24 Hour News Cycle

24 Hour News Cycle, Where Opinions are Facts
Professor Stephen Valdes

The media lynch mob for Shirley Sherrod, an anonymous agriculture department bureaucrat, serves as a great example for the 24 hour cable news cycle, and how it is manipulated by political power brokers to manage how you perceive the reality of so called fair and balanced portrayal of the news
An obscure right wing blogger decided to spin a highly edited video to embarrass the administration of a black president condoning the use of black racism to supposedly destroy our very social fabric. Using nothing less than a three minutes edit of a 45 minute speech to the NAACP, the Sharks of cable news ran with it for all it was worth till the white farmer, the supposed victim of this reverse racism, told the truth to the cable mob, the administration and the public. Ops, the media screwed up again. The government fired a career employee for fear of any backlash in the coming midterm election, and Fox News pulled in its horns, and many of us believed it…
The persistence belief that the stuff of daily political reporting is actually truth, rather than objective journalism is again laid bare. Objective reporting of political news is not dramatic and partisan enough for many of us out in TV land. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that issues and truth doesn’t matter because voters are often deeply ill informed, and less than 40% even bother to vote. This is what happens when people get their news from “ideological noise machines” rather than from real news outlets.
In a totalitarian state, the propagandist works hand in glove with the secret police to hammer home their agendas, and keep the mob in check. Here however something much worse is eroding our free press. We, the news consumers are also part of the problem.
Studies conducted in 2005 and 2006 at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, it often made their beliefs in the inaccuracy stronger, particularly if those beliefs were politically partisan.
We look at Fox news with only nine hours of news content a day, and the rest devoted to conservative opinion programming, and blogging from the right and left with no regard for accuracy or content. Now we have left leaning MSNBC shooting back its own attacks, and for the rest of the so called corporate driven news outlets, the logical perception is to give their customers what they want, partisan political soap opera to reinforce whatever opinions they have. How many other politicians and public figures have been thrown to the lions in this manner only to have careers and their working futures destroyed by the rush to judgment? Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald summed it up when he spoke of reporting facts by saying. “You only quantify for the benefit of the head. You toss the raw meat of emotion for the benefit of the heart”, and that’s what sells. We need the balance of the center, what we now might call the silent majority, with a non partisan sense reality.
At the dawn of the internet age we were awed by being the first generation of people to have the entire tapestry of human knowledge within our grasp and at our computer key board. We instead find ourselves stranded in a Misinformation Age where truth is multiple choice based on whatever you chose to believe in. we no longer are burdened with the need for facts or verification , we have become intellectually lazy. After all, it was on the internet…