The K Experience

Ben Owusu

|07-12-2008 12:26:10

Wow i.... i cant believe in the first vid that newsreporter effectively shut
down the other guy by telling him that he will never be on the show again.

Man,
i thought i knew the extent of the behavour and attitudes of the american media
and the american people but this takes it to new levels.

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Ian	\|09-30-2008 19:41:14

Actually it happens a lot, and the unfortunate thing is that most of us are
completely used to it.

I remember this kind of thing being a hot topic when I
was in elementary school and apparetly media biases were on the rise. In fact,
in fifth grade our writing class had a discussion on it, if you can believe
that. And then one day it seemed like it disappeared. No one in the media was
talking about it. The thing wasn't that it wasn't incediary, it'd just been
overplayed, it was old hat. I could talk about media bias on the street and
still have a heated discussion but the media itself was reticent because the
thing about the media in America is that it's about the perfect approximation of
a badly behaved child with ADD tearing apart the kitchen in search of a cookie
jar for raiding. It couldn't talk about media bias because it had moved on, and
modern infocasters rarely look back.

I don't think the media was 24 hour
bonanza time quite at that moment but you could kind of feel them gearing up for
something. Reving their engines for the time they'd never turn off. The pundits
were moving from famous to meteoric, opinion was pouring in to fill the gap left
by more time than information and people seemed to love contorversy, Jerry
Springer had proved that with pinache (and a few splintered chairs). Soon, it
just seemed like bias was part of the engine and since so many people seemed to
be being validated, even at the expense of polarization, it worked.

The fact
that news stations in America is significant to this because it gets to the real
issue, that the news is being dispensed to the public as a product not as
information. Everything is processed just as much as McDonalds hamburgers and
with all the same dividends to show. And just like the golden arches that can be
seen everywhere, at some point you just learn to block out the ugliness, like a
coping mechanism.

It's not that people necessarily like it (some do), or that
it's at all right, it's just that the machine is powerful and to some degree
necessary but because it's so huge, and become now so volitile, nobody knows how
to adjust it. And that's the predicament.

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