It”s gotten to the point where I basically believe nothing that’s being reported in the media because it all seems more like editorials for their conservative or liberal agendas.
I mentioned in my first post that I was sent to prison – it was a prison camp and I was there for 32 months. I’ll do posts in the future that explain why and my thoughts on the United State’s justice system. Anyway, while I was in camp, experiencing the excessive boredom it entailed, I would often go into the TV room early in the mornings. At that time, just a few of us were in there, usually watching CNN, MSNBC and FOX as there were several TVs in the room. (You listened through your own little radio you purchased from the commissary.) How entertaining it was for me to realize that we must be living in three entirely different countries as these “news” channels would report the same incident with entirely different background facts, biases and summaries! It was preposterous that any of these three channels (and others) honestly reported the “news,” despite that word being in each of their names.
The same situation exists with newspapers that also believe their stories report the news, but like the broadcast media, they actually present editorial content more than the facts. And presenting just some of the facts is also not accurate; all relevant facts that can be uncovered need to be presented rather than just the ones that support the newspaper’s agenda. Not for one minute can a broadcast news station or newspaper convince me that they don’t have a political agenda. I long for the time years ago when we were better able to use the facts reported in the media to make our own opinions. Instead we have the current situation where we have to obtain competing and often opposing factual data by sifting through all the biased information presented by these so-called news sources. And then hope we can make an accurate decision because we have the relevant facts to do so.
I used to have to deal with the media a lot during my career. What I learned was that reporters start with their own position or opinion before they even begin an interview. Their goal is to get a quote that supports the position they have, rather than try to find out if there are opposing facts. Sadly, their real goal seemed to be to draw the most attention to their story whether accurate or not. They would sometimes later present a retraction if information was wrong, but in small print, days later, on a page where it wouldn’t get noticed.
One Editor-in-Chief told me that in the days when newspapers were only in print, the most salacious stories were listed “above the fold” where they could be seen by purchasers on the old newspaper stands and thus maximize sales. Over time I came to learn the reality that I naively didn’t realize when I was younger. Media organizations are first operated to make a profit, then to report the news. Even the employees sometimes try to justify that this priority is reversed, but it is not. And the bigger profit they make, the more money everyone who works there makes. And the more salacious their news, or the more it reflects that of their viewers/readers, the more money the organization makes. This has been going on for decades, and one can look back almost a century to see how Hearst put forth his opinions as facts. However, it seems to me to have become a lot more extreme with the advent of the internet and “instant news” programs.
Politicians and their staff are often the source of this extreme information. But it’s up to the media to test these political messages and present reality, rather than trying to support or protest the political message in order to support their own organizations’ profit-driven agendas. When presented, opposing information is often inaccurate, or it’s omitted, or buried beneath layers of other data. As a specific example, I remember several years ago trying to find out the death rates of different age brackets from covid on the CDC website. As a senior citizen, I was interested in this. I remember having to sift through multiple pages of data to get that very basic information because it didn’t fit the overall political message at that time from the political communications staff. Some of the media lauded that process while others skewered it. I’m not trying to single out one political party here as there are examples from Democrat and Republican politicians that can be utilized to support my thoughts. So please don’t get all preachy to me about how you viewed specific leadership during the covid pandemic.
I want news channels to start reporting facts. I am not a member of any political party so I don’t have a horse in this media race except for wanting to hear the truth. I have tried to locate a few media sources that I feel are relatively unbiased, or that will at least state the specific perspective of the presenter before the story starts. But I want information to come to me without bias – kind of a “middle of the road” by presentation of the facts, rather than the extremes of bending the truth for your own good. Truth usually doesn’t exist in the extreme, it exists in a realm of competing information that affects its reality. And that’s where the real story lies, presenting ALL the facts, stating them clearly without bias, and letting the public use them to form their own educated opinions. If the public wants your editorial opinion then state it as such, rather than presenting opinion as reality. I’m tired of living in the extreme where I’m being told I live in a time where everything is better than it has ever been, or that we are about to lose democracy and live under a military dictatorship. Neither is true, but I sometimes wonder what the real situation is. And the media is almost useless in helping me find that reality.
MOTheRManGay 
Leave a comment