Re: American Media

Hi Are Flagan,

It may sound silly to say that American media is exaggerated, and it
probably provoked the expression, "Duh?!", but when I say "media" I mean
anything from what's on TV to a website with a few thousand readers. Many
people tend to be anti-mega-corporations and blindly condemn anything big
and embrace anything small, but I find this unreasonable. In a similar way,
just because some media company is small, does not mean that it does not
exaggerate. Most anything from the other side of the fence appear
exaggerated. When you believe in something, you tend to exaggerate, and I do
not see any problem in this. I do not particularly blame any media or any
individual for doing this. What I do instead is to listen to any of them and
try to assess how much of that information I should accept to be true for
myself. And, I do not blindly assume that everything is exaggerated either.
This is why you probably felt that my statement was a silly understatement.
Thus for me, ANY media (including "The O'Reilly Report", though I've never
seen it) can be useful.

Also, at a meta level, the mainstream media is very useful in that they tend
to focus in on the issues that the average Americans find amusing,
interesting, and/or scary. It is interesting and useful to know what the
majority is thinking and feeling, regardless of what you are thinking and
feeling. I do not believe, as some people do, that the sole purpose of the
media giants is to manipulate the masses to their own liking. There may be
some of that at work but I believe the forces are 50/50 between the media
and their audience. After all, it is a business. They are in it to make
money. They cannot afford to push their own political agendas if they do not
get the viewer rating. They wish they could get a big rating for whatever
they broadcast, but this is not possible for them.

A suburban white girl gets kidnapped, the media is all over it. An urban
black girl gets kidnapped, and no one hears about it. Many believe that
there are some media executives whose ideological goal is to suppress the
misfortunes of the black people, but this is difficult to imagine. Most
media executives are, in the end, just interested in money. It is hard to
imagine that they would go out of their ways to suppress something that
could otherwise get a big rating, for their own ideals.

I once read an interview with an ideologically minded reporter who was keen
on covering the misfortunes of the blacks, where he said the ratings of
these news items were always a failure. The people were simply not
interested. Eventually this reporter gave up his ideology, not because the
media company let him down, but because the people did. If there is a
problem in American media, we as the audience are just as guilty of it.
Simply to blame the media is not constructive.

-Dyske

–
Dyske Suematsu
http://www.dyske.com
Where Nothing Is Everything