How Depraved Money Hungry Media Is Distorting What We See, and Messing with the Country

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http://www.alternet.org/media/jon-stewart-slayed-cnns-hack-filled-political-show-crossfire-and-now-its-coming-back-grave

Money, they say, is the mother’s milk of politics. Also of news, sports and the rest of the entertainment industry. Three recent stories drive that home.

When Reince Priebus pressured Comcast’s NBC to drop a miniseries starring Diane Lane as Hillary Clinton, the hostage that the RNC chairman threatened to snuff was the network’s access to the 2016 presidential primary debates. When the NFL forced Disney’s ESPN to pull out of a documentary about concussions jointly produced with PBS’s Frontline, the league’s leverage was its deal with Disney’s ABC to air Monday Night Football. And when Time Warner’s CNN hired Newt Gingrich for its exhumed edition of Crossfire, its motive wasn’t political journalism in service of democracy; it was stunt casting in service of ratings.

On the surface, the fight between the GOP and NBC is about the effects of media on audiences. The party’s presumption – based on no evidence – is that the miniseries would put Clinton in a favorable light, and – also based on no evidence – that the halo would translate into votes. But if a movie could do that, then John Glenn, heroically portrayed in the 1983 movie The Right Stuff, would have been the 1984 Democratic presidential nominee. The real issue here isn’t the impact of entertainment on audiences, it’s the coup that took presidential debates out of the hands of citizens and handed them to party hacks.

Once upon a time, groups like the League of Women Voters sponsored the debates, and all cameras were welcome to cover them. But starting in 1988, the Democratic and Republican parties wrested control of the process. Since then, the general election debates have had an aura of patriotic respectability, but in reality they’ve been run by the same folks who’ve earned an eight percent approval rating for Congress. The primary debates have become cash cows for the networks, interest groups and faux think tanks. They’re spectacles that provide free media to candidates, attract eyeballs to sell to advertisers and offer co-branding opportunities to burnish the images of the evenings’ co-sponsors. The right question isn’t whether NBC’s miniseries would put a finger on the scale. It’s why the hell a political party should be permitted to use the money that can be milked from the democratic process as a bargaining chip.

[Laelth]

1. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth