Drive by Media

Well we might as well jump right in. Whether you like him or hate him Rush Limbaugh’s catch phrase for todays media is pretty accurate. What it is doing to the general discourse in our culture is without a doubt disastrous.

Watching the news on tv or reading print articles in the paper or on the internet is a bit like listening to a twelve year old girl explaining her religious beliefs. The first thing you need to know is who her parents are.

The general media today has become as polarized as congress. Politics is apparent in nearly every story these days. Take Fox news for instance; their support of the police and prosecutors in nearly every legal case borders on obsessive. I’m not even going to copy any link other than www.foxnews.com. You can go there any time and see the drive by media pre-convict a half dozen people.

The main example and the one I am most concerned with is the constant left wing agenda endlessly pushed on nearly every single cable, network and print news network. Today much of the news is processed through the Associated press or Reuters and disseminated to the various news outlets for rewrite and publication. If you think about it, this type of news reporting this means that all of the participating members of the news media get the same information to report on at the same time. This nearly guarantees consensus amongst its members and gives huge power to the distributor.

If you have ever done a news search on a subject in Google news you know what I’m talking about. Hundreds to thousands of articles by different publications with the same information and opinions and often times the same exact wording. There is nothing explicitly wrong or immoral to this type of news, it lowers the cost for getting a story and adds a lot of content to small news organizations, but it certainly lowers the quality of the information on a subject while giving the appearance of consensus.

Everything we do has consequences though, except maybe blogging to no one. There is a significant problem with this mode of mass information dissemination. When someone becomes interested enough in a subject to look for information, they often will run into dozens of articles with slightly different wording and different author’s names at the top all regurgitating the same three facts as the original article they were copied from.

A good example was on July 30,2008 when a “huge” 7 mile (18km^2) chunk of ice broke off from the Canadian ice shelf. Google has 439 news articles related to this event. Nearly all of the articles I opened have the same quotes and imply the same conclusions. Clearly the earth is warming and disaster is on the way.

Without getting too deeply into the whole global warming disaster issue you would think that someone could have pointed out the total ice coverage below varies from a summer 6 million square kilometers to a winter average of 14 million square kilometers every year. This makes the total percentage of the “Huge” 7 square mile (18square kilometer) chunk of ice only 16/6420781km^2 x 100 = .000249% of the total ice coverage in the summer months for the pole. Every year the poles melt away 8 million square kilometers. I’m not claiming that global warming doesn’t exist, but I want to know the motives of those who found this story to be such a huge event. Who are their parents why is the rest of the story missing?

iarc-jaxa website

How many people, who unfortunately vote, will take the time to research if this story is meaningful and actually perform division to determine how much ice this represents? Not too many I’m thinking but so many people will take one of these widely distributed articles on face value read the sensational titles like “Arctic ice shelf splits in big melt” and join the consensus. Maybe they’re right and this is some huge thing but when I look back at the history it seems like ice has been splitting for a long time.

After all 7 square miles is huge any reasonable person knows that. . . . .

When you see hundreds of articles reporting the same news from the same facts its no wonder our younger generation is experiencing group think. If you talk with young adults today they almost universally support the liberal views on health care, Iraq, global warming, oil, CO2 and on and on…….. I blame not just the media but rather its broken structure.

You get what you pay for. . .