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Tuesday, February 08, 2005

The Media Spike Their Own Scandals

From Ace of Spades HQ we get another in a series of questions about why the media are not all over the claim by Eason Jordan's accusation that the US Military is deliberately killing reporters. He supplies some answers:

This search -- for "Dobson Spongebob," for Dobson's largely deliberately misquoted remarks about Spongebob Squarepants being gay -- turns up a fair number of MSM articles. CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC, BBC News -- all weigh in on how horrible it was for Dobson to not claim that Spongebob Squarepants was gay (although of course the party line is that's precisely what he said).

On the other hand, this search --
"Eason Jordan Davos target journalists" -- turns up nothing but blog references, at least for the first five pages. (I assume an MSM source would at least make it to the first five pages.)

Why the interest in the first story and the glaring disinterest in the second?

The simple truth is obvious. The media is an near-oligopoly of interlocked corporations, the same as auto manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, or cigarette makers. They claim their first priority is reporting the truth to the American people-- but then, car makers claim their first priority is delivering the best-made, most-affordable cars to the American people, too.

In fact, the first priorities of anyone in a corporate culture are 1) protect and advance your own career; 2) curry favor with those who can help with priority 1; 3) protect and advance the corporation generally, as that will advance priorities 1 and 2; and 4) protect and advance the industry generally, as you never know when you'll wind up working for another corporation within the industry, and doing so advances priorities 1, 2, and 3.

Just as in Rathergate, the media was far behind the curve in reporting on the egregiously-bad hoaxes perpertrated by CBSNews; the Boston Globe wen so far as to deliberately mischaracterize an expert's remarks (as were correctly reported by Bill from InDC). The media had a corporate and industry interest in avoiding the story, and, once avoiding it became impossible, defending it (and themselves, generally) from external critique and attack.

And so it goes. We are now on Day 7 after Eason Jordan "reported" that the American military had targeted and murdered 12 journalists in Iraq, and the MSM has not seen fit to report this story at all.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It had been believed for 60 years by most open minded people that the MSM was narrow minded and bigoted. Rathergate proved this belief to be a fact. Eason and Sponge Bob are more proof of the bigotry in the MSM.
Turner's people canning Eason after only 3 weeks - with 0 (as in no) coverage by the MSM - may show that the MSM is in fact not "mainstream" any more; and probably have not been since Talk Radio 26 years ago.
Rod Stanton