The Mainstream Media Is Failing America on the Debt Ceiling Crisis

The Mainstream Media Is Failing America on the Debt Ceiling Crisis
July 17, 2011
By Thomas Bishop


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But in referring to this decline, I am not referring to propaganda outlets and managed news like NewsCorp holdings, Fox News and right-wing radio. Managed news– like Rupert Mudoch’s Fox News– jeopardizes free and open societies by substituting fiction for facts, carefully filtered reports for truth, and cheerleading propaganda for real journalism.

No. The failure to accurately inform the public we are referring to here stems from those who profess to actually practice journalism – the mainstream media.

24 hour news creates ferocious competition among media organizations for audience share. This, coupled with the profit demand of their elite corporate ownership, has led to the decline. Why and how? The American press has moved toward sensationalism, entertainment, and opinion and away from traditional values of verification, proportion, relevance, depth, and quality of interpretation. The practice of investigation and reporting of events has been replaced by a “journalism of assertion” which ignores whether a claim is valid and encourages putting a claim – any claim, regardless if it has any validity — into the arena of public discussion for sensationalist ratings — and for profit — as quickly as possible.

And for the past few weeks, the American news media appears to relish providing front row tickets for the world’s best ongoing drama: the saga of the United States held hostage by Republicans heading off the cliff into the unfathomable economic abyss of a cataclysmic default. But no dreary reporting on cause and effect. Oh, of course not. C’mon. I mean, where’s the sizzle in that?

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for a long time now. Why would we have thought otherwise this time?
Their ideology matches that of the Republicans, after all! They didn't
push the Teaparty and Sarah Palin down our throats for the past 2.6 years
for nothing!

And, that is all there is to that.