I wish the "news" really mattered

PA Ram wrote:

“News” is about ratings–not the public good.

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I dont even like the ‘word’ News. I think its very misleading. I dont even like to use it.

Cuz I think the word ‘news’ suggests a certain neutrality or objectivity that has never really existed in corporate-news.

At any rate, whatever we call ‘it’ and whatever ‘it’ is….Its getting worse. As the number of outlets are gobbled up by fewer and fewer of the mega-corpse….

But you know all this.

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“Our picture of the world is provided by those that profit from our ignorance.” Gavin Gee

FAIR on the MSM’s ‘news’ on Syria, for one example:http://fair.org/home/media-erase-us-role-in-syrias-misery-call-for-us-to-inflict-more-misery/

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The closest I get to mainstream TV news is that I tune in to the PBS Newshour on Friday nights about 3 or 4 times a year to watch the Mark Shields/David Brooks commentary. Oh, and sometimes the round table on the Sunday morning Stephanopolous show. Just to hear the mainstream op-ed perspective after a week of significant domestic political news. I guess I’m just curious as to what the “pulse” of the nation is like sometimes.

I don’t think I ever tune in to get “news” from TV.

nittany ram wrote:

I listen to NPR while I’m at work. That’s the only mainstream news I listen to. I’m not saying it’s measurably better than any other mainstream news outlet, but like Zooey, I listen to it to see what events the general public is being exposed to.

I get most of my news from just reading around the internet.

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No need for NPR or any other site.

Just read my posts, as if i were GOD, and always think to yourself, “here’s WV-Ram with THE NEWS.”

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Zooey wrote:

I sometimes listen to NPR in the car – 15 minute commute to work. But I find them somewhat tedious. I mean…I guess I’m glad that someone is peeling back the cover of the folk music and tamale festival in Austin…but I really don’t care. .

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Like everyone here, I think the MSM is pretty lame. But I read it, watch it, listen to it, along with a lot of stuff outside the MSM.

Perhaps the main reason for that is that I want to know what they’re actually saying, and not what people are sayin’ they’re sayin’. I want to know for myself, first hand.

Over time, by doing this, I’ve discovered that a lot of the criticism about the media, left, right and center, falls into the same traps, ironically, that beset the MSM: lack of context, absurd glibness, an unsaid assumption of being smarter than everyone else, and not needing to really make a solid case for this or that. But perhaps the worst thing they do, like the MSM, is to use the part for the whole. That bugs me — a lot. A person or two, a show or two, isn’t a zeitgeist, etc. A person or two, a show or two, doesn’t give the critic license to imply or state straight up that “they all do X, Y or Z.”

Another observation: The next president, Dem or Republican, is gonna catch hell. I have a strong feeling that Trump has helped the media take itself seriously again, perhaps too seriously. They played lapdog through several administrations, and largely because Trump went after them viciously, they finally woke up out of their lapdogmatic slumber.

The next occupant of the White House is gonna get the full Trump treatment, especially if he or she is a Dem. The MSM are gonna do everything they can to avoid being accused of “bias” and double standards.