Social commentary - Journalism in America

Media types are fond of jumping on any bandwagon that passes by.

It makes no difference what goes by, as long as it can be manipulated and applied to the latest fashion, particularly if it’s one of politics.

The nightly barrage of televised pandering, daily written thought and radio news reports impresses the audiences with politically sufficient fodder for people to mull over, filling their appetite with perceived wisdom as if coming from authoritarians. The appetite for truth is disposed of in favor of gluttonous customs that purvey ideologies; namely the biases harboring media newsrooms. They are lying to us but we will let them do it anyway, is the cry from most that listen or read or watch.

What is presented is understood to be newsworthy and legitimate despite their manipulations. The various media outlets are eager to advance themselves as if truth were lies presentable as evidence of such. Lately, we are witnesses to methodologies more reminiscent of propaganda than news reportage`. One can hardly escape the media outlets that bombard their audiences with overwhelming feed and not much of the truth, so much so that the public remains on an information overload that overcomes sensibility and obscures the facts; missing true and complete content, they have fluffed the news up to vanity, the illusion reserved for narcissists. Coupled with an excess of advertising, the pretense is one of journalism yet its effect is one of the manipulation, much as in Orwell’s` Ministry of Truth.

The public for its part is so accustomed to skewered presentations than anything given to enthusiasm and repetition is considered news and entertainment; its daily visit is a routine the public readily accepts; it is assumed to be true because the media says it is.

The recent and ongoing democratic circuses presented an example of the media glorifying itself, thus revealing the medium which has become the message. “Only we can present the truth because we are who we are“is its method. Yet it is not philosophy that’s in question, but the media’s narcissistic view of itself when it presents fact with biases. The talking heads in the media attempt to claim truths as exclusive items; as if they held monopoly on it without distinguishing them from biases. The public notwithstanding is reticent, perplexed and stupefied; mesmerized all the while by the media’s facetious emotionalism. The media’s influence captivates all, at any given moment since the majority of journalists report from the same perspective and focus that their editors’ command of them. And in the inescapable world of media presentations, the public watches and the show goes on.

One must wonder why the public continues to be influenced by such unbecoming and boorish journalism. “all the news that’s fit to print” takes on a perverse meaning when judgment is made objectively and placed in proper frame of reference. Modern journalism ingratiates itself by imposing its will on the very people whom it regards as best able to absorb the material presented. The volumes aired, written, spoken, are empty words that hook the audience and become mantra; a din of noise as it placates the mind; journalists are masters of it and subjective of its methods.

The mind of the audience is a wonderful thing, but can be fooled, tricked, persuaded even; all contingent upon input by its owner and environmental stimuli. The various media are but vehicles for that methodology; presenting themselves wise with an ideology that is foreign to the common man.

Journalism today has reached that point where news reporting is replaced by subversion, which masquerades as reason, which appears as truth, which appears as wisdom. All stories run their respective course. Not so for media reporters who must ply the never ending events that must be cleansed, filtered and disseminated in a precise order that is supervised by unknown facilitators. Journalism continues with its perversions as the media understands its audience very well, their viceroys are simply good at what they do.

Note: this article was previously published at OpinionEditorials.com in March 2005 and revised to reflect media conditions as of March 2010.