“Entire stories are conceived of by New York managers who not only assign a given topic but also tell us whom we should interview, what they should say, and how the story should be written. We’re asked to create a reality that fits their New York image of what they believe, what they’ve read, what they’ve been told by their contacts, or what they’ve heard at parties.”
- Stonewalled
Long before candidate Donald Trump began using the term FAKE NEWS to describe negative and erroneous stories; fake news was seen as propaganda and deliberate misinformation. To the corporate media, however, fake news is the reporting of accurate stories that President Trump simply doesn’t like.
Misinformation is defined as false or inaccurate information that is deliberately intended to deceive. “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth,” said Nazi Joseph Goebbels. And repeat it has, from media personalities, politicians, and their surrogates. Bias in the media has been chronic for decades, only the severity has intensified. Too many in the media operate in half-truths and outright fabrications and just assume that we don’t know. And, the reality is, too many of us don’t.
Bias in the media is reflected in more ways than one. Bias can be spotted in the selective stories that are reported and the ones that are ignored. Stories are also reported with a particular political slant, with opposing views either blocked or demonized. In fact, alternative media sources like the Drudge Report and Daily Caller along with conservative talk radio have succeeded by simply providing the other side of the story. This increase in news sources, however, has brought about a decline in more thorough reporting, replaced instead with bleeding-edge news, as networks race to be first on a story, resulting in even more inaccuracies.
Other proof of media bias is found in a misinformed public who seems oblivious to certain facts. For instance, polls show that many people believe that poverty is increasing, when in fact, it has been dropping worldwide over the past several decades. While gun ownership has doubled in the US, the number of gun deaths has been cut in half. You’d never know this by watching the news. In fact, they would lead you to believe the opposite is true because keeping to a political narrative is now the goal. And it’s easier to go along to get along than to stand alone, even when you are standing with the truth. Ask Sharyl Attkisson.
In Sharyl Attkisson’s 2014 book, “Stonewalled”, Attkisson describes her own experience with media bias as a network reporter. While much of the book details scandals during the Obama administration, Attkisson begins by revealing how the government interfered with her home computer by monitoring her work, accessing her emails, and hacking the passwords to financial accounts. Not only was a government entity responsible for these invasive incidents, but they also buried three classified documents deep in her hard drive, to use against her if necessary. Unfortunately, these scare tactics have bred a compliant media, content to report fiction rather than fact.
In documenting bias within the media, Attkisson describes a story about demonstrators protesting for a minimum wage. As part of the story, Attkisson interviewed ten minimum-wage workers. All ten acknowledged that they had been offered and turned down promotions due to the increase in responsibility that came with the new job. This information, however, was not allowed to be included because it would “skew the viewer’s impression of the demonstration”. Additionally, most of the protesters were not minimum wage workers themselves but were paid agitators. Instead of giving reporters free rein to follow an event and report it accurately, journalists are given the desired outcome of the story, to match the New York editor's liberal slant.
Attkisson goes on to describe an exercise called “the Substitution Game”, which she plays throughout the book, where you take a given news scenario and posit how it might be treated if key players were substituted. For example, everyone recalls the hysteria of the media when children were seen in cages in immigration centers on the southern border in 2018. Yet, when the same pictures were produced during the Obama administration, these same broadcasters sat silent. Are we so divided that we can’t agree that these circumstances should all be treated the same? Why can’t we be outraged over the event itself, and not based on which party is in power? Perhaps the next time you feel your outrage meter activated, try to substitute players and see if the fury is still there. By doing so, we might just discover our own biases.
Today, we are living through the panic of the Coronavirus, where networks are reporting on lines formed outside of Costco and the like, as worried shoppers horde toilet paper and bottled water at breakneck speed. Irresponsible news reporting is leading the charge.
The media has been described as the most powerful sector of the economy. But who is watching the watchers, to ensure accountability of those in power? Remember, the next time you hear the term “fake news”, don’t think about Trump’s assertions or the media’s claims, remember Sharyl Attkisson’s’.
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