Media Malaise

The Sherrod story shows the nature of a news cycle that, unlike say the Watergate scandal, does not wait for anything pesky like fact checking or even an interview with the person being charged. Instead the instantaneous nature of news today ensures that we will act first and then ask questions later. It highlights the major problems and potential advantages of media today. The first thing to say is the power of bloggers to actually influence policy, something that should theoretically lead to a stronger democracy where we do not have to count on the mainstream media to dominate the political discourse. On the other hand, it continues to show how effective conservative media personalities are at scewing the news and dominating the "liberal press" through scare campaigns, emotionally charged reporting, the spreading of half-truths and outright lies and by framing debates in their own terms. In a broader sense, it highlights the problems with the mainstream media today. As their staffs are cut, the profit motive comes to increasingly dominate decisions on what and how they present news and the elite nature of the top institutions moves further away from the muckrackers of yore, the major outlets in both print and on television have increasingly followed the model of Fox News and its many offshoots. Rather than actually fact-check, they just report what is said by others and hope for the best. Given that so many of these others are ideologically-infused in their reporting, they fall prey to the charge that he said-she said coverage merely gives credence to whoever speaks the loudest. And conservatives will probably always win this game. The media still has the power to serve as the fourth estate of government, checking the power of the elites inside and outside government. But they must go beyond the surface and discourses of the two parties and more radical fringe to actually report what is true and untrue in ongoing debates. This is particularly true regarding the question of race, where we continue to debate the absurd notion of "reverse racism" much more than we look at the actual numbers, which show lower wages and wealth, higher unemployment, lower academic achievement (in schools that are quantitatively and qualitatively worse in significant ways), lower life expectancy and a whole host of indicators that show that Blacks in America are not given an equal opportunity to succeed in a country that prides itself on the promises of the "American Dream." What's possibly the most surprisingly is how little soul searching appears to be occurring within the ranks of the mainstream media, who seem to be more interested in maintaining their withering power to frame the debate.