Ted Koppel offers a long and bitter reflection on the sad state of television news, and you read and read in hopes of a telling insight, only to finally bump into his diagnosis of the problem: deregulation, the drive for “profits” and “capitalism” generally. Late in the piece he assures us that his call for re-regulation shouldn’t mean regimentation: “television news should not become a sort of intellectual broccoli to be jammed down our viewers’ unwilling throats.” Hmmm. It sounds to me that his view of a “free press” is that Koppel should be free to tell us what to think but we should not be free not to listen or to listen to something else.
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/4615/why-is-news-so-bad-wait-for-it-capitalism/
Why is news so bad? (wait for it) Capitalism!
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{ 8 comments }
Hi, the alternative is the Fox channel which is blatently one sided, more one sided than any station in the history of tv. I watch it these days for a laugh when they tell us about the polls showing that the President is not doing what the American people want.
Mr. Anderson, TV has never been “fair and balanced”, any more than newspapers. There is always editorial bias, because there is always a choice to be made about what is run and what is not.
Fox News is biased in one direction, other news biased in other directions. I laugh at CBS news just as you laugh at Fox. That John Stossel gets any airtime at all is astounding, he may very well be as close as any big-media has ever gotten to “fair and balanced” in his reporting.
Long ago, in a country far, far away, if a newspaper called itself “The Kansas Democrat”, they were honest about, and people expected, news from a “Democrat Party” perspective.
It is the concept of impartiality itself that is the great lie.
Has anyone seen the new UN plan for saving the world?
Here is the link to the article:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article341967.ece
“It sounds to me that his view of a “free press” is that Koppel should be free to tell us what to think but we should not be free not to listen or to listen to something else.”
Jeff is absolutely correct. Koppel and the large majority of journalists care little, if anything, about free speech, a free press, and the right to dissent, accept, of course, when it benefits them. This is not surprising since the primary goal of Koppel and other journalists is to brainwash the audience, through their bias, non-factual presentations and irrational
“analysis”, into accepting their view of the world. The facts and the truth are of little importance to them. What passes for news is generally garbage, just plain garbage.
This all has nothing to do with the fact that you now can catch your news whenever you want (as opposed to sitting through the nightly news) from any number of 24 hours news networks (biased as they may be, I still find them entertaining and somewhat informative) and the internet.
Network news has simply gone the way of other outmoded (I believe that’s the right word) goods. This is like horse-and-buggy makers blaming de-regulation and the free-market for their losing business to Ford.
Joel D said:
“Has anyone seen the new UN plan for saving the world?”
Haha! Imagine that!
The UN proposes that the UN should be the world’s savior! (That sounds awfully familar)
With all the economic idiocy in the article, this part is still the funniest, “At the heart of the proposal, unveiled at a gathering of world business leaders at the Swiss ski resort of Davos . . .”
Well who WOULDN’T unveil things there?
Did the Swiss know about this?
Koppel’s statement shows the real impact of regulation. Under regulation the incumbent businesses (in this case broadcast networks.) have protected monopolies. It was the same with airlines and phone companies. Koppel had a guaranteed audience, and advertisers had to pay the big networks.
Look at the airlines after deregulation. Service went up and airfares down. But, the airlines who dominated under regulation declined in the face of competition.
Regulation almost always protects the regulated businesses to the detriment of consumers.
“The irony of the information age is that it gives legitamacy to uniformed opinion”
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