Reply #21: I look at the "media" as reactive... [View All]

[TreasonousBastard]

most of the time, anyway.

No, they can't be let off the hook, but they are a business, and respond to their customers like any business.

Some time ago I heard Barbara Walters explaining why she did celebrity interviews-- she said simply that she preferred the Castro and Kissinger interviews, but celebrities paid her salary. Nobody watched the good stuff, she sighed.

Another time I was watching one of those roundtables PBS has every so often. Some station manager from the Northwest was talking about the time his news team decided to stop the "happy news" and do in-depth stories about stuff that seemed important. Needless to say, the ratings tanked and advertisers took off.

Happy news was back on after a couple of months of serious bleeding.

The Fairness Doctrine is given a lot of credit for decent news way back when. (Somehow, it's not blamed for the excesses of Walter Winchell, but I digress...)

Personally, I think it had a lot more to do with news considered a public service, not a profit center, back then. All stations had to have a certain amount of public interest
Newspapers and magazines were never all so simon-pure back then, either. Every one of them had some spin for their markets, and while we revile Murdoch today, Hearst was exactly the same back then.

So, yeah, the press has its faults, but it is doing exactly what it is expected to do-- no more, no less.