Thursday, January 22, 2009

Liddle-why television news is intrinsically bias

It is worth reading Ron Liddle's piece over at the Spectator on why television news is intrinsically biased.

if you watched the inauguration of Barack, did you detect just the tiniest,
weeniest difference in tone from the broadcasters, compared to how they marked
the re-election of President Bush four years ago? Just an infinitesimally minute
difference in nuance? I might be wrong but I don’t remember them cutting to a
bunch of well-fed, middle-aged, middle-class white people in the Peter Bruinvels
Centre in Beaconsfield every so often to hear them singing ‘Go George — nuke the
Arabs!’, amidst bunting and drained bottles of champagne. ‘Awe-inspiring’ and
‘breath-taking’ and ‘momentous’ and ‘I have a dream’ were the words used by the
correspondents this time.


According to Ron,televison news does not merely report news it transforms it.

He makes the point with relation to the financial crisis

1.that the financial crisis has been deepest in those countries in which there is a strong and rapacious media — the UK, USA and Iceland, among others — and undoubtedly worsened as a direct result of relentlessly baleful headlines.

2.that the media was correct in reporting the green shoot comments of government ministers last week in order to provide some balance

There was a poll carried out back in the summer of 2008, in which almost one quarter of British people thought that the ‘credit crunch’ was entirely a media confection, a crisis whipped up to fill the blank pages. A little later the notion of the media being ‘responsible’ for the credit crunch became an urban myth. It is not quite so simple as that, nor quite so stark — but you would not bet against the media having been critically influential, given the ectoplasmic nature of city confidence.

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