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the position that seaver outlines above is close to the starting point--there is no objectivity---not even normatively--so i don't approach "the media" as if it somehow disappoints by failing to measure up to a fantasy standard. when you talk about "trust" or a violation of trust, you imply some disappointment. and when you make a unified Thing called "the media" which disappoints, you're basically applying an inverted objectivity standard---and arriving a a curiously facile position.
maybe a better formulation is do you approach information sources critically...
that said, i'll write sentences that go in the opposite direction. in general i find television--particularly american television--to be far more problematic than the written press.
general:
tv news substitutes an illusion of immediacy for context--"being there" instead of "being informed." infotainment--which i think a better word for it than "news"---is an advertising delivery system--routine stories are cut to more or less the same duration as advertising segments. this has always struck me as a strange choice.
particular: over the past 30 years or so, it seems to me that television news has been brought to its knees as an infotainment source. it has increasingly become a simple relay system for official opinion management strategies--you know "public diplomacy"---in part through unintended consequences of changes in how that information is gathered--sending a crew to press conferences that provide you with ready-framed factoids and broadcasting prepacking segments save the stations money.
since the thatcher regime in the uk--since the falklands war--infotainment concerning military action in particular has been entirely subsumed under propaganda. the use of press pools and cutting off of independent reporting to the greatest possible extent makes infotainment into an extension of marketing war.
i've mentioned this before i'm sure, but a couple years ago i attended a documentary film conference and had the chance to see d.a. pennebaker do a presentation about his work. in the course of that, he noted that folk misunderstand the nature of television--they confuse it with a visual medium--but in fact, it's a talk medium. a paradigmatic instance of this is american baseball coverage, which is radio coverage with images. the assumption seems to be that you, viewer, are too stupid to decipher what is happening in front of you---and that you require a faster rhythm to the tv experience otherwise you will wander off to make a sandwich or do something else thereby missing vital advertising. same applies to infotainment: think about the number of sequences you have seen that "cover" significant events that consist of watching a famous person entering or leaving a hotel---cameras positioned paparazzi style by entrances to hotels provide an illusion of contact with the immediate--but it's the voice over that tells you what you're "really seeing"--the net result of this is a passive relation to an illusory immediate.
from 9/12/2001 until sometime in 2006 i think, the american television apparatus across the board exploited this passivity to sell you first the "war on terror" then, famously, the war in iraq. it was able to do this because the television apparatus acquired a more or less unified political function through it's reliance on press conferences instead of reporting, through it's systematic preference for conservative talking heads in opinion management segments. every fascist order of the 20th century has relied on radio or television to structure consent. every fascist regime has relied on radio or television (in the american case of fascism-lite) to shift collective frames of reference, to set up an Enemy and legitimate actions against the Enemy. treated uncritically in a context where there is no meaningful diversity of viewpoints, these media can be not only unreliable, but dangerous.
want a striking example? think about the role radio played in the rwanda genocide.
the written press is preferable for information, but this too has to be read critically. a first step is not relying on the press from one country--particularly not the american press--as if it either reports situations accurately or, even less, interprets them in their complexity.
i guess the above is mostly about the virtual disappearance of independent reporting.
o yeah--i more or less stopped watching television for a long time--from 9/12/2001 through last january. it's easy. i'd check in on things, but in the main i didn't bother with it. since i've been watching again, i prefer reality shows to "news" figuring that television is mostly about itself and in "reality show" contexts that's at least explicit.
if my experience is any guie, taking a break and then looking at it again will enable you to do what a confederacy of dunces is out there.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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