The American Media

The other day I was browsing Reddit on the Internet and I came across a post that caught my eye.  The title of the post was a quote by Jon Stewart, host of the Daily Show, which read “News networks aren’t invested in right or wrong, they’re interested in momentum.  You can take us to war based on false intelligence and pretense, but God forbid you rev us up for war and you don’t deliver.” Stewart was speaking in reference to the situation in Syria, in which the United States was prepared to go to war with Syria over their possession of chemical weapons, but recent developments have made war seem less and less likely.  In class we got into a brief discussion about how the American news networks are biased and the way that they present the news to the people, and I thought that this quote by Jon Stewart tied into that discussion.

American news networks today are essentially broken into two categories: the conservative networks and the liberal networks.  While both sides may be covering the exact same news story, their goal is to present that story to the American people in a light that favors their political views and ideals, and prove the other side wrong.  For example, conservative news networks might harshly criticize a decision made by President Obama, while the liberal networks will defend his decision.  Personally, I find this way of presenting the news to be counterproductive to the overall goal of the news, which is presenting the facts objectively to the people.  By putting a political spin on the news, the truth may get distorted by the political agenda of the networks presenting it. 

Then there’s the quote by Jon Stewart to consider.  According to him, the various news networks aren’t about right or wrong, but they’re about momentum.  It doesn’t matter which side is correct, as long as they can both keep the people coming back to watch the news.  I’m inclined to agree with what Stewart is saying.  This Syria situation showed us that both the liberal and conservative networks were both, for the most part, in agreement about going to war with Syria over the chemical weapons.  John Kerry, a democrat, said the only way that war could be avoided was for Syria to give control of their weapons to the UN.  Since nobody thought that would happen, the news networks gave their coverage basically saying war was going to happen.  Luckily, Syria and Russia started talks about giving up the chemical weapons and it looks like war will be averted.  Instead of being glad that a dangerous situation was avoided, the news networks are criticizing President Obama for looking weak compared to Russia and lamenting the fact that we likely aren’t going to war.  This is the point Stewart is trying to make, because now the momentum behind this story is essentially gone and the networks need to find the next big thing to talk about.

For a long time now I’ve felt that the news on television is a waste of time.  I feel that they give too much attention to things like celebrities, but they know that that’s the news that gets viewers from a majority of the American population.  I feel that they also tend to beat certain stories to death, but again they do it because they get viewers.  In my opinion, the news networks aren’t about presenting truthful and accurate stories to the people, but about finding ways to distract the people from their real world problems and keeping them uninformed, not unlike the way that sports are used to distract and keep the people happy.