🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3EA06A7D.4060705@netgate.com>,
Earl Tunnley  <tunner@netgate.com> wrote:
:Did Stock get treated fairly by the media?  I don't think so.

Does -any- politician get treated "fairly" by the media? 
And how would we know?

Avoiding discussion of specific instances, could you describe what to
you would constitute the media treating a politician "fairly" ?


Keep in mind that most of the big media organizations are *businesses*,
and as such their first concern is not to present the most impartial
and objective reporting possible: their first concern is generally to
keep the business going. The price charged for newspapers is pretty
much just the incremental printing and distribution costs, with the
cost of the staff and newswire and traffic helicoptor and whatnot being
paid by advertising. The more product they sell (the more readers, the
more listeners), the more advertisers are willing to pay. Conversely,
if one presents articles more than a little critical of one's
main advertisers, the advertisers *do* pull out (perhaps more-so
in the USA, I don't know.)

It is a sad fact that most people don't *want* to deal with objective
examinations of all the sides of issues and what the potential
consequences are of each available course of action.  "News" gets
productized and glitzed up and attractive (or handsome or "reassuring")
presenters get hired, and stories get trimmed into 30 seconds or 2
minutes because that's what viewers respond to.  Neil Postman did a
very interesting examination of this about 5 years ago.


So... if presenting a politician in a bad light attracts an audience,
then no matter what the value of what the politician is saying,
that approach is more likely to get press than the "everything's fine"
approach. If I remember correctly, the total Canada-wide
audience for the Parlimentary Channel is estimated to be less than
1000 people most of the time. People generally just aren't
interested -- but Hey, look, there's a re-run of one of the old
original Baywatch on tonight, one of the episodes with Pamela Anderson...
-- 
   Perposterous!! Where would all the calculators go?!