By Erich Vieth on February 29th, 2008
Zogby: Mainstream media is out of touch
According to Reuters: Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe traditional journalism is out of touch, and nearly half are turning to the Internet to get their news, according to a new survey.
This is, in a way, great news. The “traditional” media has declined terribly in recent years. Their paralyzing fear of questioning or criticizing anything George Bush says, even when it was directly contradicted by evidence available at the time, is a large part of what led us into the Iraq war. And that’s just the most obvious example of the way their pervasive credulity and willingness to participate in fearmongering have done the American people a serious disservice. I find it very encouraging to see that so many people recognize that.
This issue also has bearing on the corporate media concentration we’ve seen in recent years. Yes, it’s a potentially very bad thing for one or a few big media corporations to own all the television stations, radio stations and newspapers in a given city, especially when those corporations belong to conglomerates that also own things like oil companies, mining companies, power generating companies, military supply companies, etc. As we’ve seen during the Bush Administration, the potential for self-serving media propaganda is enormous. However, the more that the general public gets its news information from the Internet, the less it is dependent upon big media corporations. The potential downside of this, of course, is that we might not know who controls a given Internet site, so the potential for self-serving propaganda remains. We saw this, for example, in the 2004 presidential election, when the expression “swift boat” became a verb.
The bottom line is pretty much what it has been since humans invented gossip: consult a variety of sources, because the truth can rarely be found in just one place.