I grew up in a relatively conservative community, and I attended a relatively conservative college. So it's no surprise that I generally view the mainstream media as being relatively liberally biased. But today I ran across an interesting post. Apparently, the mainstream media are really in the pocket of the ultraconservatives, who ask them not to investigate the reality of the American health care system.
But isn't the media really a business? Don't they just report on what they think (in their well-researched opinions) their clientele want to hear? What I'm saying is: the mainstream media reflects what the market wants, which is what newswatchers want.
So if the mainstream media isn't reporting on something, doesn't it suggest that the mainstream doesn't care about it?
2 comments:
Seems to me it's a chicken/egg kind of thing. Does the mainstream not care because there is so little good reporting on important news and so much reporting on Paris and other junk news?
Touché. We generally accept that a seller can create demand for its product, but it seems counterintuitive with the media. (Maybe it shouldn't.) This makes me wonder whether the media created the market for celebrity news or if they just coopted the existing market for gossip and gave us all something to talk about.
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