A Journalist, A Newspaper, The Media, Society....

Articles about the Israeli Palestinian conflict are always "interesting" to follow because I cannot possibly think of any other issue that brings such an obvious bias on the part of whatever publication, journalist or speaker. The words that you choose, whether you speak of Jews, Israelis, settlers, civilians, men, women and kids, the title that you put on top of your article... Everything just indicates a stand. The French national newspaper for instance titled its article on the bombing in Jerusalem "a bus going to a Jewish settlement is targeted in a bombing attack", which is just so different from the "Deadly Blast Strikes Outside Jerusalem's Central Bus Station" from the New York Times.
I just wonder whose words are those. Obviously, they have been written by an individual, a journalist, but would it be fair that those are only the words of the journalist and not of a newspaper? Certainly not, it is the newspaper that sets up standards for its stuff, and it is the newspaper, meaning the direction of the newspaper that edits and decides whether each article is worth publication. At the end of the day an article written by one journalist is published by an entire crew. Okay so each of this bias is the work of an entire newspaper. But then if every newspaper is biased, if an implicit principle becomes that pure news are boring and that newspapers need catchy titles in order to be sold, then the phenomenon is enlarged to an entire field, and that the media as a whole can be called biased. Is that it? Are words such as settlers or civilians chosen and used specifically by this abstract industry that media represents? My opinion is that this is not the case. Media being a business, it does what every business does: it gives its customers what they want. And there is a reason why American, French and Israeli media don't deliver the same perspective. It is true that different sides also exist withing one country, like the Washington Post being so different to the New York Times. but even that answers to different groups of people, and responds to different audience.
At the end of the day it is us who make the media, it is the society that dictates the words that are being printed, and it is therefore each and everyone of us who are biased in terms of papers that we read, information sources that we use and terminology that we consider right.

Media and Sensationalism

In my Contemporary Israeli Fiction class (for which I have a midterm on Monday), we saw how Israeli writers such as Castel Bloom or Yehoshua denounce the way media coverage of events such as bombing and war. We spoke a lot in class about media sensationalism and about the appropriate coverage for such events. It is one thing to deliver sensationalism with news of presidents cheating on their wives, but it is probably another to use tragic events for a commercial purpose. Besides the issue of compassion, it demeans the definition of media and demeans the trust that its customers have in it.

The Media - Ethics or Business?

Last year, France tried to deal with the issue of media having to respond and act like a business and therefore having to be sensational all the times and not necessarily only objective, by limiting the privatization of the media and the advertisements in between programs. The goal, again, was to go back to a more ethical, more serious, maybe even more monotonous media that would just deliver news and nothing else. This has provoked a tremendous debate, because the heads of media companies argued that indeed media were a business before anything else and that it was unfair to hold them to different standards. Reading Lippman and Dewey, I simply wonder where the middle could be between media being a business or an institution of ethics, and if this middle exists at all....

Liberty and News

I have started to read Liberty and News by Walter Lippman. It seems to me, at first glance, that Lippman is talking about how much the media deliver opinions rather than news and how much this was bad because people would simply tend to read newspapers and article that agreed with them. I however think that although newspapers certainly do serve partisanship rather than purely objective truth, this is more the case of big publications than it is of smallest independent ones. The sad thing is that they are probably less read than the big ones, but they are still a voice in the media society. I don't know if media are supposed to express the public opinion, and the opinion of their own group, to the risk that they might just create a cycle where no one changes his mind, or if they should constantly bring novelties, shake the population, and question everything... I guess that pure reality would make that very hard or even impossible for them, because even with the YU newspapers we can see how editors can be reluctant to publish something controversial or how one someone does not follow the mainstream he runs the risk of being labeled and stigmatized. I guess, however, that a rigorous seriousness is not attackable and that a few magazines such as the Foreign Affairs Magazine still manage to talk about everything without taking a side just because they are academic, analytical, rigorous and serious.... So maybe that is the solution, but then how many people have the patience to read the FA and don't at best skim through it to go back to a daily simpler newspaper?

Media, Duty and Liberty

Media being a watchdog, media mobilizing the population, media this, media that... It seems like each chapter we are reading is adding another burden on the mediatic shoulders. To me, though, there are different sorts of medias, with different roles and they don't exist as one entity but rather as complementary ones. Yes, some sort of medias have as their mission statement to be purely academic, objective, and provide citizens with information, and analysis. Others are openly partisan and serve to mobilize the citizens. Others are simply the voice of liberty, the voice of minorities and their claim to existence. You will never find any branch of media, any newspaper, any channel of tv, just anything that is holding on all of those roles. Maybe it's time we stop wanting media to be this ideal glory of democracy and understand that they all make for the different pieces of the same puzzle, just give them their individual liberty to be whatever they want to be, and to be useful to society not because they fill a checklist but rather because they don't and therefore represent individuals the way they are, the voice of the people in its trueness and not in its concept.

The Candidate I Would Have a Beer With

It just occured to me, while I was thinking of the watchdog and agenda setting roles of the media, that actually besides or instead of providing with purely objective images, the media really polishes the images of events as well as of candidates. It seems to make them more accessible and human-like, but really what it does is creating a show with events, and a character with a political candidate or official.

"These conservatives are arguing that the world's 1.2 billion Muslims cannot be trusted to govern themselves. That's not what I call loving freedom." Eugene Robinson writes on the Washington Post's Opinion section today. True, this is an op-ed column and we have mainly discussed news in class. But still. Does bias excuse the disrespect of the most basic rules of argumentation? Although the article seems to make a praiseworthy effort by quoting several sources, you can see just on this last sentence how the connection between sentences and the flow of the argument is missing. 


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/14/AR2011021404620.html