Lack of Balance Ain’t Just an MMO Issue
I don’t ordinarily care to wax political, as I’m fairly moderate on most issues and figure what the hell do you need to read about my opinions for. There are others who love to debate politics far more than I do, so you can find no shortage of blogs that whet your appetite in that arena.
One issue I do feel strongly about, though, is the notion of accountability and accuracy in the media. So when I read the following line by Raph Koster in his recent observations on changes to Time, I got kinda fired up:
“The days of letting facts be reported without comment seems to be dwindling… and while it opens up lots of questions about whether we’ll ever see truly unbiased reporting, it does mean that perhaps less facts will pass by unexamined. And that would be a good thing.”
Since I posted a couple responses to the piece, which in turn inspired some discussion, I thought I may as well post my collected thoughts here so that you lurkers had something to read. After all, recycling is the right thing to do these days.
Good lord, I’m not sure I could disagree more with Koster. How is the average person supposed to know what voices to trust? Part of the problem in today’s society is that media consumers latch on to magnetic voices and start believing everything they say rather than thinking for themselves.
Cable news is a joke. The FCC only cares about censoring smut, not monitoring fairness.
The media needs its Murrows, those select individuals who meticulously stick to the facts. The voice of true objectivity is often the most valuable voice of all.
I’m not saying there was some perfect era in journalism where you could implicitly trust that everything reported in the news was going to be fair and accurate. But at least there was a tangible fear of the FCC that kept most mass media outlets wary of spinning out of control.
Today,there is no fear. In fact, extremism is encouraged by the system and is an absolute must to stand out from the crowd of cable and website news.
To think that having more voices means that most people will somehow figure the facts out from the fiction seems ludicrous to me at best and dangerous at worst.
I’m against governmental regulation of the media in just about every way, but there needs to be some accountability other than ratings and advertiser dollars. There needs to be places that the average person can go and be able to count on objectivity without needing to piece together every important news story on their own.
I was taught the “marketplace of ideas” concept when I was briefly a mass communications major in college. The trouble is, I don’t think it’s the best ideas that tend to rise to the top of public consciousness, but rather those which are shouted the loudest or have the most marketing dollars behind them.
There are just too many damn voices. When there’s that much cacophony, the danger of objectivity losing out to the bullshit being blasted over the loudspeaker is a very real peril.
So the most fundamental answer is “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Who decides what “objective” is?
How is the average person supposed to decide who to trust? By doing the legwork. What is the alternative? That you are TOLD whom to trust. Why is that preferable? It’s a “believe everything you read” scenario.
[...] responds (there, and on his own site): Good lord, I’m not sure I could disagree more. How is the average [...]
[...] responds (there, and on his own site): Good lord, I’m not sure I could disagree more. How is the average [...]
People will believe anything they read in the news these days. It is scary really because it is hard to tell who is telling the truth and who isn’t. For example my husband who is a 26 year old healthy male was denied for life insurance because he has social anxiety disorder. When asked why he would be denied for that the State Farm rep said because Oprah wrote an article on the dangers of medications used to treat social anxiet disorder! I was like wth? Oprah isn’t a doctor! She is a freaking talk show host!
Another example would be the blog over at the forge where Matt talks about the soccer mom telling a friend how horrible gaming was and how screwed up it was making children because of an article that she had read.
What people read and watch in the news helps them decide what they will believe and can really manipulate their minds.
If there was an ideal solution, it would be in place already and we wouldn’t have to debate this.
However, I still think the “do your own legwork” is impractical. People are lazy. They want to be fed information, not seek it out. The most effort the average person wants to do is fire up a Google search and read the top entry.
So yeah, I do think we need filters. Smart filters. And they need to be watched and reviewed, with points and counterpoints and moderation. Because the alternative simply does not work in today’s explosion of available information.
The good stuff has to rise to the top some way other than a popularity contest.
Just watch the BBC instead of any American news program and you’re fine
Or just don’t watch it at all, it’s nearly all negative anyway.
I know that I’m naive when I say that the “solution” (if i were to be so bold as to call it that) is educating people to have “sort skills’. If we afford our society the right to freedom of speech, then we need to be able to afford the education to everyone of how to use it and be swayed by it – government can at least help in that without being accosted by scandal and political warfare (…maybe). If people are smart enough to stop and say “I heard X, Y, Z! but it was on the Oprah Winfrey Show so really amounts to squat”, then i’d say that’s one battle won. Sadly i fully admit to being naive on this “solution” and extremely cynical to it ever happening. Media warfare’s a bitch, and everyone’s a victim. Gullible people, and spam are the weapons. It’s a numbers game, and objectivity is the needle in the haystack.
It’d be nice if National Public Broadcasting was forced to remove all partisan entities and solely be fact based. That is how it is supposed to be, since it is for everyone.
Generally, people get their news from AP, Fox, CNN, etc and they all slant based on who is reporting and editing. If we could set up a simple and effective nonpartisan reporting entity monitored for strict adherance to facts without even the slightest hint of biased allowed, everyone wins. Except the oped based media posing as reporters, that is.
Some level of partisan bickering is healthy. However, the lack of a single fair reporting entity hurts the people enveloped in the rat race who are looking for accuracy but don’t have the large amount of time required to ‘sort’ through the mess.
[...] Green!), Psychochild spent the day musing on the pitfalls of Web 2.0. As this echoes some of my recent prattle on content creation and responsibility for it, I provided a rather grouchy reply that makes me [...]
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