>Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2001 01:02:06
>From: "Lex Jenkins" <lexjenkins@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: [OM] Re: [OT] News media practices
>If anyone wonders why England (and English-influenced Australia and New
>Zealand) seems so fond of sensationalist tabloid journalism, it is because
>of the prior restraint imposed by the government on the reporting of hard
>news. And to a lesser yet equally disturbing extent in the United States,
>we see that when a government entity makes it impossible for journalists to
>cover the news, they will cover crap; and when journalists are fed lies by
>"sources" they will report lies.
>
>Applying legalistic strictures to exercising the rights *all individuals*
>hold under the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is antithetical to the
>very notion of a free press.
************
We in the US, need to be sure that we remind ourselves that our press has
quite often been restricted both by government and by self-imposed
restrictions put on individual journalists and certain stories by privately
held media groups with conflicting interests. While we like to tout our 1st
Amendment, the idea of a free press is more pervasive than the actuality.
Some examples of wide-spread restrictions on the US press:
*No coverage given to the oppression of Blacks and other minorities from
1600's to early 1960's.
*No coverage given to government sponsored pogroms and massacres such as
military actions against striking workers in the early part of the 20th
century, the assault on the WWI "Bonus Marchers", and probably many more
that aren't widely known including numerous outrages against the indigenous
peoples that were here first.
*No coverage given to the fact that the US President who held office longer
than anybody else used a wheelchair. (One has to wonder if the US would've
recognized the abilities of the disabled far sooner had more been done with
that story.)
*Very little coverage given to the fact that LBJ attained office illegally
through the counting of the names of people long dead.
*Very little coverage given to the criminal shennanigans of the Clinton
regime. (That example is interesting because despite claims touting that
the Internet was going to allow even greater freedom of the press, the very
fact that certain stories appeared first on the Web was used to discredit
them.)
We've gotten ourselves into a situation in which the power of the media to
squelch stories or discredit them is almost as powerful as the media that
is supposed to report these stories. Still, US freedoms are far better than
most. The trouble is that people in the US have grown lazy and are
accustomed to believing what they're told by the popular press. Years
later, historians often fill in the missing bits, as they did in the above
examples.
As far as US appetite for sensationalism, we're second to none. One has
only to look at TV to see that. One wonders what it means when tabloidism
on the Boob Tube consistantly outranks both hard news and learning shows.
What does it mean when the most popular sportstainment is completely made
for sensationalism such as the WWF and the upcoming XFL, while potentially
great amatuers in less popular activities often can't get even local coverage?
I'm not sure where an Olympus carrying photojournalist fits into any of
this. But it's worth mentioning that people who just happened to be in
certain places at certain times have captured images that the "official
press" later decided to use. The Rodney King incident and the Fireman
carrying the kid out of the Federal Building in OK, come to mind as
non-Olympus examples.
Mike Swaim-- (OK, so that was a really poor attempt at tying this to OM
gear. ;-)
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