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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 6/27/12

Aaron Sorkin's "Newsroom": What's Good, and What's Missing

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But Sorkin's dead right about a number of things, especially about the death of a real civil society if the public cannot find out what is really going on.

As the computer genius Charles Babbage put it: On two occasions I have been asked, -- "'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?'. . . I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question". [v]

If the American people are being fed garbage, they cannot make good decisions based on such a diet.

Six major conglomerates now own the U.S. media. Go back two decades and that number was in the dozens. The consolidation of news in a few hands, the turning of news into profit centers (where news shows used to be loss leaders), and the overall dominance of right-wing politics and neoliberal ideology determining what will and will not be shown and how it will be framed, make up the actual situation.

"As Shanto Iyengar, a leading expert on framing, explains, referring to the well-established phenomenon that people will give very different answers to questions depending upon how the questions are worded, 'Question wording effects are not symptomatic of weakly held preferences or naive respondents. To the contrary, these effects emerge across a wide range of subject-matter sophistication and expertise.'4

"In other words, it is not just the ignorant or easily swayed that are seduced by framing effects. This effect applies equally to people of very varied political persuasions. A story's framing determines the boundaries of acceptable discussion and debate. Thinking outside those boundaries is invariably labeled 'unrealistic,' rendered irrelevant, and designated as impossible or outlandish in the arena of 'legitimate' public debate.

"The main problem for our society is not, therefore, that too few Americans pay close enough attention to the news or that too many Americans are gullible, even though both of these phenomena exist and contribute significantly to the problem. Through a combination of, on the one hand, the media's failure to cover--or censorship of--vital facts and issues and, on the other hand, their framing of issues in ways that predetermine what may or may not be considered, what the people of this country do not know about public policy and what falsehoods they believe have never been more extensive, extreme, and consequential. In the parlance of computer science: GIGO--Garbage In, Garbage Out. If the people are not being given reliable and fair representations of current events and issues, and if in addition they are being systematically told outright falsehoods, then there is no way that they can make sensible and wise decisions; they are being fed a steady diet of garbage. Mushrooms grow well on manure, but people do not make good decisions on a steady diet of it" (Pp. 263)

In other words, it isn't just "telling truth to stupid," as McHale puts it, articulating her view of what media ought to be. It's more, "telling truth about the media, stupid."

[This article appeared originally at DennisLoo.com on 6/26/12)

[i] See Robert Parry, "Price of the "Liberal Media' Myth," ConsortiumNews.com, January 1, 2003, http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/123102a.html , accessed January 5, 2009.

See also Dan Kennedy, "Jack Welch's Journalistic values (II)," Media Nation (blog), October 28, 2006, http://www.dankennedy.net/2006/10/ , accessed February 11, 2009.

[ii] Michael I. Niman, "Bush Cousin Calls Presidential Election," Buffalo Beat, MediaStudy.com, December 14, 2000, http://www.mediastudy.com/articles/jellis.html, accessed May 23, 2009.

[iii] David Podvin and Carolyn Kay, "Media Coverup Part IV," MakeThemAccountable.com, December 31, 2009, http://makethemaccountable.com/coverup/Part_04.htm , accessed January 3, 2010. A source for the Podvin and Kay article is a former GE media executive who wishes to remain anonymous.

[iv] This article is no longer available on the Wall Street Journal's website. A copy and paste version of the entire article, however, can be found at GamingForums.com, http://igamingforums.com/iGaming/ViacomSetsRecordStraight/dnqjn/post.htm, accessed February 19, 2011.

[v] Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Longman and Co., 1864), 67.

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Cal Poly Pomona Sociology Professor. Author of "Globalization and the Demolition of Society," co-editor/author (with Peter Phillips) of "Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney." National Steering Committee Member of the World Can't (more...)
 
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