[sonny]

This is just another subject that came up at the gun club yesterday....Wow!.....you should have heard some of the comments......what do you all think about it?

[Billll]

The government? No. They wish they could keep the media off their backs when things go awry.
Ideologues of various persuasions? Absolutely. Every outlet has its slant, as evidenced by their willingness to cover or ignore things.

[Jim March]

No, what's happened is that the media have gotten lazy.

The reporters are playing a game whereby access to government officials is the top source of stories. The government in turn encourages this with "leaks" and with favored access to those reporters and news bureaus that help their causes.

True investigative reporting is much harder, as it pisses off the "powers that be" and you lose "insider access".

[TexasVet]

They can't even control NPR and they pay half it's costs!

[Malone LaVeigh]

It's more the other way around...

[Seeker]

Malone LaVeigh, my thoughts exactly.
The media (and parent corporations) control the gov't.

[Malone LaVeigh]

More precisely, the media is one of the tools that the corps use to keep the govt to their liking.

[Khornet]

I was just reflecting this morning on two things: first, how the French press were bought out by the Nazis on the eve of WWII, playing a akey role in the erosion of the French will to fight, and second, how some leftist or other recently called for US to have a state-run media organ like the BBC, claiming it would eliminate bias and inaccuracy!

No question that the media see themselves as a branch of government, a "Fourth Estate", an integral part of the system. One applicant at a journalism school was asked why he wanted to be a journalist, and answered that he "wanted to help people"! Today's media folk have a sense of mission instead of a dispassionate desire to accurately chronicle events. I think it's far more pronounced on the left than right, and conservative media outlets, like Fox (so I hear--I don't watch TV) seem to exist not so much to push a conservative view on the people as to counter the liberal bias everywhere else.

Bottom line, IMHO: gov't doesn's control media, wishes it could, does teriffic damage when it does, and no media outlet is really trustworthy.

Malone: that's two appearances in one thread. Things must be quieting down along the Puta branch.

[Joe Demko]

Ah yes, the myth of the unbiased journalist. Every media outlet has always pushed the POV of the people who run/staff it. Read some of Mark Twain's pieces describing his experiences as a newspaper editor for some hilarious 19th century examples. The major media outlets are owned by the mega-corporations, so Malone is dead right...the media does push the corporate POV. To that, I will add that the government and the mega-corps are so tightly intertwined that is not innaccurate to say that the governmnet controls the media. Once in a while, a sacrifice is offered up to keep the facade of independent media in place; the public humiliations of Nixon and Clinton come to mind, but the system doesn't change.

[cuchulainn]

More precisely, the media is one of the tools that the corps use to keep the govt to their liking. Any evidence of that?

And, no, saying that a media outlet hasn't covered a bad story about its parent company is not evidence of "keeping the government to their liking." It's evidence of bias, to be sure. But it's a big step from "bias in favor of the parent company" to "keeping the government to their liking."

As well, the failure of the media to cover a particular story with the angle you favor (oh, say, about a particular war) is not evidence that there is some mastermind corporate demon pulling the strings behind the scene.

Look, I'm right next to the rest of you criticizing media bias, but I don't think there is any organized entity directing that bias from the curtains.

It's similar to how I look at bias and propaganda in higher education. It's there. It's prevalent and pervasive. We ought to work against it. But there is no entity behind the phenomenon.

Sorry, but I see a watered-down Illuminati conspiracy theory. Fnord.

[Leatherneck]

Jim March nailed it. "Controlled leakage" is especially prevalent inside the Beltway.

TC
TFL Survivor

[cuchulainn]

Ah yes, the myth of the unbiased journalist. Indeed. The point of the 1st Amt is to secure the right to issue biased propaganda while pretending to be unbiased. I'm serious.

Oh, we need to work against and fight the bias and propaganda, but I just don't get mad at it or see it as a conspiracy -- unless you count a confederacy of dunces as a conspiracy.