Real Time: The Media's Constant Quest for False Balance
By Heather Sunday Sep 13, 2009 4:00am
The panel discussion from this week's Real Time with Bill Maher on the media's constant quest for false balance and pretending there are always two equally valid sides to every issue. This is something that any of us who monitor the cable news daily nonsense already know but it was nice to hear some of these things said aloud for once.
Too many of the talking heads on television are nothing but out of work political consultants. They want a left and right person to battle it out for ratings instead of bringing in people who are actually knowledgeable on a subject. They give cranks equal weight in a debate when they deserve to be dismissed rather than given air time, and they confuse balance for accuracy.
The media has done their best to dumb down the American electorate which unfortunately doesn't always need any help in that department, and as Bill points out, sadly they're doing a good job.
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NPR = National Propaganda Radio.
A 2004 FAIR study concluded that "NPR’s guest list shows the radio service relies on the same elite and influential sources that dominate mainstream commercial news, and falls short of reflecting the diversity of the American public."
Noam Chomsky has criticized NPR as being biased toward ideological power and the status quo.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Public_...
After St. Ronnie threatened to shut them down as a socialist institution in the 80's they started dumbing down their news. That was bad enough, but then their correspondents started to also work for commercial media (e.g., Cokie Roberts, Mara Liason, Juan Williams), I assume because those gigs paid better. But it also compromised their integrity. Then during the Bush administration NPR finally put its tail between its legs and just gave up doing the real hard news reporting it should have been doing. If it hadn't been for the BBC during the run up to the Iraq war, I wouldn't have learned anything about the evidence contradicting the official line from the Bush administration.
I still listen to NPR, but I listen to them just as critically and skeptically as any other news organization. They've lost my trust and will have to change before they'll regain it.
There's a part of me that wants to respond, "Duh..." because this problem has been around for over a decade and is so obvious post-9/11 that it seems like all sentient Americans should be aware of it. But there's another part of me that is glad it keeps getting raised because it seems that so many of us have such short attention spans that we revert to accepting the status quo without being willing to work to change things.
I agree. When Bush was in office, it took them a while to get on his case, because 9/11 had just happened -- so they didn't want to look like they were anti-American. But all through the Clinton administration and now during the Obama administration, the media has been playing devil's advocate, so to speak. They aren't being fair and balanced. In my view, it is the responsibility of the media to investigate and find improper things being done by the government and bring them out into the light. It is their responsibility to ask the hard question, so that the people in government have an opportunity to explain their views. What the media has become is anti-administration -- whatever party is in power. It is disruptive. Sometimes what the administration is doing is correct and proper.
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