And All the Heads on TV...

Network news is very strange beast, and one that seemed to have simply emerged without much ado. I grew accustomed my first two years of college to watching morning news roundups on MSNBC, keeping in mind the pretty obvious bias. These morning news shows were about routine for me. They fit in nicely with my two cups of coffee and my refusal to prepare for the day. But after my second year I keyed in to something fairly upsetting.

There's is absolutely nothing wrong with having opinions, and I think that is fairly self-evident. But I see a pretty big problem with the packaging of opinion and then televising it on a news network ad nauseam. At first, I thought these shows were really fascinating. There was something exciting about people who were "analyzing" news stories and broadcasting debates surrounding key issues. Yes, their analysis was always heavily bent one way or the other, but still I watched. At least these issues were being talked about, and at least it was something to distract me from hours of Toddlers in Tiaras or these shows about families with way too many kids.

But the thing is, these talking heads are married to bias in such a way that they begin to warp the audience. See, I think we, as people, love to hear people who agree with our point of view. As they continue to speak with authority they confirm all of our opinions, and thus we begin to manufacture truth. Objective, immutable truth that must be defended against everyone else who has been given falsehoods. And this process feeds back into the political discourse that we have today, so marred with vitriol and half-truths that it is eroding away at any hope of having a functioning civil society (if such a thing has ever existed).

News sources are always biased. I think this is fairly uncontroversial. But with printed news sources or televised reporting, the bias is subtle and unobtrusive, most of the time. The New York Times is a liberal piece of journalism, but it reports on the facts. Though factual errors are found from time to time, this is not unique to the Times. And we are not feed opinions in the reporting section. We can chose to read the Op-Ed pieces or we can chose to ignore them. And while this is true with news networks (the remote does still grant us dominion) the Op-Ed aspect is much more prevalent and much more central to the product being sold.

It is true, and I will not try to argue otherwise, that right-wing biased commentators upset me more than left-wingers. I'm a liberal, and like all people I find it much easier to listen to people who I agree with or can access their arguments without much effort. But I do engage in listening to conservative commentators and I try to empathize. Its difficult, and tiring, but necessary. The problem is, I see people like Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh as being far more vitriolic than their counterparts on the left. Though, it may be because their counter parts are much less prominent. And it doesn't help that views of Fox News are shown to be some of the most misinformed news consumers in the country. And I can't help but think that this is the result of the viewers being who they are but more because Fox News, like so many other networks, has given up on selling factual content or competing views of news topics, and has decided that the road of least resistance is the most marketable. Unfortunately, it looks like they are right.

See, there is no question that factual errors happen, but its one thing when the factual error is confined to a reporting of facts and another when its happens and there has been a highly charged string of rhetoric surrounding that error. It has happened repeatedly, and yet is has not diminished the allure of these network channels. No matter how many controversies or horrible verbal missteps, people keep coming back to them, and they continue to build their worldview from these little frames.

I have tried to venture away from mainstream media and watch programs like Democracy Now! which are to a high degree better than the sleeker, cable options. But still, something unnerves me about the way news is transmitted now. Perhaps its because, as a result of these talking heads proliferating, all news sources suddenly become sites of attack and a black mark upon whoever admits to listening/watching a particular source. As an example, I listen to NPR and visit their website daily. I enjoy their radioshows, and I like the news service that is offered by the station. But earlier this year, NPR was the target of right-wing anger because of its liberal bias and because it received federal money. Mind you, I saw very few arguments about things NPR was saying and far more ad hominem reasoning. But still, it put me in an uncomfortable position because my refusal to see this argument against NPR immediately marked me as an enemy.

What ever happened to letting a guy watch the news?