Rubert Murdoch's media empire

     The year is 1980. Ted Turner's Cable News Network debuts, creating the first 24-hour news network. Arch-conservative mass media owner Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News in 1996, finally giving voice to white American males. Fox News often doesn't emphatically assert and stand by its statements, but employs the question mark instead to its captions. The style and aesthetics of Fox have been emulated by other media outlets, such as CNN. Obviously there is not enough news to fill twenty-four hours, so a significant portion of airtime is dedicated to "analysis." There is time committed to pop culture, human interest stories, round table discussions of relevant political issues, and a 24-hours crawl at the bottom of the screen. Many news channels follow the dictum, "If it bleeds, it leads,"concentrating on sensationalistic stories to score high Nielsen ratings.

Neil Cavuto and an example of question mark abuse.

The domination of fluff pieces and pundits

     The neologism infotainment, a portmanteau of information and entertainment, was coined during the nineteen-eighties. An early example of this television format was the show Hard Copy. Parodied in the November 1994 episode of The Simpsons ("Homer Bad Man") as Rock Bottom, Hard Copy was a sensationalistic, lurid, alarmist tabloid show. Not only has U.S. television seen an excess of infotainment shows (e.g., Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Extra, and E! Entertainment Television) but this obsession with all things celebrity has crept into broadcast and cable news. What was a starlet wearing to an awards ceremony? Who's dating whom? When was their last bowel movement?!
     Fox News Channel is most guilty of this trend toward devoting pieces viewed as trivial or superficial. Witness the coverage of what has been deemed the "missing white woman syndrome": Natalee Holloway, Chandra Levy, and Laci Peterson are representative of this media phenomenon. In addition, when something violates the FNC narrative, less coverage is guaranteed. Look at their treatment of the Second Gulf War, which showed parallels to the morass that was the Vietnam War.
     Equally important is the rise of punditry, which has led to viewers confusing what is fact and what is opinion. A controversial issue suddenly becomes a "debate", with talking heads shouting at each other to the point of unintelligibility. Wealthy pundits proclaim to be the voice of the masses and feign populism to connect with their audience. Pundits speak derisively of the "Ivory Tower" academics and "elites", portraying intellectualism as equivalent to effeteness.

     During the monologue of comedian, Catholic, and left-of-center moderate Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2006, he stated that "...reality has a well-known liberal bias." His on-screen persona is an amalgam of Geraldo Rivera, Bill O'Reilly, and Stone Phillips. On the première of The Colbert Report, his segment "The Wørd" (a piece satirizing The O'Reilly Factor's Talking Points Memo) introduced the term "truthiness."

Terminology

     Suffice it to say, it has been a total disaster over what has happened to the media over the past twenty to thirty years.Our attention spans are getting shorter. Witness the shrinking sound bite of television campaign coverage. The average length of time that presidential candidates are shown speaking without interruption on newscasts went from roughly forty-two seconds in 1968 to less than ten seconds in 2008.
     In this post, I will discuss some of the terms from our media lecture in Soc. 150. The first appellation is framing, which is placing a news story into a pre-existing frame of reference to the public. The next important term is agenda setting, defined as the process of selecting and screening topics. Another crucial concept is from Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, who popularized the term cultural hegemony. Gramsci was a victim of a truly totalitarian state. His concept of hegemony helps to illustrate how the dominant culture/group in society enforces their ideas on the marginalized in society. A narrow layer of individuals disseminated the ideas of the ruling class into society as a whole.

"I'm Not A Terrorist" by Jennifer Camper. Comic originally published in Fall 2005 issue of Bitch magazine.

     One media manipulation technique is known as false balance. In this method, the media presents, for example, an evolutionary biologist debating with a proponent of creationism/intelligent design. Or a climatologist argues with an anthropogenic "climate change" denier.
      Lastly, there is the subject of euphemisms in political media. In his supernal essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell examined this linguistic shift. A few contemporary abuses of English would be the trend from "global warming" to the more nebulous "climate change" or the reframing of "torture" as "enhanced interrogation techniques." Another example is "extraordinary rendition," where an individual is taken to a country where the rights of due process do not apply.

An Introduction

     In 1969, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh helped publicize the Mỹ Lai massacre that took place during the Vietnam War. The Pentagon Papers, spearheaded by Daniel Ellsberg and published in The New York Times in 1971, brought to attention the mishandling of the Lyndon Johnson administration's management of Vietnam. Intrepid reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke the Watergate scandal in the Washington Post in 1973. Now, we have self-styled journalists such as thin-skinned weasel faced wimp James O'Keefe and Andrew Breitbart, whose style of pranks and manipulation of audio and video recordings have become the standard for political discourse in this country. What caused this precipitous decline, this erosion of the news media? Over the course of this weblog I will strive to find the answers to this troubling question.