The media's missing links

[Briar]

The media's missing links

In pursuit of balance, wingnuts get excessive airtime and big stories don't make the newslist

AL Kennedy

Balance: it's a lovely thing. It stops us falling over and inspires manufacturers of essential executive toys, and without it Disney-based ice spectaculars would be only a longed-for dream. Balance in the media? More problematic.

TV balancing meant I recently spent an afternoon in New York watching a "scientist" explain that dinosaur eggs are really small. All dinosaur eggs. Which means dinosaurs must have started out being really small. Even the big ones. So Noah could have fitted them into the Ark. Media balance dictates that if one wingnut thinks gravity is caused by a rota of subterranean angels sucking, then he'll get as much air time as all those dull, arrogant physicists.

Media balance leaves apparently helpless reporters reciting conflicting statistics as if they were beyond interpretation. It provides the pseudo-factual white noise between surgical dating makeovers and the soaps. It sets extensive coverage of Condoleezza Rice's vacuous bleatings against non-specific mumbles about protest. It means demonstrations against the occupation of Iraq aren't covered by the BBC, leading to more demonstrations outside BBC premises, which aren't covered. This is the most common form of media balance - balancing reality with silence.
Not that I'd suggest the British, or indeed the US, media is involved in government conspiracies. That's barely necessary - they need only be lazy, broke and scared. Even if media outlets aspire to be something beyond a kind of sophisticated Xeroxing service for PR handouts and spin, they often don't have the money, or the staff, to be effective.

Which is why papers such as the Washington Post hire semi-literate bloggers as columnists. The New York Times still hasn't recovered from Judith Miller; no source that hyped the pre-Iraq invasion bollocks has handed itself over to The Hague as complicit in crimes against humanity (à la Radio Milles Collines in Rwanda). The pre-Iran invasion bollocks is hyping higher; and increasingly weighty suspicions over 9/11 are ignored.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1764886,00.html