Deserving more than deficiency
By Nate Hays
The media in the United States are under fire for all of the wrong reasons.
It is hard to go through a day without hearing someone criticize the media for being biased. Conservatives continuously rally against the "evil" mainstream media and how it constantly supports liberal causes. Meanwhile, liberals trash the Fox News Channel for what they perceive to be the network's open bias toward the right.
The problem, however, is not media bias. The problem is that people expect the media to reinforce their own political beliefs instead of reporting the news.
Isn't it possible that the news is not meant to promote a particular position but rather to inform the public at large?
With respect to the media, there is a much larger problem: They spend a majority of their time reporting trash.
For example, Michael Jackson is an easy sell for the media. But his trial is almost totally irrelevant.
Time and again we see the media sensationalize a story only because it grabs people emotionally. There is no doubt that the Laci Peterson case was a tragedy, yet the case was hardly relevant to the everyday world in which we live.
The United States is currently involved in a war in Iraq; perhaps such stories should take priority over celebrity trials.
But, in a democracy like ours, we enjoy freedom of the press. That doesn't mean much, however, if the free press is incompetent. When the media feed citizens bogus information, it becomes hard for those people to put pressure on its government to remain accountable.
This is why we must recognize these problems. How can the rampant human rights abuses in Africa ever be fixed if people are not being told about them?
Of all of the media outlets in this country, the 24-hour networks must take most of the blame. One would think that a channel that devoted the entire day to news would be able to cover headlines from around the world.
Instead, the networks regurgitate the same stories every fifteen minutes. Sitting down and watching the 24-hour networks is like watching an episode of Entertainment Tonight over and over again.
What it comes down to is this: Our press is failing us. We have a media that might as well be state-run because we are unable to receive relevant and important information.
As long as we have a media that report as they currently do, our democracy is in trouble.
As citizens, it is vital that we demand news and not sensationalism.
* Nate Hays' column appears once a month. He can be reached at nthays@scu.edu.