Media Modus
Email This Post
Print This Post
Osama bin Laden is dead, praise Allah. Now if the same would happen to the media.
Bin Laden’s sudden lead poisoning provides an interesting contrast in how alleged journalists treat a news story. We accept as self evident that politicians lie and reporters spin. Yes, this rule isn’t universal, but the percentage of honest politicians and unbiased journalists requires too many decimal places to document here. You might think that an event such as world’s most wanted man encountering a cranium/slug integration session would move reporters past partisan leanings. You might also believe Harry Reid is not a necrophiliac. The probabilities are equally low.
Compare reporting from Fox (the favored network of the political right) and CNN (which the conservatives call the Communist News Network). Each article recites the basic story of how key information that led to bin Laden intercepting lead was obtained from people America held in custody. Otherwise the two articles are as similar as Rosie Whiteley and Rosie O’Donnell.
Fox’s paw plays with the perspective that the initial nuggets of interesting information came from detainees at Guantanamo, a facility that Barack Obama originally sought to ban and later embraced. The Fox focus sounded like a defense of the previous administration – that the former Republican roster was the true hero in this event. In their report they use words like “Guantanamo” and “waterboarding” with a small bit of delight. The article starts to spin out of control by discussing Bush’s critics and not about the mechanics of discovering that bin Laden was resting comfortably in a well-heeled Pakistan suburb (not Iran, as I mistakenly predicted).
CNN never mentions Guantanamo, waterboarding, or that the initial intelligence was revealed as early as 2003. Ted Turner’s tale tuners twisted the story line so it rings in one’s ears as a case of good police work mainly under Obama’s watch. One of the unsubtle tactics CNN employees use is to spelled-out relative periods (i.e., “…uncovered the courier’s identity four years ago”) for anything that occurred under Bush, and uses numeric dates (i.e., “In … 2010 U.S. intelligence drilled down to the home”) for mission progress under Obama. The former method creates vague notions in a reader’s mind about when something happened, and the latter provides much greater chronological clarity.
Both articles are spin and neither is objective reporting. One seeks to legitimize Guantanamo and harsh interrogation, and the other seeks to bury the possible success of the same. Neither piece investigates the naked question, namely if the information did come from unpleasant procedures and if Rosie O’Donnell could be recruited to enhance prisoner distress.
As I note in Shooting The Bull, people are losing faith with the media for the simple fact that most folks can see through these shenanigans (perhaps one-sidedly, but every outlet has its detractors). Soon people will trust major news organizations as much as they trust politicians, which is not at all.
Comments