When I was in undergrad, there were many government agencies and corporations which would recruit at USC and give presentations to all interested students. I remember on one occasion, I was listening to a clandestine agent speak about his experience hearing the news coverage of a certain event he was knowledgeable of and knowing that it was only a fraction of the real story. In fact, this happened almost every time he heard about a story he was familiar with. Ever since then, I have always wondered what the true story is to anything covered by the media.
Lately, I've noticed how the media tends to fixate on certain issues. Last year when the "tsunami" was coming to Hawaii after the Chilean earthquake, I was annoyed at how every news station and network wouldn't cover any other story for days. When the media thinks they have hit the jackpot with a story which could boost their ratings, that's all they show. It seems almost impossible to get information about any other story at these times. Another example is when Michael Jackson died, Farrah Fawcett passed away on the very same day, but for some reason the media thought the people wanted to hear about Michael more than Farrah, thus there were a minimal number of articles available on her at that time while every station covered Micheal's story.
There is such an agenda the media wants us to buy into! Not only has advertising made its way into this mainstream source of information which permeates our everyday lives, the actual news we read has become marketing. They give us ideas and "facts" which we either accept or refute with a passion, and the number of stories gives us options of which stories we want to read. I mean, who actually reads each and every story that gets published by any news source at all times? As I learned in high school, the news is written at a 10th grade level of understanding, mainly so it can appeal to the masses. In James C. Scott's book, Seeing Like a State, he goes through the history of state power through the simplification and appropriation of everything in society. For example, the creation of last names allowed governments to keep track of its population more clearly while cadastral surveys helped them keep track of all the land; this led to more accurate and increased taxation and thus greater funds for the state. In essence, his argument is that simplifying and standardizing life into clear categories which are easily accounted for has given states increased power and legibility. The more the state knows about its population and its land, the easier it is to control them (and most people will not resist a state's power). Scott's argument seems easy to accept in terms of planning and taxes, things which are easily recognizable as ordered and standardized in life. However, I would argue that the news media also helps to give increased power and legibility to states as well as big corporations and capitalism by simplifying what we think we know about the world. This helps us to be increasingly at ease with the world and unwilling to take radical actions agaisnt higher powers because we feel like we know about what is going on out there. Instead of experiencing much of these things for ourselves, we read the news, make personal statements and develop our thoughts and "opinions" on the matter, and go on living our individualistic contented little lives. I'm not saying that people don't take action from reading the news, but as Alexis de Tocqueville said regarding stratification in society, if people have the slightest hope that things can be different, that will pacify them. The media gives us a sense of what is going on in the world and allows us to postulate about reality, and that seems to be enough for most people. The media simplifies reality into a few hundred words, sometimes more, per article, and in those articles how much "fact" and how much opinion and opinion or propaganda, for lack of a better word, are we getting? And do we just accept it all as fact?
Just as there is a natural bias in the way sociologists and social scientists select research topics and research questions which reflect their worldviews, often unintentionally, there is an even stronger bias in the way the media chooses which stories to cover. There seems to be no real way to avoid such a bias as everything we read reflects the personality of the writer, however it is necessary and ethical for social scientists to be upfront about their beliefs and backgrounds when writing anything while the same is not true of most journalists. This scares me. How much of the news do people take to be facts about the world? Most of it. The only time we dispute the news is when it comes from more personal, openly biased sources and programs such as Glenn Beck's show and other various programs on networks like CNN and Fox News. But whether you are conservative, liberal, or of any other political belief, it is difficult to argue against pure news articles as they are published in sources like the New York Times. (Just a side note: I'm not an expert as to which newspapers or networks are biased with which ideologies, so I'm just trying to give examples to the best of my knowledge. All I know is I try to read a variety of sources to get a well-rounded account of issues).
I could go on and on about the negative aspects of the news media, speaking as the critical theorist inside me. However to get to my point, I will make this part short. Despite all its biases and shortcomings as a news sources, I truly enjoy reading the news. Which brings me to my last point, speaking as the postmodernist inside my soul: the news is not much more than a form of entertainment in society. It serves many functions and does inform us about "current events." But we can never know the "truth" about reality. Thus, the media drives a major part of the circus that is the political arena in society, and it is happy to generate as much buzz about anything that it possibly can. The new media's main purpose in society is for entertainment.
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