I’ve been a relentless critic of the mainstream media, which I believe is infected with a liberal bias and has done great damage to this country with its one-sided narratives. But at least the media’s ideological biases are tempered by a journalistic ethos that stresses the need for objectivity, checking “the other side” of the story, and ascertaining the facts. The media may be guilty of cherry picking the evidence, but rarely do reporters make stuff up from whole cloth.
The media’s ability to live up to its journalistic credo is increasingly in jeopardy. According to Elaine C. Kamarck and Ashley Gabriele with the Brookings Institution, total newsroom employment has declined from 43,000 nationally in 1978 (when I was embarking upon my journalistic career) to 32,900 by 2015 — a decline of 26% — even as society was becoming more complex. There still is serious journalism going on, but much of it resides behind paywalls accessible only to elite audiences that can afford the hefty subscriptions.
Meanwhile, the general public relies less upon traditional gumshoe-journalism outlets for their “news” and more upon digital content increasingly imbued with entertainment, such as Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” or Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show. Even those programs, as biased as they are, are at least tethered to reality by a reliance upon video and news clips generated by the mainstream media for source material.
What is especially concerning is the proliferation of unmediated content on email and social media. I can’t count the number of right-wing rants about Obama’s faked birth certificate or some other paranoid obsession that some gullible correspondent has forwarded to me. Distorted information and outrageous lies propagate on the left wing of the ideological spectrum as well.
Social media has accelerated the metabolism of rumor-mongering to a speed faster even than email, often with profoundly negative consequences. A recent comment by Spike Lee, who is promoting a new movie about the epidemic of gun violence in Chicago, struck a chord. Gangsters respond to unfiltered, unmediated Instagram, Twitter and Facebook posts “not by typing something on their phones but by bang, bang, bang,” Lee told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
With email and social media, people create insular networks of like-minded people who rarely question one another’s biases and assumptions. There are no fact-checking intermediaries in social media. The nature of social, cultural, economic and political reality is so complex that anyone can put a plausible-sounding but profoundly wrong spin on just about any issue. Everyone believes what they want to believe, and society schisms into mutually uncomprehending factions.
I don’t see how it ends well.
— JAB
