Once upon a time, the media was, generally speaking, trusted: back when the New York Times really was the paper of record, all the way up to when Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. The news media has brought us some of the most important revelations in American history, like when the Washington Post broke the Watergate scandal through the investigations done by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Largely, the idea of calling the media “fake” and treating them as the enemy, rather than a source of information and truth, is very modern. At least on a scale this widespread.
That’s not to say the major news outlets haven’t walked themselves right into this problem. In an ever more corporate America, unchecked capitalism can cause widespread misinformation in the media. This led to the ability for Donald Trump to attack the media directly and cause Americans to distrust their media.
The 24-hour news cycle has become the new norm, due to near necessity for most major media outlets. But there are inherent issues that can cause misinformation when companies put ratings ahead of accurate reporting. It happens whenever an anchor is on air and says something along the lines of “we’ll update you as the story develops.” This attitude toward news allows for speed to be favored over quality, allowing more mistakes to be made.
Print journalism used to be, in some sense, a haven from this. But as digital takes over print, it becomes just as susceptible to the need for any individual outlet to get the news out faster than its competitors.
To be fair, the 24-hour cycle does have its benefits, but they are restricted to severe disasters like Hurricane Harvey or Sandy or Katrina and to attacks such as the ones on 9/11. These are times when learning things the moment information becomes available can help save lives. Most other times, the cycle is used just so an outlet can be the first to report on something.
This cycle comes from pressure for ratings, and has become the new norm as it becomes further successful for more outlets.
With intense ratings pressure comes sensationalism. The Weather Channel produces graphics for news outlets that they are able to use during their weather forecasts. But some of the graphics they include in their service are things like flipping and crashing cars, people and snowmobiles falling through ice and power lines made to look like they’re falling through a station’s news studio. All of this has to do with making the news more sensational than it may actually be, so that companies can increase their ratings. This is downright dangerous. When things that are sensationalized in the news don’t turn out to be as interesting or as dangerous as they’re played up to be, it causes desensitization and distrust in the public when something big actually does happen.
Ratings also come into play when a media outlet tries to create an ethos. Despite effort to remain unbiased, every television station, news publication and radio station inherently has its own ideas and agenda. For example, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal both skew to the right of the political spectrum, while NPR and the New York Times skew to the left.
Outlets like CNN and the New York Post remain closer to the middle. Outlets need to build these identities to separate themselves from other places that cover national news. If all of the media was completely unbiased, there would hardly need to be more than one outlet to effectively cover the news. But with such widespread perspectives from which different outlets report the news, it’s impossible for the media not to conflict with itself on what actually happened on any given day. Media outlets’ political slants become particularly evident when news analysis and news commentary come into play. When some viewers, listeners or readers take their favorite outlet’s word as law, misinformation gets spread quickly.
Media outlets also, in many cases, work to protect their advertisers. In 2006, Fox News was going to report a story that claimed most milk sold in the US is unfit to drink, due to the inclusion of certain hormones that can cause cancer. The manufacturer of some of the milk in question, Monsanto, was a major advertiser for Fox, and the journalists were asked to change the story by Fox, but wouldn’t. The story was killed due to advertiser pressure from Monsanto, and the journalists were offered money to keep quiet on the story. They refused, and were eventually fired from Fox News.
This kind of protection of advertisers comes as a response to companies not wanting their money pulled from a news program. The nature of investigative journalism leaves corporations vulnerable to criticism, as journalists look for the things that can help the public learn the truth about what goes on behind closed doors. Moreover, the Monsanto situation points to the idea that advertisers hold all the power, screening stories even before they air. If they buy in with enough money, advertisers can cancel any story that doesn’t fit their best interests.
Lastly, corporations have been merging. Today, five corporations control most of the media Americans consume: Comcast, The Walt Disney Company, AT&T, CBS Corporation and Viacom. Major news operations are owned by these companies, like ABC, which is owned by Disney. That means the same company who makes Good Morning America makes all the new Marvel and Star Wars movies. That’s not inherently bad, but it can cause major conflicts of interest when reporters face pressure not only from advertisers, but from the corporations they work for.
[RELATED: 09.25.2019 From the desk of Aidan Pollard, News Editor]
In 2018, the Sinclair Broadcast Group made dozens of local news anchors read a message during their newscasts. The message was about promising not to be “fake news” and that misinformation is “all too common” in modern media.
Looking past the surface-level, it was a corporation forcing its employees to juxtapose a nearly identical political message to localities all over the U.S. There were multiple edits of the stations reading the message, which play out like dystopian propaganda videos. Corporations should not be able to force broadcasters to recite messages that serve only the corporation and not the localities in which anchors and reporters broadcast.
All of these issues with misinformation in the media come from capitalistic tendencies left unchecked. Advertisers should not have the ability to screen stations’ stories, and stations should be protected from advertisers who threaten ad-pulls based on the content of the news. The media should shift away from the 24-hour news cycle.
Some stations are doing just that. HBO’s Vice News runs only once a week, focusing on really getting to the center of a couple big stories, rather than abridging big stories to make room for other stories. Big media conglomerates desperately need to be broken up so news stations can return to a sense of agency and autonomy over what they cover.
This is all handled in Noam Chomsky’s idea of manufactured consent. He claims media outlets are highly effective propaganda machines, manipulating their audience through market forces like rating-focused broadcasts, internalized assumptions like political biases and agendas, and self-censorship like Fox News’ Monsanto story. Chomsky says this is because “ … the general population are ‘ignorant outsiders.’ We have to keep them out of the public arena because they are either too stupid or if they get involved they will just make trouble. Their job is to be ‘spectators,’ not ‘participants.’ They are allowed to vote every once in a while for one of us smart guys. But then they are supposed to go home and do something else like watch football or MTV or whatever it may be.”
For anything to change about what news is presented to the public, we as a people need to take account for our own ignorances and learn hard truths we’d rather ignore. We need to make informed decisions on what we believe to be the whole truth based on unbiased consumption of information that may be outside of our comfort zone, so that we’re no longer having our consent manufactured for us.