“Fake news” has become a colloquial saying at this point, coined by Trump. It’s kind of a meme, it’s a little funny, but after reading Archer’s essay… it’s disconcerting. Taking a step back and looking at the scope of American history, it’s a bit phenomenal how much the press has been vilified. Freedom of speech and freedom of press are sewn into our constitution, as they have been for ages and yet… here we are.
The media being biased isn’t news (pun intended). There’s nothing recent about that. We’ve learned that anything written/said/recorded by a person… is biased. Covering one thing and not another… that’s bias, whether it’s intended or not. I don’t think such a thing as unbiased news can exist. But… the bias can be dialed back for sure. However, the media is a business… so they have to be exciting, inflammatory, shocking, and the like. It’s a dilemma that Archer shows as being exploited by politicians to distract from their own shortcomings.
Archer brings up Nixon, Bush 1, Bush 2, Clinton, Obama, and other presidents, showing an escalation in this politician vs media war. This escalation has reached a peak now, and I wonder if it will keep climbing (probably). This awareness, or as Archer says it, the way I’ve been primed to view the media makes it hard for me to believe anything I see on the news. I’m constantly wondering what’s not being said, what was actually said, if anything that I’m reading is true or not… It really turns me off from the news entirely. Because to understand one thing, you have to read from so many angles that it becomes an amalgamation of mismatches… or you can just take what you get from a single source and risk missing a pretty key detail.
Rather than declaring a war on the media… shouldn’t there be just a mutual understanding? I think the Machiavellian way to handle the media would just be to… do the things you say you’ll do. There might just be less for the media to attack that way. Easier said than done, I know.
**Fun fact: I had Archer for LDST 102!
I liked how you reminded us that the media is still a business. I think it is easy to forget that like anything, the media has to make money, and they are not going to do that by reporting boring stories without headlines.
I had the same response. The boring stories don’t make the money to we dramatize the truth and leave out other stories that need to be heard which often leads to one-sided narratives that are flooded through the media on a daily basis,