![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() These hows are often hidden but they have a huge impact on what the public understands and values. It’s trusting how it reports – how it prioritizes what’s important, selects which facts are the most relevant and frames the implicit choices. What does it mean to trust a media outlet today? Not just trusting it to report the truth. Which brings me to the reason I read the Guardian every day. They’re just more attuned to what their corporate owners or political benefactors would like emphasized than to what the public should understand.Īnd their decisions about what’s important to report, what facts to include or exclude, and the implicit choices posed, are becoming ever more concentrated in the hands of very few people – such as Elon Musk, Chris Licht, Rupert Murdoch and a handful of super-celebrities such as Dr Phil McGraw and Tucker Carlson. In my experience, most editors, publishers and producers don’t seek to mislead the public. Less in deceiving the public than in presenting false choices. Distortions come less in outright lying than in leaving out pertinent information. The problem with today’s media isn’t so much that they’re misinforming as that they’re misframing. When the New York Times reports that inflation is being driven by wage gains but fails to report on record corporate profits, it’s not just leaving out a pertinent fact.īy emphasizing the views of those who believe “wage-price” inflation is threatening the economy, rather than “profit-price” inflation, the Times is actively shaping – and distorting – how the public understands one of the central economic problems of the day. (Licht also told staff they should stop referring to Trump’s “big lie” because the phrase sounds like a Democratic party talking point, and he wants more conservative guests.) Licht has altered how the public views what’s at stake in our politics, presumably to please corporate advertisers or to appease the rightwing billionaire cable magnate John Malone, the leading shareholder in the new Warner Bros Discovery conglomerate. The so-called “center” depends largely on what the media decide the public should know and how the media present and frame issues. There’s no “center” in American politics. When Chris Licht, CNN’s new chairman and CEO, fired Brian Stelter and canceled Stelter’s Sunday CNN show, Reliable Sources – which had been a source of intelligent criticism of Fox News, rightwing media in general, Trumpism and the increasingly authoritarian lurch of the Republican party – Licht didn’t just move CNN to the “center”, as he has claimed. Musk is choosing to coarsen the nation’s conversation by actively courting the political right. When Elon Musk invites back on to Twitter Donald Trump, Milo Yiannopoulos and others whose hateful or violent screeds got them banned by Twitter’s former owners, he’s not honoring “free speech”, as he claims. Sadly, the media are rife with hidden agendas. It would be a show about favoritism to Black people over white people. The question gave away the hidden agenda. ![]()
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