Two Conventions and the Media

Last updated on: July 29, 2016 at 1:21 pm by Dave Griffey

Two Conventions and the Media 2016-07-29T13:12:32-04:00 Dave Griffey

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Well it’s over. Thank goodness. And depending on what news outlets you watch, it was either a three ring circus followed by a convention filled with wonderful speakers surrounded by a little bit of dissension, or it was a bold convention with clashes between party members followed by a scandal ridden string of Machiavellis lifted up by a corrupt party machine.

This morning, I wasn’t able to watch FOX long enough to see if they planned on covering last night’s acceptance speech. I’m sure they’re aware it happened, but in the time I had, they didn’t mention anything. That’s OK. Last week, across the national media, I only learned three things: Melania Trump’s speech lifted sections from Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech, Ted Cruz didn’t endorse Trump, and vague analysis of Trump’s speech. That was it. I had to watch FOX to know who else spoke. To hear the other news stations, I’d have thought the whole week was those three events and nothing more. Oh, and Scott Baio spoke the first night.

Meanwhile, this week, except for a few unfortunate cases of scorned Bernie supporters, the basic media assessment of numerous DNC speakers, many getting their own news segments worth of coverage, was this:

Except for FOX of course. In that case, the focus was on the protesters, the protesters, the protesters, oh yeah, and the protesters. With occasional jabs at this or that occasional speaker for good measure. The fact that FOX spent no time this morning talking about last night suggests, at least to me, that Ms. Clinton did a pretty good job, or at least didn’t crash and burn.

As for me I prefer getting my news from print, but I follow the TV news since many get their information from the networks and cable news, and keeping a finger on the societal pulse has always been important to me. I never would say that the print media is any less biased than TV, but with print you can take time, read through it a couple times, and read it again. With TV, it’s said today, gone later today. Except for YouTube.

All of this is to say that I’d have to have rocks in my head to think the media is a source of neutral, unbiased news and information. Clearly, just in watching how the press, especially the television news, covered the last two weeks shows the endless spins and twists. And those spins were in line with the sources. It’s no shock that the majority of the outlets had a generally positive take on the DNC, and a negative take on the RNC. Likewise, FOX, the one conservative holdout, did just the opposite.

So knowing that the media is slanted and biased when it comes to reporting on politics (and this doesn’t mean the bias is always straight down party lines, but often it is), why would I assume I know what is happening in the world? After all, the primary way I have of knowing what is going on comes largely from a source I just spent several paragraphs explaining I don’t trust.

Michael Crichton once spoke of the Gell Mann Amnesia effect. That’s where we read a story about a subject we’re knowledgeable about and can see the clear and obvious flaws in the story. We realize that the story is wrong, error laden, perhaps completely opposite of the truth. And yet when we turn the page and see a story about something we’re not knowledgeable about, we take it as gospel truth.

When I watch the press cover my own areas of experience and expertise, I often find problems and errors, if not clear bias. Why, then, would I assume the press is right about the economy, about police violence, about international affairs and ISIS, about what Pope Francis just said or about the state of America or the world on any given day? If I can’t deny the obvious bias, even to the point of outlets ignoring stories and facts that hinder this bias, why do I trust anything else the media says?

It’s not easy. We like to imagine that history is one long uphill trajectory. Yesterday stunk, but tomorrow’s going to be great because today is awesome (that’s our awesomeness showing through). That upward climb of history that frames our modern understanding of human development looms large. The problem is that history isn’t a straight line upward. It’s more like a roller coaster that you could argue is heading upward, but not without frequent dips and valleys. We like to think that, unlike people in the olden days, we have all of this information, all of this access to knowledge, this sprawling media that is here to tell us what people in the past never had a chance to know. But do we?

This is not to say the media is valueless or without purpose. The news can tell me it’s 88 degrees outside, and it might be true. It can tell me Ohio State won the football game last Saturday, and it will be true because the Buckeyes rock. It can report the stocks for the day, or let me know a police officer was killed or that there is a war going on that nobody seems to notice. But sometimes I think more than what the media tells me, it’s what the media doesn’t tell me that’s the mischief. I’m not even talking about opinion or editorial. I mean the stories that focus on certain things to convince me the world is thus, when I have every reason to believe there is far more to the story that I’m hearing, information that could skewer the narrative presented. Which explains the majority of speakers I heard little to nothing about last week across the national media, or the majority of speeches I heard nothing positive about this week on FOX. That’s the point.

Just a few thoughts after the two week circus known as media coverage of the conventions. I wonder if there are people left who think the news media is a reliable source for unbiased information. I wonder if we know it is biased, but continue to trust what the media says despite that fact. Worse, I wonder if it isn’t despite the fact that we know the media is biased that we listen, but precisely because of the fact that we know it’s biased that we turn to certain outlets at certain times.

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