(07-27-2015 09:17 AM)NIU007 Wrote: (07-27-2015 09:13 AM)QuestionSocratic Wrote: (07-27-2015 08:48 AM)Machiavelli Wrote: I honestly DGAF whatever Jenner does. But the above manufacturing of a story ... that's the distilled essence of everything wrong with journalism today.
It's corporate in nature. Too many tentacles or angles in making a story. Too many hands baking the pie. All of our news sources with the exception NPR and PBS have a corporate overlord. At one time we had laws on the books that would have prevented this.
Government funding. Yep that gets you unbiased news.
So, does PBS change their viewpoint every time the party that's in the White House changes? Or the party that controls Congress?
No, they don't change their viewpoint unless the on-air personalities change, just like the other networks. When is the last time that changed for any of them in any kind of massive way? Hint: Never.
This whole talking point about corporations control the media so the media are conservative is a bunch of crap for several reasons.
1) Ownership and top management don't reach down to the level of controlling editorial content. The news staff would revolt, and the corporate overlords don't really care about that level of detail. They care about numbers. They will make changes if they aren't getting the listeners/viewers, but that's it.
2) There is a very strong establishment groupthink in news. The journalism schools are pretty much of one mind, far left, and everybody who breaks in has to run that gauntlet. So there is a lot of indoctrination bias. That's one reason why a lot of the more conservative commentators have non-traditional educational backgrounds (law, business, military).
3) One thing that has always amazed me was how long it took anyone to come up with the idea of Fox News. With the conservative viewpoint so woefully underserved in the mainstream media, I thought for decades that a conservative leaning news outlet would get big numbers and be very profitable. And that's exactly what has happened. I guess it took so long at least partly because of the need to overcome the groupthink bias among news staffs. What I don't understand now is why somebody at an NBC or CBS or ABC news doesn't look at Fox and say, "Hey, they have the center and right all to themselves, we could shift our point of view to center-right and pick up a lot of viewers." But again, the people who would make that call are career news folks who have been steadily influenced to lean left from the start.
4) The talking point depends upon the assumption that corporate = leans right. But media is closely linked to entertainment, and many of the corporate types have Hollywood backgrounds, which promotes a hard left groupthink, or otherwise lean hard left. Consider the likes of Michael Eisner and Ted Turner (who is pretty much out of media now, and used to be pretty much a centrist until he married Jane Fonda, and CNN took off to the left under what was apparently Fonda's influence).
5) The talking point depends on the further assumption that the goal of news is to make the biggest possible profit, and that serving the most people by being in the center is the way to make the biggest profit. That's not the way management views it. From the local radio station to the national networks, news is a loss leader, something they have to do to keep their license. So they don't really look at it from a profitability standpoint. They are mostly just trying to minimize losses. And the cheapest way to minimize losses while getting reasonable numbers is to overdramatize stupid stuff, like Caley Anthony or O.J. Simpson or take your pick among hundreds, if not thousands, of others. And remember it's the news staff who is making the decisions of what to cover, not corporate (there isn't time to consult corporate on real-time decisions), so they tend to cover the things that THEY find interesting and assume that the public will do the same.
If I were sufficiently wealthy, one investment I would try to make would be one of the big 3 networks, and one change I would make would be to direct the news to the center-right/libertarian point of view. I think there's a significant unserved or underserved potential clientele there. Fox is more neocon, the others lean hard left. ALL of the others lean hard left.
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So now we have political reason to cheer for ESPN's death too
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