Quote:
Originally Posted by Martian
I'm intrigued by this statement, because it doesn't seem to make sense to me.
All sources are biased. It doesn't matter whether you get your news from Fox or CNN or Reuters or Le Monde Diplo, there's always a bias inherent in the source. Given that the average person has neither the ability nor the inclination to investigate these matters first-hand, all one can really do is aggregate as many biased sources as possible and eliminate the conflicts in order to come up with something that approximates the true story. On the other hand, many issues are much more complicated than simply true or false, which further complicates the matter.
The vast majority of folks simply aren't sufficiently interested in the greater issues to expend that amount of effort. The media outlets are simply filling a need for news bytes that don't require a great deal of effort to comprehend.
Incidentally, this is part of the reason why Plato considered democracy to be a form of social decay.
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Bias is one problem, but what's worse than bias is the absolutely meaningless, vapid coverage. We get hours and hours about Obama's bowling, Edwards haircut, and OJ Simpson, but we get barely a few minutes about actual important news. Sure, we can blame The Public for lapping this stuff up. In a market-based system, the public will choose the kind of coverage it wants to hear, and if we want vapid obsession about meaningless crap, then that's what we'll get. But when *all* of the major news outlets are equally vapid, how is the market supposed to work? Even NPR, which IMNSHO is the best of them, is only good in comparison to the others. Much of their coverage of actual news (they do a lot of pretty much explicitly human-interest stuff as well, which is fine) is almost as bad as the major TV networks'. We can hope that blogging and more small independent news outlets will help, but of course there are problems with that approach too.
An ignorant public obsessed with trivia breeds a media that dishes out crap - and that media helps keep the public ignorant and obsessed with trivia.