Sunday, January 20, 2008

Tabloid news is destroying democracy

By Libby

I have to agree with Jeffrey McCall. TV news is bad for for our republic. Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so.
The public wants a different kind of television election coverage. A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that 80 percent of Americans want more coverage of where candidates stand on issues and more coverage of lesser-known candidates. This is not likely to happen soon. It is easier and cheaper to cover elections with a template that tells us where a particular prominent candidate is, which celebrity appeared with the candidate, the latest poll numbers, and who feels momentum. It is more sensational to show and analyze Hillary Clinton’s teary eyes than detail her policy initiatives.
So everybody outside the Village agrees that TV news is a joke and our elite media are failing us. That's truly bipartisan, except that we think it's failing for different reasons. Whatever. What are we going to do about it? I say we pressure the FCC to break up the media conglomerates to open access to more points of view. Anybody have a better idea?

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2 Comments:

Blogger Capt. Fogg said...

It's one of my pet irritations, of course. The Great Reagan it was, I believe, who decided that a frequency allocation was just a free license to make money and didn't include an obligation to the public who own the spectrum. Bush is just another cheap pirate and there's no way anything will change until he's back in Texas on Republican Welfare, spending what he stole form us.

9:19:00 AM  
Blogger Libby Spencer said...

I keep checking my little backwards Bush counter several times a day. One day closer, if all goes well. I'm still not convinced he's going to leave willingly.

3:08:00 PM  

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