>> Because we’ve lost control of our media >
And that’s really
at this point what it’s all about -- these television
personalities, people like Chris Matthews, a cheerleader for the
war on MSNBC, makes about five million dollars a year. They’re
celebrities, they’re judged on their likeability - what in the
business is called a Q Score - and not on their commitment to news,
or to the truth.
>> When General Electric owns, as they do, MSNBC -- and I began the
column writing about Phil Donahue, who was removed from MSNBC
although he had the highest ratings of any show in the evening,
because he dared to put on people who questioned the rush to the
Iraq War... Look, General Electric’s made a fortune off these wars,
as has Microsoft, and they’re hardly going to allow a dissident
voice to impede their profits or their ratings.
Well, they stick to the lowest common
denominator. They build these kind of soap opera scenarios night
after night, week after week, around celebrities. It’s entertaining
-- it’s really, at this point, the business they’re in is
entertainment -- but I worked for many years, including fifteen at
The New York Times, and news is not about entertainment. News is
about information, news is about giving your readers or your
viewers often uncomfortable and unpleasant truths -- climate
change, let’s go back to climate change, would be a good one. That
is the purpose of news, it is about fostering the common good. It
is about informing the public, and when news becomes a business,
when news becomes about entertainment, then issues that are not
uplifting so to speak, issues that don’t have an immediate
emotional draw -- whether it’s around sex, whether it’s around
violence, whether it’s around anything else -- are shoved to the
side. And you’re reduced to what essentially we have been reduced
to, which is a kind of carnival act.
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