Celebrity News Craze: April 2008

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Another Insider Expresses Concern Over Media Ethics

Once again an editorial piece was published in The New York Times questioning the media's ethics about its reportage during the 2008 presidential primaries.

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of John Edwards, an early candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination in the 2008 presidential election, questioned the trend in media that is leading to the creation of a "one-size-fits-all journalism."

Her concerns are based on her first-hand knowledge of the issues facing America, and the resulting media coverage of those issues as seen through the 2008 presidential primaries.

If "press insiders" don't find a way to work through biases in the media, then there will only be a greater likelihood that the public will continue to demand to participate in the media.

The rise of citizen journalists, bloggers, YouTube style debates, and the like, only point to the public's fear that the media cannot be fair, and that the only answer is for the public to share in the responsibility of reporting the news.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Tracking Political News Coverage in the era of the Celebrity News Craze

In the year since Aphrodite Jones published Michael Jackson Conspiracy, in which she questioned the true impartiality of the media, other critics have begun to express similar concerns about media ethics.

Of course, when Jones expressed her criticism of the media's professionalism concerning the Michael Jackson trial, the media's reaction was muted.

But now that the media's professionalism is being examined during the course of the 2008 presidential campaign, well, now more people are tapping into the dangers that Jones was warning everybody about one year ago.

If journalists got away with reporting wrong predictions in 2005 as fact about a trial while the case was still being presented, why should it surprise us today that journalists are also trying to get away with reporting wrong predictions in 2008 as fact about a campaign season that is still months away from election day?

In Frank Rich's column in The New York Times, Rich expressed outrage that the media allowed itself to be distracted by inconsequential issues whereas the debate should have been about real concerns that face the electorage.

"Ludicrous as the whole spectacle was, ABC would not have been so widely pilloried had it not tapped into a larger national discontent with news media fatuousness. The debate didn’t happen in a vacuum; it was the culmination of the orgy of press hysteria over Mr. Obama’s remarks about “bitter” small-town voters. For nearly a week, you couldn’t change channels without hearing how Mr. Obama had destroyed his campaign with this single slip at a San Francisco fund-raiser. By Wednesday night, the public was overdosing.

"... But the overreaction to this latest gaffe backfired on the media more than it damaged him. ...

"Thus did another overhyped 2008 story line go embarrassingly bust, like such predecessors as the death of the John McCain campaign and the organizational and financial invincibility of the Clinton political machine against a rookie senator from Illinois. ... "

Rich concludes his column by hoping that consumers of media, who, in this case, watched the debate on the ABC Network, are "mad as hell" at the media's lack of professionalism and, consequently, "won’t take it anymore."

To me, that's wishful thinking.

Where was the outrage one year ago when Jones was sounding this alarum bell?

Media Bias in the United States

According to Wikipedia, this is how we can think of media bias:

Media bias in the United States is the description of systematically non-uniform selection or coverage of news stories in the United States media. Claims of bias in the media include claims of liberal bias, conservative bias, claims of mainstream bias, and claims of corporate bias. There are a variety of watchdog groups that attempt to find the facts behind both biased reporting and unfounded claims of bias, and research about media bias is a subject of systematic scholarship in a variety of disciplines.

What can independent website publishers and bloggers do that the mainstream media can't?

In an interesting blog post on Daily Kos, a blogger acknowledges the sensibility that is emerging about critics of the mainstream media: that there is a valid role for bloggers and independent website publishers in reporting the news.

This blog will aim to add to that conversation from the perspective of other bloggers and independent website publishers.

Where I'm starting out is from the perspective of society's and the media's shared obession with celebrities. How does this focus on celebrities blur our concentration of other subjects?

Disclosures

I am a registered Democrat, and I have long had an interest in the media.

I've read a lot about a bias in the media lately revolving around the U.S. Democratic Party's primary campaign. But even before this, I was lucky to have worked for the journalist Aphrodite Jones, who wrote a book about media bias. Although I will rely on that book to give some context to this blog, I hope the scope of this blog can encompass a larger conversation about fairness and accuracy in the media.

Thank you for visiting Celebrity Media Craze.