Medium As Massage

There has been a lot of real and virtual lip flapping about mainstream media being the enemy of the people with the fourth estate shouting back about the importance of an independent press. It often seems as if the two parties are talking past one another but not really disagreeing. Politicians have always objected to media criticism and charges of bias are increasingly undisputed. So let's take a look at just a few things from the front sections of one issue of the AJC and see what the poor, ignorant masses are being fed as a daily diet of "critical, independent media."

This is attention grabbing:

Forget Texas, FEAR Tennessee!

Big data is a big buzzword and makes for a big, effective headline. If by effective you mean "grab the reader's attention without exposing too much information." And if a picture is worth a thousand words that photo screams "Tennessee is going to figure out where accidents are about to happen and send out a trooper to shoot the survivors." Is this the message mainstream media wants to send? Are they incompetent or misleading?

We also get the AP's solution to the opioid crisis:

Only The Media Knew It Was This Simple!

If the media had not squelched this information the Obama administration could have nipped this epidemic in the bud by simply paying the Chinese to close the loophole. Surely this would have been cheaper than fighting a drug epidemic sweeping our rural areas (talk of an urban problem is still off limits) but we'll never know because mainstream media hasn't "informed the public."

Media are as big a set of windsocks as any politicians have ever been. Case in point: the Swedish Immigration story.

Trump NEVER mentioned riots, only after false reporting were there riots!

So maybe media are correct. When THEY inform the public then that informed public can and will take informed action. It would be nice were the information complete and correct but hey, he was vague and that opened the door wide enough for even the AP to drive a truckload of ambiguous disinformation.

Despite having fallen out of favour with a history-purging PC crowd Thomas Jefferson was correct in his conviction regarding the absolute necessity of an informed electorate:

Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.

If we are to rely on mainstream media for accurate unfiltered information then our time is past.