Friday, November 11, 2005

Riot coverage excessive?

We all know that there is some either conscious or subconscious process that causes our media to cover some stories more than you would like and some less (or not at all). Many people, myself included, charge that many media outlets allow the political implications of a story to effect the coverage.

The French have people in their news media saying "we are limiting coverage of the riots, the international coverage is excessive", etc. That is interesting as far as it goes and we have seen the same thing here.

However, they have media bosses saying "we are limiting coverage of the riots because we don't want to encourage support for right-wing politicians". And they think that is OK.

For instance, it is bad enough that we know that CBS had political motivations to run their discredited Bush-TANG story. Can you imagine the reaction if they had come out and said, "Look, we knew this story might turn out to be discredited but we were betting that wouldn't happen until after John Kerry was in the White House"? The state of things in this country is that we have to accept that at least some of the bias is subconscious and along with that acceptance on our part should be a noble attempt to limit it on theirs.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home