Well, Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert pulled it off. They held their Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear on the Mall in Washington DC on October 30th, 2010. I wasn’t able to attend it in person, but Comedy Central aired it (commercial free), live that morning. I was entertained by the first 2.5 hours, and moved by the last 30 minutes of it. That balance (in retrospect) seems about right, but watching the convention, I kept wanting Stewart to get to the damn point already. Still, at the end of the day, I thought it was a great event and had a great message: That the political extremists on both sides of the isle have hijacked this country, and we the sane need to take it back. Our main stream media does little more but fuel the fire, just so they can stir the pot and make news out of it. Our Media spends all it’s time focusing on the extreme, the sensational, and the most controversial stories they can find, often blowing them out of proportion, if not not lying about them altogether, and at the end of the day that is hurting America.
Here’s a prime example of this phenomenon, I just picked this up off of a friend’s Facebook Wall. Apparently, the president is headed to India for a G20 conference. An un-credited, anonymous source in INDIA has claimed that the president is going to be traveling with 3000 people, will rent out the entire Taj Mahal hotel, and will spend over $200 million dollars a day on the trip. Factcheck.org did the math on this as part of their investigative work. Apparently, it only costs $190 million dollars a day to run the war in Afghanistan, so the idea that a small state visit would exceed that cost is pretty far fetched. The white house has categorically denied the claims, but they can’t put forth the real numbers for fear of letting the wrong people know important details about the president’s security detail while he’s overseas. Most conventional wisdom points to an error in the translation, and that the Indian reporter meant 200 million rupees a day, which translates to about 5 million US Dollars a day. That figure is much more in line with what a presidential trip should cost, based on figures from the Bush and Clinton administrations.
However, Rush Limbaugh got a hold of this and blasted it all over the American radio. Of course, all he focused on was the $200 million dollar a day figure. Then Glen Beck added in that he would be taking 34 warships and an aircraft carrier (which, by the way, would be about 10% of the entire US Navy). Neither man would list his source, or perform the most basic fact checking. Instead, they are riling up the American people against the President’s flagrant waste of Tax Payer’s Dollars... How is this helping America? It’s not. It’s helping Rush, and Beck, and their supporters. When Fox News pulls the same stunts, they aren’t doing it to help the people, they are doing it to help their stock holders and their Republican Buddies. When MSNBC (who is actively trying to emulate Fox News now, but for the Democrats instead) pull the same moves, it’s not to help the people but to help their ratings, their stock holders, and get a little more air time for the democrats. I could rant about that move from MSNBC for awhile, but I wont… I’ll just chalk it up to fighting fire with fire, and move on. At least MSNBC is fighting for the little guys, not the big and powerful… but that’s a rant for another time. Even CNN, which does a reasonable job of being moderate and trying to represent both sides, resorts to sensationalist reporting to grab people’s attention. Steven Colbert drew attention to this at the rally, when he awarded Anderson Cooper’s tight black tee-shirt one of his Fear awards.
In looking over all the major players in the Mainstream Media, a trend becomes painfully obvious, coming from all sides of the landscape. The media has long since lost their ‘journalist integrity’… they lost it the day that the networks decided that news shows needed to be profitable. The day that the people in charge put profits over proper reporting, the media ceased being a reliable source of news and became no better than the politicians they are covering. Think about it… Most people would agree that it’s wrong for a politician to take money from a lobbyist group and then legislate in favor of those lobbyists. How is it any better for the media to take advertising money from the same corporations, and be expected to report fairly on news based around those corporations, especially when it involves corruption in Washington? I lost the last of my illusions on that matter while watching the BP Oil Spill coverage on CNN. Every night, Anderson Cooper would rail BP for their bullshit in the gulf, hitting them especially hard for the millions of dollars they spent on their PR campaign while refusing to pay the locals… but the very next day, those same BP commercials were being aired on CNN, DURING AC360. I don’t fault Cooper for that, but if the network, CNN, is willing to take ad money from BP, how can we be expected to trust that they are going to give a fair report of BP’s actions?
The problem is worse that all that, though… If ratings are king, and sensationalism gets ratings, how do you drum up your sensationalism? Easy… you take a note from the grocery store tabloids and you lie through your teeth! Either through active deception (i.e. saying something you know isn’t true), or regurgitating facts that no one on your staff has bothered to fact check, you can deceive your audience. The India trip debacle has gotten so far out of hand that members of Congress are going on national news programs and calling the president out on this ‘wasteful spending’. One senator was on AC360 last week to discuss how the Republicans are going to trim the budget in the House. Instead of talking about that, she tried to change the topic from reducing Medicare costs to the India Trip, and Anderson had to lay the smack down on her for it. Fox news is so good at lying on the air that they’ve gone to court over it. The result of that lawsuit and similar suites like it is that Fox News can legally lie on the air, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
Of course, without the media, how are any of us going to know what the hell is going on? And if the Media can say whatever the fuck they want and not be held accountable for it, they how can we believe what we hear? It’s a never ending spiral of lies and blame and bullshit that does nothing but hurt this country and the people who live here. It’s gotten to the point that I almost can’t bear to watch the news anymore, even on CNN. I’m not alone, either… and I think it’s a big part of why Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert are the 2 most trusted sources of news on Television today. As much as I like those 2 guys, this is not the way it should be! What happened to the folks like Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Walter Cronkite? What can we do to get our news media back to the way it was?
Well, I think the first solution is to pass legislation that forces News organizations to fact check stories they put out there, and clearly labels opinions and unproven ‘facts’ as such. This goes for everyone, from Fox to CNN to MSNBC, even NPR: If you want to call yourself a NEWS show, you have to be reporting honestly. Just forcing the media to tell the truth about situations will go a long way towards clearing the air. I’m not saying that news shows can’t or shouldn’t have opinions, or pundits, or commentators, or analysts… those folks are there to help explain what's going on and what it means to the rest of us. Fine, I can live with that. But what I can’t stomach are ‘News’ shows that spend hours analyzing, debating, and propagating stories (like the India trip) that are complete falsehoods.
The other solution to the problem is to remove the motivation for news shows to pander to their supporters. National News Organizations that are privately funded are ultimately motivated by their sponsors and their revenu money. I don’t believe that a news show can be truly objective in that situation. I would like to see publicly funded news organizations, prohibited from receiving private capital and forced to fact check the stories they report on. Everything else has to be labeled as opinion pieces, and prohibited from being called ‘News Organizations’. I know that idea will never fly, but it’s the only way I can think of to remove the driving force of the Media to put their ratings over their integrity.
The reason it would never fly is that a publicly funded newscast would wind up being boring. Beyond the obvious lack of the outlandish stories that are the mainstream media’s bread and butter, these networks would have to work with a limited budget. Fox wouldn’t be able to hire analysts like Karl Rove and Sarah Palin, or hire talk show hosts like Glen Beck. MSNBC would have similar issue (although, given his crusader like mentality, I think Keith Olberman would keep working). CNN wouldn’t be able to keep buying those nifty (and completely useless) technological toys, like their 3D holograms and Wall-O-Bricks charts. News would go back to the way it was in the 60’s, with a couple of anchors behind a desk, reporting on the stories, with the occasional editorial or opinion piece off to the side and on the scene reports for big events. Personally, I would love it. We would learn more and there would be a lot less anger and hatred between the right and left in the country. Unfortunately, most American’s don’t give a fuck about learning more, they want to be entertained, they want to fight, and they need someone to blame for things they dislike. So, we’ve allowed our news channels to become a source of entertainment, and let ourselves get into the mess we’re in now.
Obviously, I’m going to have to fix this, when the world is mine…
--Crash
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