Monday, April 28, 2003

Media Vanity

The media is so vain. They spend more time looking at themselves in the mirror than anyone else. There are way too many TV hours spent with the media analyzing its own role in the events of the day. There are articles in the papers about how the newspapers and TV look at criminals. There are TV programs about how the reporters are treated in Iraq. And so on and so forth.

It is the viewer's job to examine the media. It is not the media's job to examine themselves. First of all they are blurring the lines between the news and the reporting of it. Didn't there used to be a fly-on-the-wall standard for what the journalist's role was supposed to be? Second, there is no reason to believe that the media is any more accurate, fair, or honest when telling you about themselves then they are when they tell you about the news. It is just second-order nonesense, or as someone or other said, it is "nonesense on stilts". How honest are the CNN analyses of their own reporting? Who knows. They already admitted to soft-pedaling all the news in Iraq for the past 10 years. So what is the whole thing worth? Not much, if you ask me.