How influential is the media in shaping public opinion?

[marcus]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/13covert.html

shocked by how blatant

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Arnold just got caught doing the same. Why would any of this shock you?

To me the republican screw job is so obvious that I can only watch while in awe of the foolishness of this country.

 

[SOS2008]

To me the republican screw job is so obvious that I can only watch while in awe of the foolishness of this country.

First this was debated under the Gannon Guffaw thread, then under FOX's let's bomb them back to the stone age thread, and now this information. Not only is the media leaning more to the right, and practicing censorship, it is being paid to do it.

If you're wondering why the country isn't alarmed, studies showed that Americans who supported Bush tended to have education levels of high school or less. If people were aware of it, they might understand the lack of ethics, but I doubt they would understand the deeper aspect of how this erodes democracy.

 

[Moonbear]

Well, the article is quite a few pages long there, and I've only read about halfway through, but on page 2 or 3, it mentions this began during the Clinton administration, so it seems you don't get to blame Bush entirely for this one, nor use it as evidence of media leaning to the right. If anything, it's evidence of how lazy our news stations have become that they are essentially resorting to plagiarism in showing pre-packaged videos and claiming it as their own work rather than crediting the source. But, this laziness has been pretty obvious for some time. I can go to the Reuters website and read their stories, then listen to the same pre-packaged story being read on every radio and TV channel I listen to that day (or sometimes there's even a day lag in the news getting out). There is absolutely nothing added, no investigative reporting, nothing that even indicates the media stations have gone about confirming sources; the story is read verbatim, and I never hear credit given anymore "this report just in from the Reuters news wire" or however they used to be credited.

I also don't see it as much worse, other than in not giving credit to the original source, than in writing a story based on a press package handed out to the reporters without the reporters doing any further checking of the facts and information in that press package.

 

[loseyourname]

This has been brought up about forty times on this board alone, and as Moonbear points out, many politicians from both sides are guilty as is just about every news agency out there, regardless of how it leans. The fact that anyone is shocked by this is what shocks me. Has there ever been a time when the news media was truly trustworthy?

 

[misskitty]

The media has never been entirely trustworthy because they will put whatever spin they can on a story so that it sells newspapers or increases the number of viewers. Its a dangerous combination.

I believe it was Mark Twain who said "Those who don't read the newspapers are uninformed...Those who do read the papers are misinformed."