CNN – News or Entertainment Programming?

The promo slogan for CNN used to be “all news all the time.” Now is seems to have changed into “some news some of the time.” There was a time in America when the Peter Jennings story on inaccurate uranium information related to Iraq that Bush used in his state of the union address would have been the top story on all the networks for days. Certainly, the possibility America may have been led into war through the deceptions of a rogue administration is big news and something the public needs to hear about.

The truth is the news we see via broadcasters like Fox, CNN, CBS and most others is filtered based upon public acceptability. This is all about ratings and advertising dollars because it has become accepted in the industry that if you present an audience with information against their views, that audience will change the channel to find a station that more closely mirrors their opinions. In other words the audience prefers a certain flavor of news over other flavors. The news channel that is able to harmonize itself with majority opinion is rewarded by the highest ratings along with a corresponding increase in advertising dollars.

This is not about the ethics of particular journalists so much as it is about the priorities of assignment editors, news directors and upper management. The problem is the ethics associated with journalism does not seem to extend into the news management levels that decide which stories get reported on. Such choices are governed by a criterion of viewer interest that translate into nothing less than telling the audience only what they want to hear. The American audience did not want to hear stories about the ugly part of the war with Iraq and much preferred the version of the news that focused on high-tech weaponry. So that is what they got. Now the audience does not want to hear that our country might have been blindly led into an unjust war by the Bush administration. So the stories related to this important issue tend to wind up on page five if they are even reported at all.

The airwaves are owned by the public and one would assume the news would serve to keep the public informed about the truth of what is going on. We all depend upon the news as a window to what is happening in our world. One would assume the public trust given news organizations to inform the public of the news would override profit considerations. One would assume a program that represents itself as a news program would be responsible to report the news in a fair and evenhanded manner. Unfortunately, when you turn on the news today, most of what we get in America is not really news at all but programs devoted to telling America only what it wants to hear. Even the government itself has become an extension of this colored news phenomena as the congress and other branches respond primarily to the delusional world created by our news medias.

No wonder the rest of the world sees us as so out of touch with reality. I hope the ratings for Peter Jennings do not decline too much.

Pat Kelly
Editor,
LogicalReality.com

And I'm afraid the world is heading that way too.