Media Series: Post 2–Societal Direction, How medias’ focus determines what WE see.
By Jared | April 20, 2008
What is important today? Is it Brittany Spears’ pregnancy? Is it the war in Iraq? Is it another political scandal? Who determines what is important? We know simply from observation that it is “the media” that determines what is foremost in the national consciousness. Who determines what SHOULD be important?
Fine, but who determines what SHOULD be important? That isn’t as simple a question as you may think. If you’re like me, you might answer “God determines that.” There are any number of possible answers, but the fact is, we judge what SHOULD be important based on what we know now that IS important.
Thinking outside the box is fine and good, but what do you do when your only point of reference is the box itself? No matter what you do, the filter through which you see the world is going to shape the way you think about the world, if only because you have to start SOMEWHERE.
The media has its traditions and its directions just like any other social group does, and, by and large, people are not willing to break with what they know and have always known. Imagine a great ship on the ocean. It has momentum going straight ahead. Turning it around isn’t just a matter of stopping it and making it move another way. There is a huge weight of metal, of screws and rivets and sheet metal and bulkheads and people involved. If you bring the ship instantly to a dead stop, it will literally tear itself apart from stress.
To further complicate matters, every single passenger helps to determine the direction, (imagine an ocean liner in which every passenger has a set of bicycle pedals and a steering handle.) Every person has his own view of what should and should not be reported, and each one gets to decide what he does or does not include in a story.
Historically, the media tends to ride the left edge of society. (This is another subject for another time. The reasons are a little hard to get a grasp on.)
This can be a serious problem, because the media has a major role in determining what everyone in America’s “box” looks like. Take, for example, The Honest Truth. We definitely think outside the mainstream media’s box, but when all of society is already being told where to focus, it takes a massive amount of work to shift that attitude, even a fraction…and we, too, suffer from the pull of the media’s collective pointing.
Also keep in mind how much time Americans spend with media. Far more of our time is spent every day taking in either entertainment or news than ever before. That means the effect of this draw is even more pronounced…and we have to work even harder at correcting it.
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When the average person is exposed to liberalism for too long
By Jesse | April 7, 2008
This transcript from Rush Limbaugh’s show today is a great example of what happens to average people when they are exposed to liberalism for too long. I encourage you all to read the transcript if you have the time because it just shows the absolutely massive amount of disinformation that left has managed to disseminate in the past 8 years. It is up to all of us to do what Rush did: challenge people to take personal responsibility for the state of the nation.
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Media Series: Post 1–Media in Macro, How Information Flows
By Jared | March 28, 2008
How does the media work on a large scale? Why do national events grab the spotlight? If you pay any attention, you see the “it bleeds, it leads” mentality at work in the media. Fewer people bother to go deeper than a cynical comment or two in asking how news is made. That question is both important and interesting all by itself.
News is selected by what is most interesting to people, not necessarily by what is most important. Why is that? Yes, partly because the media want audience, but not entirely.
Picture the “media” as a pyramid. At the bottom, you have the local papers in which are published all varieties of stories, from a report on the local high schools to the car accident that closed off Main Street yesterday. Sprinkled throughout these stories are a few that might gain wider interest, such as the one about the school bus that got torn open by a snowplow. In my home town of Burns, Wyoming (200 people), there is no newspaper. Pine Bluffs, however, does have a paper, the Pine Bluffs Post. Cheyenne, Wyoming, my state’s capitol also has a paper, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. These are the local papers of my area. (There are also small television and radio stations.)
At our pyramid’s next level might be the regional news media. (Usually the media in larger cities.) These media, such as the Denver Post, the Casper Star Tribune (my state’s paper of record), or the Denver television news channels (or 850 KOA, Denver’s talk radio station), will both gather stories from the smaller papers around them and have their own reporting staff to do their work for them. They might pick up the story about the snow slow, because it killed several school children and that is, in their minds, newsworthy. They pass over the stories about small town high schools and car accidents. Who in Denver cares that the mayor of Pine Bluffs got pulled over for driving under the influence? Nobody. A school bus gets peeled open like a sardine can? Now that’s news.
This pyramid keeps going up to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the national television news stations, and other media. At some layers you might begin adding blogs, larger radio stations, cable television, columnists, etc.
By the time we reach the top, most of the “new” in news has disappeared, and the media are just picking up stories from smaller media sources. (Yes, politics and investigative journalism are exceptions, but national news sources rely primarily on others for their information.) Once a story has been determined to be newsworthy, the larger media send their own people to report on it (or just rebroadcast the story with their own analysis after making a few phone calls to verify it.)
Within hours of this story being reported, it was picked up by national news stations. Seen in perspective, this story was hardly worthy of national news. (How many people do you think are hurt or killed by snowplow/school bus collisions compared to knife-fights in inner-city schools?) It was just a car accident. Tragic, yes, but hardly earth-shattering. Black ice and car accidents happen every winter.
The fact is, nobody is guiding national news to the important issues. No single person or group of people makes those decisions. Part of news judgment is based on “magnitude” (how many people a story affects) and once a national media outlet picks up a story, it gains some magnitude. Reporters and editors make their own calls on magnitude, and, when it comes down to it, they’re really shooting blind. Is it any wonder, then, that we get such a random patchwork conglomeration in the “news?”
(Please note, it CAN be argued that the story about the snow plow was legitimate and should have had the place it did. I don’t care to argue the point. I’m simply using that as an example of how stories are passed from one media outlet to the next.)
Topics: Current Affairs, Politics, Principles, Societal Problems | No Comments »
Going deeper and asking why.
By Jared | March 24, 2008
It’s fairly easy to just rave on about this or that being wrong with society. It’s even easier to go picking through news stories and columns like a sniper, then tearing them apart and putting them back together again. (It’s also rather fun, and, yes, it can be more than a little instructive.)
Frankly, that’s exactly what journalism is becoming today—a “take it apart and put it back together again” discipline in which the journalist’s job is to pick out the most interesting bit of news and re-publish it with a new headline and a new twist, possibly a few statistics, and a bit of amusing commentary.
The journalist’s job is to make sure what he’s telling you is true. “Just the facts, man” journalism is about calling your sources, making notes, and making sure there really IS a body in the morgue to prove that the crime was committed.
Or it was. Times are changing. The internet has provided an information glut. Yes, local newspaper reporters are called to report on local situations. That IS how the news first gets into circulation most of the time, and it probably always will be. After the local reporter does his job, the “national news media” generally pick up these stories and run with them. Journalism is becoming a discipline of selection.
I don’t mean to belabor this point, but it has a great deal to do with what I hope to do next at The Honest Truth Online, so bear with me for a moment.
The media are important because they act as a lens to focus the people’s attention. Take my dad as an example. My dad builds machinery for a living. He has a family. He has bills to pay. He has to worry about flat tires and the neighbor’s dogs and property taxes. He’s got a life that is, more or less, analogous to everyone else’s.
My dad has only a very small percentage of his time to spend on national (or even local) news. Thus, whatever news source he reads/watches/listens to determines the following: 1. What he knows about national news. 2. What he considers important. 3. What political parties/charities he supports, how he votes, what he buys for his family, whether he can afford a new house/car/boat, etc.
The media are important because they determine what we know about the world and, to an extent, how we approach everything around us. (If interest rates are going up, you want to know about it, right? If the price of oil goes up, gas prices go up. We are so used to these things that we don’t even think about them anymore.)
There are academics somewhere, I’m sure, who study the media, but I’ve yet to see anyone in the media itself do a systematic, in-depth study of what drives politics (and by extension the rest of society) on a nuts and bolts level.
The subject is enormous, but I think it is possible to learn something from a good, honest try. In the interest of this, I’ll be starting several series of posts all focusing on the same question and building on one another. I have several areas to explore.
1. Why does it matter: What effect does this have on Joe American? How does the chain of events work?
2. Examine the worldview: What are they saying? Ok, Why are they asking those questions? And why are they looking in that direction for their answers?
3. Show me where it fits: Use contemporary examples, pulled from across the internet and other media to illustrate.
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Why Global Warming?
By Jared | March 13, 2008
“Created to take a stand against the greatest threat our planet has ever faced, Earth Hour uses the simple action of turning off the lights for one hour to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming….Originating in Sydney in 2007, the Earth Hour campaign has now gained global attention. As a result, on 8pm March 29, 2008 millions of people in some of the world’s major capital cities will unite and switch off for Earth Hour. See what is happening in your city and how you can get involved.”
This is a direct quote from earthhour.org, a website devoted to raising awareness about global warming. Whatever side of the political spectrum you happen to fall on, you almost certainly agree that the international furor over global warming has grown to truly huge proportions over the past few years (rightfully or not).
I would argue not. And I would also argue WHY not. First, take a quote from Timothy Ball, one of Canada’s first PH.Ds. in climatology:
“What would happen if tomorrow we were told that, after all, the Earth is flat? It would probably be the most important piece of news in the media and would generate a lot of debate. So why is it that when scientists who have studied the Global Warming phenomenon for years say that humans are not the cause nobody listens?”
(http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming020507.htm)
Ball makes an extremely good point. Global warming does not have backing from the scientific community as a whole, and in fact, is not driven by “science” but by politics. There has never been good data to indicate that mankind is behind any kind of warming trend here on earth, even if it is taking a nice cold winter (and a sun going into an inactive phase) to make the point.
If you want an essay on “why global warming doesn’t exist” you’ll have to look elsewhere. (You can start with Ball’s article.) I’m not an expert on that and see no need to become one. On the other hand, I do have eyes, and it doesn’t take a genius to see that the motivation behind the “global warming” hysteria is politically, not scientifically, motivated.
This is a tool, folks. The left wing in the world is using it as a lever to get what they want. It’s the politics of fear writ large. How large? In billions or trillions of dollars. Nor does it take a conspiracy theorist to see how it happened. Global cooling, which predated it, was bad science as well.
Both have been used in the same way—to get people to support a certain segment of the political ruling class in our society. In politics, all too often, the end justifies the means. Left-wing politicians saw an opportunity to increase their own power and took it. No need to be sure if something is true before you use it to get power for yourself. It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to be believable.
It was a ripple effect. One person picked it up, then another, then another. Soon, it was a world-wide issue.
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Hillary–groundhog, cockroach, attack dog
By Jared | March 9, 2008
Hillary just stuck her head out of her political bunker and declared we’re in for six more months of war. She still doesn’t seem to understand, though, that she’s in a catch 22. She can’t win with attack-dog politics, and the way she’s tearing Obama up, she might as well volunteer in the John McCain campaign.
Clinton is now insinuating that Obama would not be a capable commander in chief. (Strange. I agree with Hillary Clinton. This is scary.) In so doing, she’s courting more backfires from the media and her primary voter base, but she just can’t stop. Her strengths are all turned against her, and Obama is absolutely making the most of it.
In any political battle, there are three general categories of weapons—issues, emotions, and attacks. As with most democrat politicians, Hillary can’t win on the issues. The democrats haven’t been able to win on the issues since FDR’s New Deal came crashing down around his ears, leaving wreckage that still clutters our political landscape today. They realize this, instinctively even if not rationally, and they rarely bother trying to fight a war of issues today.
Clinton has always been an attack player. She has used her position as a woman (vulnerable, exploited, sensitive) to carry on a political cat-fight with her opponents. Her latest jibe about Obama’s lack of experience as a commander-in-chief is a case in point. Her MO thus-far has been to throw out insinuations and wait for the liberal media to do her dirty work for her, painting her as the injured party.
One fringe benefit of being female has been that she has the emotions on her side already. (Again, this is thanks to the media painting the democrat candidates as sensitive and caring and the republicans as evil and nasty.)
That is no longer true. Obama is the first serious candidate for president ever who is black. He has now preempted all emotional issues to his side simply by virtue of who and what he is. The country and the media are programmed to love him. (Being an amazingly good public speaker doesn’t hurt either.) Hillary never intentionally picked up the emotions as a primary weapon anyway. She simply got them by virtue of being who she is.
So what does that leave her with? Cattiness and snide attacks. That’s all. But there’s a problem. As I detailed in “The liberal worldview comes home to roost,” being black has put Obama in the protected sector. Any attack Hillary makes is going to backfire on her. If she was campaigning for the republican vote, she might be able to squeak by. Republicans vote on issues (and do not pay as much attention to media whining about attacks on their candidate). She simply can not win.
Obama himself is, perhaps, in the luckiest spot he could be, and he’s taking full advantage of it. He’s painted himself as the “reasonable” politician who isn’t used to dirty fighting. Now all he has to do is hunker down and smile. The worst he can be criticized for is “not hitting back” (which is part of his appeal anyway).
At the same time, the democrat party is split very nearly in half. Hillary isn’t going to quit. She’s told us so repeatedly.
The one thing Hillary has on her side is that the Clintons are political cockroaches. You can kick them, step on them, smash them, blow them up or even cut them in half and they still just won’t die.
It’s nearly impossible to say whether she actually has even a chance at the nomination. (The math against her is steep, especially after the above factors. It would take a miracle.) Buckle up folks. This could be one spectacular political season.
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Social Networking Sites
By Jared | March 6, 2008
According to an Associated Press article posted at Newsmax.com, Facebook has hired Google’s vice president of global online sales and operations to be their Chief Operating Officer. The article mentioned that Facebook, with 66 million users, has become the internet’s most populous social network.
As always, when Facebook is mentioned the whole specter of social networking sites and what they mean for society rises in my mind.
On a purely qualitative level, I like Facebook far better than any of the other sites I’ve looked at (MySpace, Xanga, Bebo, etc.) It has security and anti-spam features that I very much appreciate. I do not want just anyone to be able to see details I put up for my friends (contact info, for instance), and my MySpace account (which I only check once every two months) has gotten 30 times more spam messages than either “comments” or actual messages. Facebook lets me keep in touch with people I would otherwise never talk to without trying to keep track of a massive email list, and it’s mostly hands-free.
When it comes to social networking sites in general, deeper issues are always just under the surface. The first is, of course, the spate of recent horror stories of internet predators befriending children over MySpace. Each case of this is, of course, terrible, but blaming social networking sites for it is unfair and it takes the focus from where it should rest—on parents.
Just in the little browsing of MySpace that I’ve done (looking at friends’ profiles, and those of their friends) I’ve seen entirely too many MySpace profiles of underage girls who advertise their age as “99” (to fool the age filters) then proceed to post questionable pictures of themselves. I have to ask myself, where are these girls’ parents? I know that during my growing-up, my own parents were quite interested (and almost always aware) of what I was doing with my time, and especially when I was online.
There is a one-hundred-percent effective solution to internet predators. Keep your children off social networking sites (or closely monitor them). To do otherwise is to ask for trouble.
Even more thought-provoking than this, however, is the question of how the internet is changing our society. With webcams, voice chat and social-networking sites, society is becoming more and more internet-based. Nothing can beat real, live conversation, but internet is so much easier and more convenient.
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Feminism: Society’s Great Faux Pas
By Jared | March 2, 2008
When I saw the “Outlook” headline today on The Washington Post’s website, I could hardly believe my eyes. The words “Why Do Women Act So Dumb?” headed a column by Charlotte Allen that touched on everything from politics to driving to home economics. I couldn’t help being interested, and once I got into the column, I couldn’t help being impressed. I actually agreed with many of the points Allen made. (Ladies, I am not calling you stupid. Allen, being female, is allowed to do so if she wishes. I am not so foolish.)
I know the respective roles of men and women is a touchy subject all across the political spectrum, and I never expected a major newspaper, especially one as left-leaning as the Washington Post, to publish something useful on the subject.
Allen’s conclusion was that perhaps women should be less concerned about whether they are out-earning men in the business world, or out-thinking them in the scientific world and be more willing to do the things they are suited to, as she puts it, “tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home.”
I find it interesting to note, first, that this acknowledges that there are, indeed, differences between men and women and the way they think. (Yes, this should be obvious to any sane person, but apparently it is not, as for years there has been a popular myth among the academic elites that only circumstances create any mental or personality differences between the sexes.) Because academia is dominated by the left (and often vice-versa), seeing a column at the Washington Post admitting as much is a bit disconcerting.
I would also like to say that I am personally a great admirer of the fair sex (and can’t think of a healthy, twenty-two-year-old male who isn’t). I have no desire to dictate to any woman where she can go to school or work, or how to carry on her life. (Trying to tell a girl what she can and can’t do is a bad idea. Smart men know this. Dumb men learn it—often painfully.)
On the other hand, like Allen, I recommend that women play to their strengths. Why is it so terrible in our culture to say that women are, in general, happier “showing tenderness toward children and men and the weak” rather than trying to out-perform men in the business world? Is it a bad thing that men and women complement each other in life? It seems to me that modern feminism is possibly the world’s biggest case of “the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.”
I also think the feminism movement has done terrible damage, possibly irreparable damage, to women’s place in society. What do I mean? Simple—by trying to do men’s jobs better than men, women have lost men’s respect. (I am speaking of society as a whole and the general attitude of men toward women. Not specific cases)
It is interesting to note that Allen seems almost to be lamenting how women are failing to “measure up” to men. It shows just how badly our values are scrambled. Why is she comparing women to men? We are different, and should be content to leave it so.
By competing with men in men’s own world (or measuring themselves against men), women have lost a great deal of the value they once had in men’s eyes. Chivalry has been lost in America, and society is poorer for it.
The backlash is just as bad. While women have been robbed of their special place in society, men have been proportionally emasculated. It is no longer “normal” for men to have violent instincts (and the self-control to vent them properly) or even for men to want to protect and care for their women. Each of society’s attitudes has a ripple effect, and even now we are only beginning to see just how destructive this particular societal tsunami will be.
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Watching the liberals duke it out
By Jared | March 1, 2008
They say that you can tell the character of a man by his enemies as much as by his friends. Such a one is Rush Limbaugh, who has made headlines again by telling voters in Ohio and Texas to vote for Hillary Clinton.
There are few names as reviled by the left as Limbaugh. For nearly twenty years now (since 1988), Limbaugh has hosted a nationally syndicated conservative talk-radio show. By 2005, Limbaugh’s show had over 13 million weekly listeners, and he had become one of the most demonized conservative figures in media.
For some reason, listening to Rush just drives left-leaning listeners crazy.
(I imagine it would be like me listening to National Public Radio. When I hear NPR, I usually get an urge to bash my head against the wall. It isn’t particularly good for my blood pressure, especially now that I know how they decide what “news” is.)
Now, Rush is telling his audience to jump across the political fence in Texas and Ohio and vote for Hillary to keep her in the race. There are two immediately striking points.
First, how ironic is it that two of the most traditionally anti-Clinton media figures (Limbaugh and Ann Coulter) have recently said that Hillary was the candidate to vote for? (Granted neither of them was entirely serious, but it seems fitting somehow that two of the most violently conservative media personalities should endorse Mrs. Clinton.)
Coulter, of course, did so in protest of the Republican nomination of John McCain, while Limbaugh has expressly stated that he wants to keep the firefight going on the Democrat side of the aisle for as long as he can.
Second, is such a move morally acceptable?
It is, of course, perfectly legal, but is it ethical to change sides simply to spread chaos and confusion in the enemy’s camp? I certainly would not do so myself. It seems to me to be a dishonest tactic, even if Limbaugh is right that it would probably be effective.
There is one certainty. McCain needs to sit up and take notice of the treatment that Hillary Clinton is getting from the media.
When Obama attacks Clinton, the media say he is sharpening his rhetoric. When Clinton attacks Obama, the media characterize her as hateful and mean-spirited.
Even the pictures of Obama in a turban and traditional Kenyan garb that are being circulated have been blamed on Clinton. (The only really destructive thing about the pictures is the damage they’re dealing to Clinton in backlash—and she probably wasn’t the one who released them in the first place.)
As soon as the war on the liberal side cools down, McCain is going to have to deal with the same media forces. We’ve already seen the New York Times take a swing at him, and all indications are that their baseless smear piece is only the opening salvo in a long, long war.
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The liberal worldview comes home to roost
By Jared | February 20, 2008
The Associated Press reported Monday that Hillary Clinton is trying to smear Barack Obama.
Yup, you heard it right, now let’s try it again. This time, put it in quote marks. “Top advisers to Hillary Rodham Clinton accused Democratic rival Barack Obama of plagiarism Monday, the latest effort by her campaign to undermine the Illinois senator’s credibility.” (Obtained at Newsmax.com under the headline “Clinton camp accuses Obama of Plagiarism.”)
Take about two seconds to savor it. Instead of doing their job as part of the Clinton smear machine, at least a few members of the media have turned the sword of their pens on she who had been their biggest darling. Don’t you just feel vindicated? Took long enough, didn’t it?
…Ok, you’ve had your gloat. Don’t let it cloud your vision. There’s a lot more to be learned here.
Stealing the silverware (surely Mrs. Clinton’s biggest achievement and most valuable learning experience during her time in the White House) wasn’t enough to make them sit up and take notice. Why turn on her now?
Frankly, I doubt they even realize that’s what they did. It’s just how they’re programmed. Everybody has a worldview—a set of beliefs and opinions through which they see the world. That is why objectivity is impossible. No matter how you try to see things, it’s still you looking at them. A nearsighted person does not correct his eye problems by trying to guess how a person with normal vision sees.
Likewise with this reporter from the Associated Press. He came out of the indoctrination centers (journalism school) all programmed with a liberal world view that says “only racists criticize blacks.”
The reality is more subtle, but is exactly that. In this country, saying something negative about a black person is automatically bad. You are wrong to say it, even if it is true. Stating a simple fact like, “there are more black people in prison than white people” automatically makes people think that 1. You are a racist and 2. There is something wrong with the prison system.
Think about it a little more deeply. In US History class we learned that slave owners argued for slavery by saying black people were just too destructive and childish to be left alone. Maybe they were right. Perhaps the great experiment of African American freedom was just a great big mistake and we should round all the blackies up and start making them WORK again instead of mooching off hardworking Americans through the welfare system.
…Ok, you can stop freaking out now. I’m joking. I do think, however, that those of us who have brains need to do two things. One, be realistic about the problem and try to see through the lies inherent in the liberal world view. (And don’t take it so seriously when I make fun of black people. Sheesh. Equal opportunity humor, remember?) Two, try to fix the situation. …but that’s another story.
Topics: Current Affairs, Politics | No Comments »
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