Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] what majority wants Bush?

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Tue, 07 Sep 2004 10:45:40 -0500, Mikhail Kovalenko
<EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> Mike Miller wrote:
> 
> > In other words, people watching the news see it as unbiased if it is
> > showing the world to them in the way they see it - if it matches their
> > belief system.  If the news departs from the viewers perspective, they
> > will see the news as slanted.  The way I see it, we have ordinary news,
> > and we have extreme right wing, intentionally biased, politically-
> > motivated, often-deceitful crap (as on Fox News - Hannity, O'Reilly,
> > Coulter, etc.).  Where is the biased liberal news?  There is none!
> 
> Come on, Mike! You're very confused. Do you really believe that there
> can be extreme right wing crap without extreme left wing crap? It
> doesn't work that way. You don't even notice it because it matches your
> belief system.

If there were no cost to broadcasting or disseminating the news, I
would pretty much agree.  In the letters-to-the-editor space, or the
weblog space, where the "no cost" argument is closest to being true, I
think you can and do see a full spectrum of crap; a rainbow of crap,
if you will. :-)  In the real world, things are more complicated,
since any viewpoint expressed has to be paid for by somebody.  If we
are talking about a commercial media source, the people who do most of
the paying are corporations who have products to sell.  In a perfect
world, advertising itself would also not inject any net bias to the
situation, since advertisers should just want to maximize their
audience.  But this is where the problem really begins: people have
very different preferences for the shows that are on, and different
advertisers need to reach different audiences.  So what happens is a
kind of fine-tuning where advertisers spend money to get a specific
kind of audience, and broadcasters design programs that deliver those
market segments.  This has gone on for a long time, but for many years
the one facet of this that was less likely to be so finely tuned was
the news.  Everybody watched some news, but broadcasting the news
itself wasn't a huge moneymaker ("prime time" got its name for a
reason), so you made your half hour or hour as broad as possible. 
Clearly, this is not what happens today.  We have many all-news
channels, and with so much coverage, the "cycle" of news has gotten
faster and faster.  Now, it *still* could have been true that the news
we got from news networks was free of bias, if everybody watched and
followed the news in the same way and to the same extent.  But they
don't.  To the shock of probably nobody at this point, men followed
some kinds of news way more closely than women: specifically, sports,
politics, and financial stuff.  Now sports is just sports (more or
less), but politics and finance are certainly areas where partisan
differences exist.  Importantly, the politics of the target audience
of these shows (men old enough to spend more time watching TV than
doing other stuff) is to the right of the center of the whole spectrum
of political opinion.  Now, once advertisers and broadcasters start
chasing that demographic, the whole world changes.  Network news
outfits note that they are losing share to the cable news channels,
but the segment they're losing the most is the one we just discussed. 
Newspapers are really getting killed, but they can't afford not to
appeal to the people who would otherwise leave, so they shift.

Basically, without anything evil happening at all, you would expect
news to match the demographic of news watcher.  And from there, it's
just a short leap to the point where some broadcasters find that
bombast sells better than measured (boring) Meet-the-press stuff, and
there isn't much drama and bombast in centrist positions.  Also, there
is not very much to be gained from incredible accuracy, especially if
it messes up the story line.  So when news becomes big money
entertainment, you're going to see some amazing things happen, but
none of them (for the biggest media outlets) tend to shift the focus
either leftwards or towards some idealistic "teller of the truth"
role.

Now, that's hardly everything that's out there, but it cable news
surely does feed its audience.  A very interesting thing you can see
recently is that staid, clearly conservative publications like the
Wall Street Journal and the Economist of London, have started to
diverge notably from the cable TV script.  And the reason why is that
they have a different audience: people who have and want to make
serious amounts of money.  In that demographic, some social issues
like gay marriage or who got Bush his deferment are meaningless, but
other issues like how in the world will the US pay its growing current
accounts deficit and who got the US bogged down in Iraq still have a
lot of play. Where there is money to be made in the sheer accuracy of
reporting, then somebody will deliver the goods.  (Note that this
extends only to the news reporting; in the realm of opinion sold as
opinion, the WSJ and others still know where their bread is buttered.)

> Sigh.

Yeah, there's a sentiment I share.  I think it's even getting bipartisan. :-)

jking
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