Reporting the News...Or Creating the News?
So much has previously been said about bias in the Main Stream Media that this rant seems like so much beating of the proverbial dead horse. Despite this, I find that I cannot help myself.
Arthur Chrenkoff posts today about Steve Vincent, NY art critic, and his experiences in war-torn Iraq. The post is wonderful and you should read it. In the post, he excerpts part of Vincent's remarks and I recreate them here for your edification and ease:
"Haider, for example, told me of acting as a translator for a German TV
crew working outside Baghdad in the summer of 2003. The crew, he recounted,
filmed a village trash heap, then reported , over his protests, that the
smoldering compost was once 'fertile farmland destroyed by Coalition bombs'. In
September, He accompanied a French photographer as she wandered through Baghdad
looking for a scene that would dramatize Iraqi suffering resulting from war.
Unable to find a suitable tableau, she paid an Iraqi woman to kneel in the
debris of a partially demolished building and raise her arms to heaven as if
imploring Allah to strike down the American infidels. 'The photographer had me
ask the woman to remove her wristwatch so she wouldn't look too wealthy,' Haider
related. Mohammad recalled watching an Al-Jazeera film crew pay men loitering on
Saddoun Street to throw rocks and light a car on fire. 'Within a few minutes,
Al-Jazeera made their own "anti-American" demonstration,' he said."
How remarkable is that? This is so disingenuous! It is ridiculous! You'd think they were filming their kids' recital for all of the bias in the reporting. These people have an AGENDA and they are doing their damnedest to serve it!
Whatever happened to reporting the events of the day in a factual way in an attempt to inform? It seems the world media has changed it's mission statement from that to "creating and highlighting the events of the day in a creative way in an attempt to move public opinion." It's crap! For god's sake they aren't reporters they are Jayson Blairs and Michael Moores. Their "news" is mere mockumentary.
I want to illustrate what I mean. Suppose the story is about a woman hosting her annual holiday tea party with her nieces making up the party. Today's "journalist" might cover this as a male discrimination party that introduces and indoctrinates children to the evils of caffeine. They might choose to allege that the woman is seeking to reinforce negative stereotypical images of women as creatures of leisure who live to serve men. The "journalist" pays a young neighborhood boy to rub dirt into the sweat on his neck and face from playing all day and proceeds to ask him how he'd feel if his dog and dad both died in a car accident. The picture is snapped. Tear trails stain his dirt covered face and his weepy look is immortalized above the caption, "Young boy excluded from holiday merry-making." Nevermind the kid was no relation to the woman, or the fact he'd probably prefer to eat worms than hobnob with cootie-carrying girls. He's the victim. His tear-stained face proves it.
The truth might be something as innocuous as the woman is a childless auntie to 7 young girls, all of whom have no sense of ceremony or grace. Perhaps she is attempting to teach them how to dine daintily on finger foods while balancing a tea cup. Perhaps she is just giving her own tea party to satisfy the childhood dreams she still harbors. None of these facts is of interest to the media. They are not content until they can show some group (or multiples if they can) suffering at the hands of some evil.
The real problem with this is that it wrongly identifies a group or more as victims. They may not be victims. They may not be suffering. But, as in the old adage, "if it bleeds, it leads." Slightly less well known is the new end to that phrase..."And if you can't see the blood, suggest internal mental suffering, otherwise you'll never be printed above the fold or at the top of the newscast." This constant identification of so-called victims diminishes the martyr-power of real victims. If all we see in the news is this injured party, this victim, the poor suffering bastard whose Aspen retreat is being foreclosed, how can we feel anything for the women being raped and the genocide in Darfur? All of the coverage of so-called victims both inures us to the concept of victimization, thereby drawing less concern for real victims of real crimes, and perpetuates the nonsense that all people everywhere are victims.
This global victimization leads logically to two places. First, if all the world is a victim, then I'm entitled to something. Entitlement. Not civil rights, not human rights, but entitlement. As in, I am entitled to a tea party. THIS IS SUCH THE WRONG MESSAGE! Secondly, global victimization requires the creation of some global oppressor, an evil-doer of gigantic proportion. Do you know who gets to play this part? Of course you do. It is...The United States of America. This is an evil and insidious plot, I tell you!
If you read the media long enough, you will come to the conclusion that American's and the United States of America are wholly responsible for WW1, WW2, genocide in Russia, Hitler's genocide of the Jews and other undesirables, the loss of morality, global warming, AIDS, terrorism, etc ad nauseum.
And it is crap. That's what it is. At some point very early on people are responsible for their own actions. Suck it up. And quit the victim crap.
Last but not least, to all you "journalists" out there, do the right thing and start covering the news instead of creating it.
