America's new national political season is revving up and as someone who was never politically active (save for a protest I attended for the sake of a girl), I took it upon myself to be a more informed citizen this year.
To be honest, I was more concerned with collecting all the dragon shouts in Skyrim and praying to developer gods that Mass Effect 3 be a satisfactory conclusion to the futuristic science fiction epic the last time the most powerful geopolitical power in the world was polishing a new rock to put in the museum window. Politics was always in my periphery, though. My parents, with good intentions, raised me under the premise that my vote didn't count.
To this day, that sentiment remains true. And it surprises me.
I should probably explain that as a child, my exposure to politics was minimal. I watched almost nothing of consequence on television (I did catch live coverage of Princess Diana's death while blowing two hundred dollars in an arcade.) and my parents never discussed politics, save for my dad repeating definitively that our family voted Democrat because we weren't white.
So when I started paying attention to news media this election cycle I was surprised. Surprised that politicians were not above saying things purely for effect. I was surprised that news outlets were not above cleverly wording segments to propagate any number of pre-existing social agendas. I was surprised that sensationalism was more influential than broad-minded coherent logic in one of the most important political processes to the world.
I learned that big news media is less full of lies as it is full of half truths conveniently curated to craft an illusion of crisis to--I would guess--move public opinion into making a solid decision. As moderators of national conversations, they make no room for apathy or inaction.
Whether it's NPR, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, or Russia Today, FOX, TYT, or even worse, Infowars, Democracy Now or The Blaze, there's always a spin being put on the reporting of objective facts. Sometimes the spin is implied by the selection of facts presented--and alternatively those left out. Sometimes the spin is conspicuous, if not frankly stated. What none of these news groups can say they are not guilty of providing misleading statistics, or making far fetched conclusions on a limited dataset.
Pundits and the speaking segments they appear in seem to be a whole different story altogether. If I were an alcoholic, I would make a drinking game out of the way news media abuse pundits to push their ideas about social mores. Something like take a drink every time a pundit pushes aside an objection by repeating a statement worded with a lightly higher degree of worded emphasis, or hypocritically uses a method of argumentative oneupmanship they've chastised their opponent for using, or outrightly denys the validity of a popular opinion, or cuts off the moderator or their opposing pundit. (If you're interested in this sort of game, just go through past Crossfire segments.) The amount of logical fallacies that are allowed--and not addressed--by all parties involved in these supposed contentious conversations between experts makes it hard for average viewers to discern fact from fiction.
A few months ago, it was suggested that I watch Bill Maher's program on HBO; I seemed to share a lot of the same views he did. He and I agree that the current political system does not account for corruption, we are both realists on the issue of social progression, we take a step back from the perversion of social propriety (aka Political Correctness). It seemed we shared an ideal for society to go back to the idyllic 1950's, without the systemic racism, sexism and homophobia. We both agree that there is a pervasive distrust that sometimes borders on bigotry held by every activist organization on both sides of the political spectrum. Of course, being a comedian, Maher is not free of his own bigotries, and being a human, neither am I.
However, the more I watched, the more I realized that he was a reverberating mouthpiece for the socialist left, speaking disparagingly about the unpreferred Party, making general characterizations about the party based on how a few visible members have acted, unfairly giving weight to quotations without a fair-minded context, giving no credit to any earnestness that could be interpreted by their misgivings. That's when I realized he was the counterpart to Bill O'Reilly.
There are two sides in the industry of public information dissemination and they are definitely not the left-wing socialist media or the right-wing state media. Nor are they well-funded corporate media and independent investigative journalism. The line is actually much finer, the distinction is harder to clarify. One one hand, there are those that report information as scientific intellectuals, leaving room for doubt and critical thinking, and on the other hand there are the sensationalist storytellers, who create coherent narratives to establish prefabricated perspectives.
Because so much of the final judgement in fair and unbiased reporting is implicitly inferred by the viewers, it can be scary for those who report to leave this up to a collection of self-interested and poorly educated masses. But when a news organization purposefully manipulate public opinion, no matter how right they may be, they risk undermining their trustworthiness as an outlet for factual information.
In the last few months, I've spent many nights yelling at a screen. Not because what I saw was necessarily wrong, spiteful, or misleading but mostly because the responsibility for accurate reporting has been shirked, because these organizations that--from an economic standpoint--purport themselves as reliable sources of information have established themselves as unreliable--even when they might be right.
