Balanced News? Bah, Humbug!

I've written before about the dumbing down of public broadcasting, especially its news and documentary work. Here's a confirmation from the commercial media. I've noticed it particularly on the News Hour, which has utterly abandoned the effort to provide objective reporting in the name of something called "balance", which long ago infected other tv news. In brief, "balance" is the mistaken notion that truth can be found by splitting the difference between two competing views. Never mind that there are often more than two legitimate views. The predominance of this kind of reporting has encouraged one side to take the extreme position that they can simply disregard reality and say whatever seems convenient, as long as they are consistent, secure in the knowledge that they will be considered at least half right. The Washington Post quoted the Republican chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting saying that PBS' critics are engaging in "paranoia", advising them to "grow up." "We're only seeking balance," he said. "I am concerned about perceptions that not all parts of the political spectrum are reflected on public broadcasting. [But] there are no hidden agendas."

Don't buy it. It is nothing but a hidden agenda, though it's often hidden in plain sight. The voices that have been added are not conservative voices of prudence and reason. They are shills for regressive ideology and apologists for the Bush administration. They seek not to inform, but to dissemble and confuse.

And it is all part of a much larger orchestrated attack that has been ongoing for 40 years now. First came the attacks on the supposed liberal bias of the media, attacks which continue today, when all the available evidence clearly says that exactly the opposite is true. While the bias never really existed, it was effective in getting reporters and, especially, the tv networks, to bend over backward in order to avoid the appearance of bias. Little did they know that the right wing would never be satisfied, even now when the commercial media mostly uncritically parrots their canards. Then came the "compromise" of "balance", which suited the commercial media well, because it's a lot less expensive to do point-counterpoint type interviews than it is to do actual research. Then came the reduction in news staffs in the commercial media, in response to market pressures, which left them far more at the mercy of government pronouncements that they could not independently verify. Then came Fox News, which not only combined all of these pressures at once, but blatantly broke all the rules of objective reporting, hewing strictly to one ideological line. Failure to double and triple check his sources essentially got Dan Rather run out of Dodge, but when Fox News anchor Brit Hume spoke a blatant falsehood in the midst of a Social Security "news" report and stood by it, that was just fine with Fox.

So, where do we go from here? The first thing to do is to recognize that the forces that have changed commercial media, and now PBS, are not going to go away, and the damage they have inflicted will not be reversed easily. The commercial media will respond only to the loss of market share. PBS will respond only to changes in Congress and the White House. The answer, which I will continue to repeat until it happens, is to build our own media. This does not have to be Fox in reverse; in fact, I'd argue that it shouldn't be. The truth is on our side; we just need a better megaphone. That isn't an argument that providing more facts will change people's minds, by itself. It is more of a statistical argument. Each individual is receptive and responsive to different types of information and different styles of presentation. The more different ways we have of delivering the truth, the more likely it is that some of it will seep in and alter the perceptions of enough people to make a difference.

So what are those different ways? It's one effort at a time, mostly small ones. We'd love to have a full-fledged tv network, but that's going to take time, and billions of $$$. Of course, we've got Air America radio. And for those of you with satellite tv, there is a channel called Link TV (channel 375 on DirecTV) that offers a variety of international information, and also presents a news program called Democracy Now. While Democracy Now does mostly straight news in an honest way, their editorial decisions are consciously leftist, so that it is a good way to broaden your exposure, but not a good sole source of information. There are still some good newspapers and magazines, most available via the internet, including The Nation, The Progressive, Mother Jones, the Columbus (Ohio) Free Press, and The Village Voice. As I wrote earlier, the Los Angeles Times, in many regards a mainstream newspaper, is beginning to do a consistently good, objective job of investigative reporting. There are also a variety of local radio shows, including this one in Houston, that is also available via streaming over the internet. Ah, yes--the internet. You are reading this currently on a blog. Blogs, as Juan Cole points out, are a distributed medium not beholden to anyone. Anyone can participate, and while professional standards may be lacking, so are commercial pressures. Cole's enlightened presentation concludes with this:

"... this difference, my friends, accounts for why bloggers get vilified. Journalists can be switched to another story, or fired, or their stories can be buried on page 36. We can't be fired. So if Martin Peretz doesn't like what we have to say, he will publish a hatchet job on us in The New Republic, seeking to make us taboo. If you can't shut people up, and you really don't want their voices heard, then all you can do is try to persuade others not to listen to them or give them a platform. The easiest way to do this is to falsely accuse them of racism or Communism some other character flaw unacceptable to polite society. Because of the distributed character of blogging "computing," however, such tactics are probably doomed to fail.

We are not the mainstream media, and we are here. Get used to it."

Couldn't have said it better.

DEMOPHOENIX