Bush League Journalism
I’ve made a practice of reading the newspaper daily for many years now, although for the past few years I’ve been reduced to the on-line versions during the week, capping off my intake of local, national, and world events with a print copy of the SMH on Saturday and the Sun-Herald on Sunday (just to make sure I didn’t miss anything). One thing I’ve learned in all this time is that newspapers lie. O.k., they lean; that is, they slant the news to suit the political persuasion of their editorial policy, which is really just a marketing decision based on the demographics of their target audience. The New York Times may be the “paper of record” for a large number of Americans, regionally supplanted by the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times (and beyond that we’re getting smaller and smaller in regard to influence, but at least most local newspapers aren’t just advertising rags), but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an overt political content. The Murdoch papers are the worst examples of the conservative print media, just as the Fox empire has come to exemplify tabloid journalism in television, but that doesn’t let anyone else off the hook. Here in Australia, the Fairfax papers have a good, firm grip on the reading public, but their content isn’t any less geared toward yellow journalism than the Telegraph or the Australian. In fact, I’d say that there often isn’t even the pretence of objectivity in most of the papers I read; I find that infuriating. That, and the accelerating trend towards sensationalism. What’s the result of all this? Well, there’s an article over at the American Prospect that I think is worth looking at, regarding the whole Swift boat veterans attack advertising matter and how it’s been treated in the press (located via Book Notes). The Kerry-Bush battles don’t get much of a look-in here, at least not on a daily basis, but that’s to be expected. I don’t expect, however, any better over stoushes between the Howard and Latham camps as the march to the election drags on.