Dog Eat Dog

The most interesting thing about the media today is that more often than not they will jump at any scandalous story, even if it's about their fellow journalist. There is a bit of a hubbub about how Madonna won a law suit against British press. A tabloid had run an article featuring wedding pictures that had been stolen from her home. I will not even begin to rant about how overbearingly annoying it is that someone would actually steal something from someone just because it would make for a story. Instead i would like to pause and reflect on how funny this is. The media is exploiting how Madonna has beat...the media. Granted it's American versus British but still, is there no code of honor?

Of course not. Its a competition all the way. Who can one up and who can exploit is all that maters. As long as people want to read something and it sells then go ahead and turn on the printers and mail the papers. One could say that the journalist who are spreading the word of the tabloids failure are doing good, showing the follies of paparazzi's that everyone knows are heinously annoying and immoral. This could be true, but it could also be true that the very same journalist would jump at the chance to write an article on a scandalous affair between Madonna and Josh Groban (because I mean who could see that coming? It would be crazy). 

In any case , I'm not saying that it's a terrible thing , the media turning on media, just pointing out the oddity of it.The intricacies of interest never fail to amuse me.

Wal-Mart Shoppers

I was on Thanksgiving break in Florida when I glanced at the T.V in the living room and saw the headline. WAL MART SHOPPER CRUSHED IN BLACK FRIDAY MADNESS.

I thought it was a joke.

Then realized that it was all true. A crowd of shoppers actually became so excited about prices that they trampled a man to death.

"This is ridiculous" I thought. Then I realized, THIS is america.

Perhaps its harsh to blame the media for only showing us crass stories about brittany spears shaving her head and high-school girls getting pregnant, when that really is what's happening. We truly do live in a country with strange problems and perhaps the media is a mirror image of that society. We are the people that want to slow down when looking at a car accident, we are the people who listen for gossip and indulge in learning secrets. It is the corporate side of the media industry that caters to that aspect of our society. In order to make a profit they have to give us the latest scoop on a wal mart scandal, because thats what people will buy. 

so thats what the media is, a mirror into our desires. Yes a good majority of us want to read about politics and science but another large portion of the country loves to see movie stars go to rehab.And so many papers include articles about Obama and GPS but many papers also printed a story about a wal mart disaster. 

A Broken Record of a Tragedy

Now I know that my last post was similar to this one but bear with me.

Today I sat in my Politics of war class and sat down to a lector on the Iraq war. Unfortunately my professor is quite ill and has almost no voice and so he told us we would have to do most of the talking.He requested that we gather into small groups and list what we knew about the war. We had simple questions to answer: what kind of war was it , who the combatants and what was the Surge etc etc. Now I do not claim to know a whole lot about the Iraq war in all it's complexity. I am aware of the fighting between the Sunni and Shiites and the US alliance with most of the Shiites. Besides that and a bit about the  Al-Qaeda, I'm not aware of a whole lot , still I got into the group of International Relations students assuming i was about to be informed. Strangely however , no one in my group knew a whole lot. Hardly anything , in fact. When the professor asked the class as a whole to share there was a heavy silence in the room. 

I was horrified. In a class of college students, most of whom are studying international relations, no one knew the specifics of the war. They could not even tell you what it is about. 

What kind of a country are we living in where the people don't even know why their soldiers are dying? Why is the media printing papers with celebrity marriages and dirty politicians social lives when there is a war going on that no one knows anything about? Why is it that news broadcasters are telling me about tests on organic vegetables and yet americans are being slaughtered and 90,000 refugees are driven from their homes every month?

The Public Eye

We have learned that one of the factors that dictates news is the interest of readers. One of the things that falls into this category is fame. People want to read about famous people : celebrities , politicians etc. Thousands of average people begin and end relationships every day but the only ones that get spread out on a magazine are the ones that are started and ended by people we see in the movies. A woman down the street from where I used to live embezzled money from town hall but it wasn't in any magazines , but if any famous politician tried to pull that trick their face would be one the news for weeks. This is a both beneficial and detrimental. While I cannot find any good reason to poke our nose into the personal life of overpaid actors I do think its good to know more about politicians. People need to know about the people with power in their local area. The detriment is found when you consider where the focus of the common people is being placed. For instance , hundred of people have read about Eliot Spitzer and his use of prostitutes. Its all over the news and internet and people everywhere are shaking their head and looking down on this obvious infringement on new York State law. Still , with the statistics of rape being what they are , why is the media focusing on one man having sex with a willing person? You can theorize that perhaps if the media focused on the unwilling victims and rapist's stories then maybe we could lower the statistic. Perhaps this is the detriment of drawing public focus , the detriment of idolization of the famous. 

Tunnel Vision

So I know that on election day , as history is being made I ought to write my blog on the impeding presidency. Still , I wanted to use this post to look back at past presidential decisions influenced by the media. 

Let me take you back to 1992 to one of the few "humanitarian" war decisions made in the U.S. 

What defines a Humanitarian intervention is a lack of personal gain for the country that intervenes.  But it raises the question "why go to war if there is no personal gain?". This is why humanitarian intervention doesn't happen often (or one could argue ...ever). 

So if people don't just send troops into a hostile place out of the goodness of their hearts, Why did Bush decide to provide relief to Somalia? The answer lies in the media and public opinion.

While somalia was undergoing famine crisis , there was also trouble brewing (well...boiling over actually) in The Balkans. Bosnia was being torn to pieces by serbian armies and the UN provided little help. So with all the pleas for help echoing out of Yugoslavia why did the president decide to send troops to Somalia? 

The answer is simple. The News began running pictures of starving people on the 6 o'clock slot. Happy American families were just sitting down to dinner when they were presented with horrific pictures of skeleton like children gleaming out from their television sets. The public response was passionate. People wanted something to be done , and as Bush had led a rather unspectacular Presidency he saw a chance to make a name for himself. 

1.5 somalians were expected to die from starvation , because of the intervention only 50,000 to 100,000 actually died. All because of some pictures in the media.

News At Half Empty

So call me sentimental but during tech week when one suffers from a significant loss of sleep i fight the temptation to be incredibly negative by looking at those heart warming (all be it kind of cheesy) stories the news is so fond of broadcasting. So last monday i went onto MSN news to look for such a tale. I wanted to hear about charity funding a children's hospital or a Man who had run into a burning building to save a baby, anything to make me start thinking the world wasn't an awful cynical place (even if it really is). So I click on the little NEWS tab and what do i see, Palin effigies, Body discovered in search for murdered teacher , college tuition up 6.4 percent , and thousands lack power after northeast storm (ruining halloween!!). I had to do some serious digging before finally finding a video story about a special farm of animals used as a kind of therapy for children with mental disabilities. It made me say "awww" and cheered me up , but why did i have to search so hard for it. Why was the rotting corpse of a murdered woman on the front page but a family builds a farm for special needs children to experience joy from and they get buried at the bottom of the news bin? What is society's obsession with tragedy? what happened to the days of the depression , when people turned to musicals like Oklahoma because of their optimistic views? why battle hard times with more negativity. Why not focus on the good?

The end that justifies the means

One of the major accusations that the media is throwing at the Obama campaign is that he is a "socialist". This scares people because socialism is quite a bit like communism. It's the idea that capitalism gives wealth to only a small fraction of society , leaving the majority with significantly less money and power. 

The thing is, the current system DOES only give money to a small fraction and in the upcoming depression it's not going to work out. But people hear "spread the wealth" and they can only see red. 

It's true that Obama's plan for fiscal reconstruction is not exactly individualistic. He does call for the individual to serve society with the raising of taxes. He also wants more government involvement in health care. The truth is however , we DO need to give to society as a whole if we are going to survive the financial crisis. People don't want to hear it but it IS necessary. As far as health care goes, Obama wants more involvement because he wants more affordable health care for anyone who needs it. Speaking as someone who has had to pay for her own health care out of pocket, I can tell you that this plan is also necessary. Obama wants to spread the wealth and the media and public go into a nervous frenzy , but doesn't it just make sense? Isn't it a flaw in the system that corrupt business owners can own cars that cost more than your house but the single working mother with a five year old son can't afford to take him to the hospital when he is sick? How can the media criticize something so obviously needed in this country, just because it isn't individualistic. Does the "individual" only mean "the elite individual"? The lower class is made up of individuals , it is not some seething mass we call "society".

Technology, no strings attached

In our recent readings we have been informed of the danger that technology (namely internet news feeds and bloggers) poses on journalism.

However , i feel that one positive point being left out is how blogging and some news feeds provide something unprecedented in our system of news :no strings attached. 

There is obviously less revenue when dealing with these things , bloggers (while often unreliable) report news for free. No one is paying these internet journalists and so there is no one to tell them what they can and cannot report. 

As we saw in the documentary on milk hormones , the big names that fund the news stations have a heavy hand in what is and isn't being revealed. They can kill any story that they think will be bad for their business. The corruption of money has seeped into every pore of T.V news programs and newspapers. 

So while you often run into the risk of false information in blogs and free news feeds , you are without the puppet strings of funding. If you find a blogger that proves themselves to be an actually intelligent well informed source of information you can  be pretty sure that no one is going to force them to withhold that information from you or alter it for commercial reasons.

In this way the revenue free news system is beneficial to us as a public. Less censorship will yield better warnings and is the pathway to a more enlightened audience.

Wolves , Poler bears and The second U in Nuclear

I know that the media has been pointing (and laughing ) at Palin lately, but against my every expectation they have actually cut her a break this time.

People are actually proud of her, she managed to get through the debate without putting her entire foot in her mouth, something completely unprecedented in Vice presidential debate history......o wait....

Despite being hailed as an idiot , I can now see the brilliance in Palin's technique. She has built herself up as such a completely incompetent individual that all she has to do to be considered successful is not make a complete fool of herself. Nothing she said was particularly brilliant , but because she didn't fall flat on her face people took her seriously, even called the debate a tie. 

Does anyone else remember how the media raked Bush over the coals for Saying "Nuc-u-lar"? No one even mentioned it when Palin said it...maybe because they were impressed that she actually knew what the war was about. Media crucified Bush for ruining the environmental treaty but when Palin allows the hunting of wolves and tries to keep Poler Bears off of the endangered species list, journalist hardly take notice. Why aren't people enraged? 

Because it's "funny". What we can laugh at doesn't scare us. 

All these SNL skits and classroom jokes make us find her amusing. Another brilliant technique on her account, who can hate someone who is so entertaining. No one thinks of her as a threat when she seems so harmlessly and hilariously stupid. But the future of the country is not so funny. The economy , the war, and the environment are deadly serious matters. If power is put in the wrong hand then we could easily slip into a depression. 

So why is everyone Laughing?

The Hatchet, The Scalpel and The Pen

It is difficult to watch the 2008 Presidential debate and be objective. Politics are like religion in that people can never discuss or observe the matters without a deep bias. Everyone has their own set of beliefs attached to the issues that they cannot simply put aside and ignore for an hour and a half. This said , one cannot expect a journalist, who (despite what some may say) is only human, to give a completely unbiased analysis.

Still , I went looking for media coverage that I could attack in this blog. Because of my own bias and desire to point out the flaws of media I went looking for the most right-wing of reviews so that I could crucify the unfair representation of the events on September 26,2008. I was shocked to find that most media coverage was strikingly fair. 

I first went to a simple fact-check article on MSN and after reading it I got out a sheet of paper and tallied how many "Misrepresentations" and "muddled facts" they accused each candidate of. It came out even , five tacked on to each. 

So I went to the news that I could count on being bias, I went to Fox. 

NOTHING! There was an article commending both candidates for their arguments and pointing out their downfalls evenly. "Whichever side you're on , you can find a way, without much trouble even, to claim victory in Friday night's Presidential debate". Susan B. Landau's overly cute blonde head was staring me down with an annoying smile that said "Ha! Better luck next time". 

So while I might resent Susan for ruining my intentions for this blog I must commend her along with the other journalists who fairly reported on the debate. Give the media one point on the score board. 

Progressive Thinking

When looking at America's past , no other time is as comparable to french existentialism as the sixties. People stopped believing in the sturdy morals that had fueled their everyday lives :trust in their religion , money , and most importantly their government. People were literally screaming in the streets desperate to be heard by the men in tailored business suits that were sending their brothers, fathers and sons off to a war that no body wanted to fight. Young boys received draft notices like death certificates. Some turned away from the very country that held their childhood memories, their families and friends to flee to Canada. When given the option to either die on a blood stained field in Vietnam or rot in prison they created their own : run away and never look back , live as an outcast...but LIVE. 

We may look at the desperate acts of these young people and ponder as to whether we have grown past such problems. There is no draft today, no one is going to mail us a letter saying we have to fight a war tomorrow. However, young boys are being given letters announcing their "stop-loss". Boys who have served their term are being dragged back to the homeland of their bullet induced nightmares. Whats worse is that people who signed up for non combat positions are handed a gun and told to do jobs they have never been trained for.

One such non combat soldier Hinzman fled to Canada recently to avoid deployment to Iraq. 

Now i will give the news this : they certainly are a glorious mirror into which we may see the ugly reflection of our downfalls. People are still fleeing to Canada? When i read this i couldn't believe it. We are backsliding into the follies of our past and no one is looking at this headline and seeing the scratch in the record? How can we not hold up an old newspaper from the sixties to the online print of the Henzman deportation case and not connect the dots?

So thank god for the headline, and shame only that the font is so small. People need to know what this country has become, people need stories like this to open up their eyes and see that progression has missed one little aspect of american life. 

A Simple Observation

Now I am no one to judge seeing as I have dedicated my life to the study of dramatics but one cannot deny the media's aggressive attraction to tragedy or scandal. It is enough to make a person question as to whether the news is a service to the public or simple entertainment for the masses. The news seems to be that annoying gossiping teenage girl that you couldn't help but listen to from time to time in high school. We have all found ourselves enjoying a juicy secret that we have no right to know.  The guilty thrill is almost too much to say no too. As we have grown up we have traded the whispering blonde with a story about Trisha's weekend abortion for a brunette on the daily news telling us about the "Gloucester Seventeen". Do we have a right to know about the unfortunate misleadings of these young girls? Probably not , it does not effect us positively in the least and yet we eat it up like it was maple candy. 

In the month of the Gloucester Seventeen (June 2008) research was being done to prove that arts benefit your health, A UN high level meeting on AIDS was held in New York, and Navsync released a CW46 low signal GPS. Ask any student on campus what was important in the news  in June however and if they don't say "I dunno" they would probably only speak of the pregnant teens in Massachusetts.  Why? Doesn't this seem trivial when compared to news that benefits the people? Still it is always going to be more entertaining to sit down and read about seventeen year-old girl's pact on getting pregnant at 16 than it is to read about a GPS system that will allow service in low frequency areas. 

So while , without the news we would be plunged into an abyss of ignorance , The news serves as more of a sitcom than a service to the average american. The news that actually covers the important stuff is always being questioned by the people, always being accused (perhaps correctly) of being bias and manipulating. 

Now while my blog is probably coming off as very anti-news I do not think being against the news system as a whole is possible ( and if it is it definitely is by no means intelligent). There are many a topic scrawled out on the sunday paper or across your T.V screen that are helpful and informative, but the problem is that most people never look away from Brittany Spears exposed vagina long enough to read them. In short, the negative side of news coverage often takes a toll on the beneficial side. The flaw of humanity spills out into anything that we do.

It is merely an observation.