Media Bias, Advertisers, and the Free Press

Media Bias, Advertisers, and the Free Press

I’d like to start this off by saying I am not a member of the Press… I am just some guy in pajamas (currently scrubs) and I got my words to say here.

Look at what’s happened at CNN (tailwind, two scandals from Eason Jordan), CBS (the TANG memos, phony Vietnam vets claiming atrocities), the NYTs (Jayson Blair), USA Today ( umm with whomever the guy there was) and probably the next case of bias from another media outlet. This was not about republicans out to get democrats or big money against the little guy…. This is about an industry that long ago realized that to make money they have to generate viewers. And they have chosen a way to make money. Fox has chosen bias in another way ( as had rush, hannity, etc)

These biases are about selling a product to people. Why does fox work? Because a lot of folks out there in TV land knew just by a careful eye and ear was spun and twisted. Thus the Product of Fox News sold well to those people. That is one of two ways that the media companies serve their advertisers (targeting). Talk Radio and Fox use this method very well.

The Traditional media party is still working the Muckraker card. “Everything is horrible; the world is going to end unless you do exactly what we tell you to.” They are targeting the fact people do see *gasps* problems in the real world. So the bigger the problems that the media shows to the general public, the bigger their draw of viewers and readers. That’s part of the “Liberal Media Bias”. And with this part, you can say all manner of things that P*** off your advertising base, but the numbers of viewers will still come in and you still sell. This is how shows like Married with Children last out moral controversies. This method can be risky but it has a big pay day.

And the advertisers? Sure they can get mad but if their ad reaches the most profitable and maximum cross section of the audience the greedy little piggies will keep eating it up. Controversy ( such as boycott campaigns) can work if something is marginal. But if it has roots (Married with Children, the WWE) it won’t work. Advertisers go for the demographics that ensure their success. So the corporate defense just doesn’t work. If the New York Times, USA Today, or CNN keep pumping out the people, they will keep getting in the Ad revenue.

Now they aren’t. Because they long ago stopped caring about the product they put out. Was the Scott Peterson trial more important then the brutalizing of poor people in the Congo by UN personnel? Not by any rational definition of the word Important. Should wall to wall coverage be given to any high profile trial, while the vast majority of people in North Korea are living on a starvation diet do to the criminal behavior of the government? Again no. they don’t want to do the stories that are meaningful from a muck raking standpoint, they simply want to do the ones that get them their bang for the buck

Do we see Journalists going after the incestuous relations between the scientific research community and many of the very industries who would make their ideas real products? Where are the Journalists questioning foreign governments who opposed the Iraq war, and were the bulk of pre and post sanction Iraqi trade? The journalists don’t see those things as problem because of the second byproduct of bias

Journalists, all of the national elite live in a small pond. Most of them go to the same parties, the same restaurants, the same social functions. Many of them live in close proximity or vacation in close proximity to each other. For the Media to stand as the 4th estate over the rest of the world they would have to go there.

This is not a problem that is republican or democrat in origin. As Rush Limbaugh is likely in orbit of the same clutches of geography as Hillary Clinton. The people with power are largely centralized in the same community, and as such they have the same environmental concerns dictating how they see the world.

Now at many of the local newspapers this was not the case till they were consolidated and corporate group think enforced upon them. Bias is about environment. They don’t see what they are doing is wrong. And bias is about roping in us plebes into buying their product and the other people who totemize their product. Except when I was a kid I can’t think of a time advertising on TV, newspapers, or radio influenced me to get a product. It’s because it’s just a box or a paper... its no more important then that.

And my mother always taught me not to believe everything you hear or read. So media has failed to snare me, and they will continue the road to bias.