I am deeply disappointed in
the way the media is covering the U.S. presidential election and in their
abdication of responsibility to instill critical thinking into the political
process.
There are two problems at the
root of our media’s role in the deterioration of the electoral process and
ultimately of democracy itself. The
first rests at the foot of the colleges and graduate schools who teach ethics
in journalism. The second is a
by-product of a capitalistic economy run amok.
Today’s newspaper reporters
and television producers have been indoctrinated with an odd theory relating to
a journalist’s responsibility to present news without personal bias. The method being taught directs the journalist
to give equal time and credibility to each side of every issue and to every
political candidate. And since the media
apparently cannot afford their own research on complicated issues, they meet
this requirement by bringing in two partisans representing each extreme side of
the issue and letting them go at it, each making full-throated arguments for
their particular self-interested view of the world, without any kind of
screening by the anchor or producer.
If Mother Teresa were running
against Adolf Hitler for Congress, for example, you’d bring in a Catholic nun
(who, in addition to her seminary credentials, holds a law degree from Harvard),
on one side, to argue against, say, Joseph Goebbels on the other. They would each get equal time and equal
respect and nobody would try to interpret what they said.
Whoever thought this up, what
on earth made you think anything useful to public understanding of complicated
issues could come out of it?
The second cause of the
pathetic state of critical thinking among the American electorate is the
single-minded profit-driven focus of television news (and, to a lesser degree,
every other source of political news) to make everything a controversy, blowing
up every molehill into a mountain, keeping viewers glued to the channel no
matter how ridiculous the overplay of conflict and chaos. I first figured this out when I would check
the weather channel before going somewhere, packing in anticipation of
hurricane and tidal wave, only to find sunshine when I arrived. You may think one channel or another is
excessively biased, and while it’s true most of them are trying to attract a
particular base, the truth is they all want to see a close race. The only loyalty these guys have is to their
quarterly profit.
Is anybody surprised that so
many of our citizens are conspiracy-theorists who believe anything they hear on
talk radio?
These two candidates for
president are nowhere near comparable in their capability to serve the nation
and it just makes me heart-sick that the citizens of this once-great democracy
no longer have access to the necessary education or to a public-interested news
source to help them understand what’s going on.
