Media Malaise

I have been absent from my blog the past month or so with an end of semester rush, but wanted to start it up again now. I have talked often about the media abrogating their responsibility in recent years and wanted to start offering specific examples as they become available.

One of the most obvious ways in which the media has lost its critical touch is by failing to fact check claims made by politicians. In this relatively minor example, we witness a writer from the Omaha World Herlad who appears too lazy to check a simple fact:

"The Iowa senator has questioned why people should be charged upwards of $5 to withdraw their own money. He said the cost of an ATM transaction is only about 36 cents, yet people often are charged $2 or $3 to take out $20." (http://www.omaha.com/article/20100520/NEWS/705209844#atms-a-mystery-to-senator).

This is a common and infuriating trend that reaches from the smallest local papers all the way up to the Washinton Post, New York Times and LA Times. Rather than tell us who is closer to the facts, they tend to just report what each side says and leave it up to the reader to chose which one to believe -- which I imagine would tend to be the side they are aligned with. Luckily we do have the Internet and a series of organizations and bloggers doing that fact checking for us, but unfortunately they tend to reach people who agree with their general political positions. When media becomes mere entertainment, we all lose -- but most of all those who believe it plays an integral role in democracy.