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Failures of American mass media
As an immigrant or potential immigrant to the United States, one of your most important civic duties after you naturalize, is to vote. To make informed local and national choices you need to read good newspapers, scan the Internet for a variety of opinions, and yes, even watch the news. Increasingly many or most Americans get their national news from “prime time” cable news networks such as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox.
CNN is widely considered to be a more mainstream (neither left or right wing dominated) network. NBC (MSNBC) provides a more progressive, liberal perspective, and Fox clearly provides far right wing, conservative viewpoint. Since CNN also hosts conservative commentators like Lou Dobbs this is somewhat of a generalization. Overall, this is a pretty good system since multiple views are represented and given roughly equal time. The real problem is that if you only watch one news network, read one local newspaper, or listen to one radio station you will be sadly uninformed or even misinformed.
For example, I know an otherwise intelligent engineering graduate classmate of mine who reads the Orange County Register, a local California newpaper contaminated with opinions from an intellectually-challenged conservative commentator named Thomas Sowell. The result is that he let Sowell’s uninformed op-eds cloud his thinking to the point where he denies the established scientific fact of global warming. And here in my home town of Albuquerque, the top New Mexico newspaper serving nearly a million people is largely dominated by meaningless but apparently popular front page reporting of local crime, leaving many New Mexico residents ignorant of the deeper issues of our day. And this sad situation is not unusual in America where viewership and ratings drive content.
The fact is that our views and our perceptions of reality are overwhelmingly shaped by the mass media. As a newcomer to America, this makes it imperative to understand exactly what you are watching. In my next few articles on this subject, I’ll discuss how Fox "News" successfully manipulates gullible Americans by substituting accuracy and ethics in exchange for higher ratings.
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