A Solution To Biased National TV News
We have met the enemy -- and he is us.
There was an interesting column in the Wall Street Journal recently about what has become of the so-called mainstream media — and what remains of its audience.
The piece was by Journal columnist Holman Jenkins — and a couple of his thoughts jumped out at me.
Here’s one: “National TV news, contrary to the fantasy of some of its surviving viewers, no longer aims to find out about the world and bring it to you. It aims to find out what you want to believe about the world so it can feed it to you.” (Emphasis added).
Maybe the reason I think Jenkins is so spot on is because I’ve been saying the same thing for quite some time now — especially about cable TV, which I’ve called one of the most divisive institutions in all of America.
Fox, CNN and MSNBC may present news that’s factually correct, most of the time anyway — so that’s not the problem. The problem is that each plays up certain stories and plays down other stories based largely on how much they want to pander to their viewers.
Example: Fox News was all over the border crisis during the Biden Administration. It was legitimate news and Fox did a great job reporting the story. But that’s not the only reason Fox spent so much time on the border. Another reason — a very big reason: The chaos on the border was bad news for President Biden — and the Fox audience tunes into the channel because it loves to hear bad news about Joe Biden.
If you watched CNN or MSNBC you might not even know there was a crisis on the border — because that wasn’t the kind of news their liberal viewers tuned in to hear.
The pandering works in both directions. CNN and MSNBC play up every hair-brained utterance that emanates from the mouth of Donald Trump. That’s also legitimate news. But here again, there’s more. Liberal news channels spend so much time on things that make Trump look bad because that’s the kind of news that liberals want to hear. And Fox plays down Trump’s goofy observations, misstatements, and outright lies because that’s not what its audience wants to hear.
So before we move on, let’s review what Holman Jenkins wrote in his column:
“National TV news, contrary to the fantasy of some of its surviving viewers, no longer aims to find out about the world and bring it to you. It aims to find out what you want to believe about the world so it can feed it to you.”
OK, so where do we go from here. Mr. Jenkins has an observation about that too:
“A media that brainlessly renders everything as a battle of all-good versus all-bad is a menace to society and will be self-liquidating in the long run.”
Let’s hope he’s right about that.
He goes on to say:
“Happily, there’s one practice media employers can adopt right now to speed the adjustment along. Fire stupidity. Relentlessly, unapologetically remove from the work force people who show themselves to be intellectually insipid conformists, who can’t reason properly, who are emotionally incapable of skepticism or resistance to popular bandwagons. Media owners will be surprised how quickly many problems … will fix themselves.”
Let’s hope he’s right about that, too. But let’s not forget one not-so-small reason for the problem: The consumer of this so-called information.
They’re getting the kind of news they want — biases and all. The audience is the un-indicted co-conspirator. As Pogo put it so eloquently: “We have met the enemy — and he is us.”
When Rupert Murdoch started Fox News, it came across as having the viewpoint of the Chicago Tribune, when Robert McCormick was Publisher and Editor. It was slanted to the right, but willing to be critical of Republicans, when criticism was deserved.
Now, it's just cheerleading channel for Donald Trump.
I started watching News Nation, because it far less biased than Fox, as well as CNN and MSNBC.
Dan Abrams kind of enjoyed pointing out when any of the three cable competitors, as well as CBS, ABC, the Post, and the NYT all jumped off the rails of unbiased news coverage.
The "solution" proposed by Jenkins will never happen, UNLESS the audience demands it. As Bernie has pointed out many times, the emphasis in the Cable News Business is BUSINESS, not NEWS. Recall not too long ago, a new boss came in at CNN, and he made a sincere attempt to move CNN to the middle, and get out of the far Left propaganda business. The result - CNN's ratings went down, the "newsroom" revolted, and the guy was fired. On the plus side, I do see NewsNation holding its own. I do believe there is a "silent majority" that is just tired of this partisan cheerleading, but that audience doesn't reliably tune in for hours a day to get their fix, unlike the brainwashed hyper partisans that religiously tune in to their team's channel every night.