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Why Does the American Media Get Big Stories Wrong?

theatlantic.com

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Re: Why Does the American Media Get Big Stories Wrong?

#31

Post by Ntrails »

duedl0r wrote: post #19
crimsonzagar wrote: post #14

Media is wrong? No. Perhaps the following lines put it succinctly. "When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can hav…

"We do X, because people want X" is the stupidest argument I've ever heard. The funny thing is, those arguments are always coming from CEOs making X. How about we were made to like that, because CEOs of X can optimize their profits? But ok, everybody can tell me now that people can make their own choice. In fact, they can't. IT'S THE TRUTH. (btw ending a thought with "it's the truth" is yet another incredible stupid…

They didn't create a group of people who wanted unbalanced press coverage of events in line with their own viewpoints.

In British print media there is a whole range of right wing, middle and left wing newspapers. They all have a readership, and they all serve that readerships requirements. None of them created their readers thirst for leftist spin, or right wing shock - it exists and so they sell to it.

Often times the left and right wing extremes are owned by the same parent company. They don't care what we want, as long as we buy it from them.

Re: Why Does the American Media Get Big Stories Wrong?

#32

Post by brown9-2 »

Surveying stories as diverse as the Soviet spies that infiltrated the U.S. government during the Cold War, the bankruptcy of Enron, the anthrax attacks of 2001, the run-up to the Iraq War, and the Vioxx scandal, he points out that major news organizations have repeatedly missed or inexplicably ignored newsworthy facts and events of the utmost significance.

It will always be possible to pick certain stories or facts that "the media" have missed - because the world of "facts" is so large and no organization could always be either right about everything or omniscient. The world we live in is large and many things happen in it, and most of them are not easily (or even possibly) discoverable.

This sort of critique seems like it would ignore the fact that there are some stories that "the media" would have gotten "right", whatever that means.

You will always be able to find things that were missed.

Re: Why Does the American Media Get Big Stories Wrong?

#33

Post by gadders »

johnchristopher wrote: post #24
mercurial wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a small European country (Denmark) and I'm not aware of this behaviour. Do you have more specifics?

I would guess (based on wild and unsubstantiated assertions on my part) that parent is referring to eastward European countries such as the Balkans.

Or The Guardian in the UK, which almost exclusively carries local government and civil service jobs.

Obviously even this won't work with a Conservative (led) government.

Re: Why Does the American Media Get Big Stories Wrong?

#34

Post by duedl0r »

Ntrails wrote: post #31
duedl0r wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We do X, because people want X" is the stupidest argument I've ever heard. The funny thing is, those arguments are always coming from CEOs making X. How about we were made to like that, because CEOs of X can optimize their profits? But ok, everybody can tell me now that people can make their own choice. In fact, they can't. IT'S THE TRUTH. (btw ending a thought with "it's the truth" is yet another incredible stupid…

They didn't create a group of people who wanted unbalanced press coverage of events in line with their own viewpoints. In British print media there is a whole range of right wing, middle and left wing newspapers. They all have a readership, and they all serve that readerships requirements. None of them created their readers thirst for leftist spin, or right wing shock - it exists and so they sell to it. Often times t…

Yes, you're right, but I think what you're describing is the current situation. It doesn't say anything about how we got there in the first place.

For me this process is compareable to education of children. If you let your child drink coke instead of water, it will do so. But since we're good parents, we don't allow that, do we?

Btw, this whole argumentation isn't restricted to media. E.g. clothing companies: they want to make us believe, we want our stuff from Bangladesh, where the mortality is significantly higher in a cloth company than anywhere else?

So you're saying there are groups of people here who want this?

I just refuse to believe that.

In the end I'm not the one who makes a fortune of all this, so I'm not willing to take the responsibility.

Re: Why Does the American Media Get Big Stories Wrong?

#35

Post by DougWebb »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #16
Vivtek wrote: post #12

the American people, who want the media to rally around officials in times of crisis Bah. Speak for yourself, Atlantic Magazine. (Especially during manufactured crises...)

Of course he doesn't mean every single American - he's making a generalization. But kindly note that in the weeks after 9/11, fully three quarters of Americans supported a military engagement against countries that harbored terrorists - even, explicitly, if thousands of innocent civilians of those countries would be killed.

...fully three quarters of Americans supported a military engagement against countries that harbored terrorists...

The problem is that Iraq wasn't one of those countries, but the media mostly supported President Cheney's^h^h^h^h Bush's desire to invade anyway.

The American media is also hugely biased when it comes to reporting casualties too... every American soldier's death was and continues to be noted, but the huge number of soldiers with severe injuries is rarely counted, and the enormous number of local civilians and soldiers killed and injured are hardly mentioned at all. Aside from military families who know what's really going on, American warfare is presented to Americans as if it was just another one of our action movies. That's why we seem so ignorant about our impact on the world.

Re: Why Does the American Media Get Big Stories Wrong?

#36

Post by squozzer »

Here's my hypothesis -- The US Media gets things wrong because the news really isn't relevant. So errors of either commission or omission don't really matter -- sure, the occasional journalist resigns (e.g. Dan Rather after W's National Guard story) or someone goes to jail. Certainly the story is relevant to them, but not to the rest of us.

In most cases, when the story breaks, it's already over. And when a lesson can be drawn from it, it's usually the wrong one (e.g. "they hate us for our freedoms") but that's decided by the propagandists.

You might rightfully ask, "what about stories whose outcomes remain undecided, e.g. Syria? I doubt the outcome, or at least how the US will act, is undecided. But we're not likely to learn about such decisions until after they've been implemented, unless someone really needs to stick their finger in the wind before acting.

Re: Why Does the American Media Get Big Stories Wrong?

#37

Post by epo »

lazyjones wrote: post #13

I don't know how relevant this is to the american media, but here in small european countries, media corruption is rampant: government agencies (in particular ministries) bribe newspapers and magazines with expensive ads in order to avoid the (rightfully) bad press and possibly investigative journalism.

Citation required.

Re: Why Does the American Media Get Big Stories Wrong?

#38

Post by graycat »

(1) The 'news' is bait for the ad hook. (2) Good bait needs to get attention. (3) The ancient Greeks discovered that a sure-fire way to get and hold the attention of an audience was to use the techniques we now call 'formula fiction'. (4) The news is staffed heavily by humanities majors well acquainted with formula fiction. (5) The news, in order to get attention, is really mostly just light entertainment based on the techniques of formula fiction. (6) The old idea that a free press was to help create an "informed citizenry" as needed for a good democracy rarely competes with the approach of light entertainment. (7) There is more information available, but long "the medium is the message" held true -- that is, when have just a few major news outlets, those outlets go for the mass audience and omit special interests, the long tail, details, etc. and just stick with their light entertainment. (8) With the Internet, there are millions of 'outlets' so that we can be on the way to much more information beyond just light entertainment.

For the OP, for the light entertainment based on the techniques of formula fiction, getting details, facts, etc. correct was not very important. This is not new: There is an Andy Hardy movie from the 1930s that has Andy laughing at the poor accuracy of the news. The audiences for that movie in the 1930s were quite prepared to laugh at newspapers. For anyone with the discipline of a good STEM background, news is outrageously bad and irresponsible junk.

Re: Why Does the American Media Get Big Stories Wrong?

#39

Post by mercurial »

gadders wrote: post #33
johnchristopher wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess (based on wild and unsubstantiated assertions on my part) that parent is referring to eastward European countries such as the Balkans.

Or The Guardian in the UK, which almost exclusively carries local government and civil service jobs. Obviously even this won't work with a Conservative (led) government.

Are you simultaneously arguing the Guardian is bribed by the government and that the UK is a "small country"?

Re: Why Does the American Media Get Big Stories Wrong?

#40

Post by 6d0debc071 »

crimsonzagar wrote: post #14

Media is wrong? No. Perhaps the following lines put it succinctly. "When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can hav…

I start a company. You start a news company and report on me. Over time, I notice that a lot of people are reporting on me and I don't really control my image that well, so I start a press office. And the press office is mostly honest with you, because so many people are reporting on me and no-one would listen to what I had to say if I wasn't mostly honest.

So, there's no advantage in investigative journalism, which is relatively expensive. So, your media company hires less people to report on me and more people to just redistribute my press releases.

Now, at some point, I'm going to notice no-one's really reporting on me any more. And what do you think is going to happen then, once I've got you all over that barrel - you think I'm going to keep talking about myself honestly? Even if I will, someone won't, and that someone will have an advantage over me in the marketplace so, over time, she'll win.

That wouldn't be a conspiracy, at least not in the classical sense. You can get there with everyone starting off reasonably honest and if you shoot all the conspirators, then you'll just be right back where you started with the same underlying problem: Investigative reporting has to give you an edge in the marketplace that can't be eroded by the person you're investigating.

I'm not saying that's the only factor at work - though many news companies do seem to be more about second and third order content aggregation than they are about investigative reporting, especially when it comes to their relationship with organisations like the police. But - it's not necessarily about giving people what they want, or about a conspiracy, the news agencies can evolve into situations where they're going to be wrong. No-one needs to conspire, and no-one, at least on the news agency's part or the consumer's part - and very few initially on the part of the initial provider - needs to want it to be that way.

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