trump in the polls when he should be winning handily.
Where are the stories about what his administration has accomplished during the past three years? Where are the stories about how his policies are affecting people’s lives?
Biden is being covered as if his age is some sort of scandal. How dare he even think of running again! Doesn’t he know that Democrats want someone younger? It’s time for a change!
The “it’s time for a change” meme is my favorite one. The media loves to trot out some farmers who are happy to tell you they want a change. But they never tell you why they want change. Are they tired of winning so much? Is Pres. Biden too successful? Are they unhappy that their lives are improving?
The journalist’s job is to tell you the facts about a particular story and put it into context for you, so you can make up your mind whether you think it’s a good thing or a bad thing.
The media today is too focused on the mundane, the stupid and the irrelevant. They’re more interested in finding the most salacious incident so they can put it in their upcoming book, than trying to make sense of what politicians are doing that may be helping or hurting our lives.
If you read the coverage of Donald Trump, you’d think it was 2016 all over again. There’s endless (and breathless) coverage of his mug shot (He’s selling T-Shirts) There’s endless (and breathless) coverage of his arriving in court for one of his (so far) four arraignments.
As The Guardian newspaper notes, the media covers Trump “mostly as an entertaining side show,” rather than the existential threat to Democracy, the United States and the planet, that he is.
According to Nobel Prize-winning economist and The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the media is failing to report on something that should be seen as a big win for Pres. Biden: the economy.
Inflation and unemployment are low, yet survey after survey points out that people think the economy is terrible.
“There’s a really profound and peculiar disconnect going on,” Krugman said recently on CNN.
The Guardian notes that the media is at least partly to blame.
“When gas prices spike, it’s the end of the world. When they steady or fall, it’s the shrug heard ‘round the world. It illustrates one of journalism’s forever flaws – its bias for negative news and for conflict,” the paper noted.
I’d argue that the media is entirely to blame.
It relies too heavily on polls. Who’s up? Who’s down? But never why are they up or down. It’s the horserace that’s the story, rather than what politicians are proposing to do if they get into office.
Joanne Lipman, former chief content officer of Gannett, hit the nail on the head in a recent interview with media critic Dan Froomkin in his Media Watch newsletter.
“Journalists cover EVERY story through the lens of left vs right, which means news consumers don’t actually get real information about the issues. We are woefully ill-informed on basic topics. ‘Bidenomics’ has been quite successful, for example, but most people wrongly believe the economy is in the toilet. Our understanding of policies is even worse,” Lipman noted.
The problem is the media is stuck in the past. They are so intent on being “objective” that they fail to see that journalism has changed. While being objective is a good goal, it’s nearly impossible to achieve. People are inherently biased. Some more than others.
In an effort to be “objective,” the media tries to present “both sides” of the story. Unfortunately, they many times fail to see that both sides have different agendas and only one side has a legitimate story to tell. One side usually tries to present the facts. The other side (usually The Right) often times tries to obfuscate and outright lie about what’s going on.
Publicizing the lies of one side and trying to make it equivalent to the other is not being “objective.” The way things are today, reporting that both sides are equivalent is doing a disservice to the public. It downplays the existential nature of The Right’s policies.
In their effort to achieve neutrality, the media ends up emphasizing the lies and the bullshit, rather than telling the actual truth of the situation.
Both sides don’t do it. So quit reporting stories as if they do.