We get letters, especially regarding this rant about modern journalism.

Great piece on journalism…I think you could also have mentioned the professionalization of news reporting as a significant contributing factor to its decline. Being a reporter used to be decidedly non-elite profession, with the requirements of being able to write clearly and having a good nose for a story. But over the last 20 or 30 years, it’s become “journalism” filled with college graduates—and people with j-school masters’—with all the attendant self-importance and ideologization, given that college students have been taught for 30 years that ideology is what matters—and the occult motives of people in line with the vulgar Marxism that rules the academy. Hence the “here’s what’s really going on” school of explanatory teleprompter reading, etc. Because you aren’t as smart as journalism majors and need to be instructed…

One myth the Czar frequently needs to dispel (not in the readers’ case) is that we have never enjoyed a Golden Age of journalism. Actually, we’re staggeringly less biased than we used to be; that’s both good and bad.

It’s good, in that we are starting to have many more outlets for
alternative explanations (e.g., conservative ones), but bad in that it is easier to masquerade agendas with the pretense of fairness. Thank goodness more and more people are using the internet—they can get the news they want to hear, rather than enjoy spoon-feeding. Whether or not the source is credible is somewhat less important to the Czar, as long as people are expanding beyond their one newspaper and whatever news program comes on before the show they want to watch.

The networks cannot afford to cover all the major news stories equally (and profitably), so they focus on the big ones as defined by a variety of influences. However, of course, you can’t exhaustively cover the same five minute story ad nauseam, or you lose viewers. So to lengthen a news story to fill time, you bring in analsysts to explain, posit, opine. The Czar agrees with this reader’s comment above that there is an underlying assumption by the outlets that we are too slack-jawed to get it without their help.

One other curiosity: our whole shock and awe about the news media dates back to 1986, when we took an anthropology course, of all things. The professor stunned us with the claim that objective documentary work is impossible. As long as you have a cameraman looking in one direction, a writer describing the events, an editor cutting out “useless” footage, a narrator stressing certain words at a certain rate, you have introduced four sources of contamination.

As an assignment, the class was to watch an allegedly unbiased anthropological film and spot all the points where some sort of editorial favoritism was occurring. The Czar received an A on his response for realizing how the camera always seemed to be set up where they needed it, how the music emphasized certain actions, how scene transitions implied passage of time (clockwipes versus jump cuts, etc.). Once we got the idea of what to see, it was hard not to turn if off with regard to every scene.

The professor then added that this bias is not limited to documentary films: he cited televised news, radio news, newspapers, and so on (there was no Web at that time), as further examples of this contamination. He said the news is the worst, because you have an untold number of contamination, either by filtering, over-simplification, obfuscation, lensing, biasing, advertiser influence, and so on. The Czar’s mind henceforth blown, we have since been unable to turn it off.

Readers should hereby notice whether riots are filmed from the side of the police, the side of the protestors, of if the camera person is in between; whether they use subtitles or overdubs when interviewing non-English speakers, what stories lead, how long a story is reported, which talking head reads the tele-prompter, whether the reporting is thinly veiled advertisement for a show on the same network or a movie by the parent company (often masked as a celebrity interview), or whether the newspaper wants you to download the rest of the story from their website (and see related ads).

What else can the Czar add? Forewarned is forearmed: remain suspicious when watching, reading, hearing, or ingesting any news story.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.