Media credibility seems to have gone down in this last presidential campaign coverage, whereas TV news ratings seem to have gone up as citizens in front of the TV, better known as TV audience, leaned more favorably toward bias news reinforcing their political view.
A study by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that during this last political campaign cable news networks provided a bias approach, individuating in MSNBC vs Fox news the most ideological divide battle. “Where one goes for news makes a difference” summarizes the study. In a further report, PEJ shows that in the campaign coverage the press has principally leaned toward left, in favor of Obama, with McCain receiving a more negative coverage. “Basically you chose your news outlet if it made you happy, if it reinforced all your views.”- said Richard Wald, a professor of media and society at Columbia University School of Journalism and a former senior vice president at ABC News, on the New York Times. The NYT article opens with the description of what “a lousy day was to be Senator John McCcain”, if reported by MSNBC, unless to report the same news was Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren on Fox News Channel and then “Things were looking up for Mr. McCain”.
Unlike politics that, beside its crystallized and atrophied basis on each party side, seeks a convergence to the center as winning formula to draw the independent and swing voters, in the news media battle field, the winning formula seems to inversely lie and rely on the actual devergence from the center, polarizing the TV audience into those two political “Kantian categories of the American spirit”, such as the right “bible belt” of the middle America versus the snobby and elitist left liberals of the West and East coast: Fox news leads the TV ratings, defeating CNN, not by being a champion of objectivity, but by actually speaking directly at the guts of conservative America, presumably the core of that mid America with whom both political parties want to flirt and please. After all, during the primaries, Obama’s unfortunate slip refered to these people, those “bitter” working class voters, as Obama called them, that “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them”; that is mainly the same TV audience making The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News the leading political news show at 9pm, as well as the same target, as marketing would call, for which John McCain chose Sarah Palin as a mere, but extraordinary marketing instrument capable to penetrate, intercept and energize that religious and bible belt vote, aka the GOP base, that until that moment was a little bit asleep over McCain’s campaign. Within the same polarizing logic, on the other side, on MSNBC, the most watched program is the political talk show Rachel Maddow , whose passionate and declared left leaning view was cable to double the usual viewership of 800,000 to an average of of 1.7 million since she started on Sept. 8, beating a TV icon such as Larry King on CNN. In other words, it seems like presenting an ideologized version of political news pays more than objective information.
But since the second half of the twentieth century hadn’t journalism realized that a more objective news coverage would have assured more readers and a broader TV audience, in the name of a higher profit (forget about professional ethics) ?
I suspect that for media, which are not an ethereal entity but real individuals, such as producers, editors in chief and journalists with the responsibility of pressing deadlines and daily decisions, often taken with no or little time (even to repress their animal and most important their political instincts-after all we’re all human beings!), sometimes might be easier to “accidentally” slip into the convenience of riding the ideological and political wave of their audience’s existing beliefs in order to profit on an immediate consensus and therefore higher ratings equal to more advertising revenues for the network or for the newspaper.
As marketing might suggest, it’s profitable and rewarding for media to say what people need and want to hear, reinforcing their ideological barricades: advertising campaigns are usually developed according to a cognitive science theory teaching that in order to understand and decode a new message, the brain tends to naturally filter it through the closest previous frame of reference. That means that our brain functions mainly favor the new information that resembles and is compliant to what we previously know and matches what we believe in, even to the point of denying cler evidence of a truth not corresponding to our convenient beliefs. It’s called cognitive dissonance.
I fear that objectivity in journalism often remains a naive academic residual replaced by a more realistic professional “on the battle field” application of 101 news media college class intended to conveniently feed the readers and the audience with what they want to hear.
Journalism vs marketing: can someone kindly remind me the difference these days?
Horizon 