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Re:The results of the dialogue. Part 1 of 1 (can you beleive it?)
Arnaud My own thinking 042305
Hi Arnaud,
Once again, I think we agree far more than we disagree. It is important to note that the word "Media" derives from the Latin, and is therefore a plural form for the singular, "medium," meaning a method or substance used for a given purpose. Thus, when I refer to the "media," I’m referring to all of the different technologies by which information is distributed on a mass scale, whether that be books, magazines, newspapers, television, radio, cable, Internet—anything you can name.
I agree completely that print media are far more detailed and informative than television news broadcasts, but there are other programs, such as McNeil-Lehrer, or 60 Minutes that provide more detailed reports of important issues. As I look over your reading list, I have to say that it seems you must be very well informed.
If I have led you to believe that I advocate letting somebody else tell me what to think of the facts, I have sadly misrepresented my views. What I meant to imply is that it is not practical for me to do the work of five news crews, sifting through all of the worlds events every day and deciding for myself which ones require my immediate attention. I still have to earn my own keep, complete my school work and find time to relax with my girlfriend (not to mention posting a note or two now and again at MLE). I could do none of these other things if I were selecting my own news stories from all of the events taking place in the world every day. I have to trust the professional's opinions, to some extent, with regards to what requires my attention.
I do believe in listening to news commentator's opinions as to what the fact mean, again, because they are more experienced and skilled than I in providing news analysis. It is why they are paid to do the job. That does not mean that I don't listen to them critically and take responsibility for questioning their thinking. It is their job to do the work, and like a good supervisor, it is my job to evaluate the quality of the work they have done, treat their views as "recommended interpretation," and then make up my own mind as to a final analysis.
You'll see something of my process if you read the post I will be making shortly, on the EU Constitution discussion. I will discuss what is being said by various experts on the Constitution, and what I happen to think of their views.
:-)
Talk to you soon!
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 23, 2005
# Msgs: 26
Latest: April 23, 2005
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Re:Re:Media Madness Part II of II
It sound like we're pretty much in agreement around most of this stuff. The big difference between us that I can see is that I am focused on the full half of the glass and you seem to be looking more at the empty half.
I think, though, that the idea of "introducing"' ethics to the media –your wording suggesting that the media have never heard of ethics before—might be rather untimely. I will grant, certainly that they do not always follow them perfectly, but I can't agree that they've never heard of them before.
As to your reading of the news as uninformative—I can't speak to whatever news stories you refer to, and it's very likely we haven't seen the same ones (I don't watch CNN much). I'm not sure in specific terms what kinds of questions you are expecting the media to answer, and what kinds of information you're getting instead. Yet I feel moved to suggest the following, just on the outside chance that it might be helpful: People often want the media to give us definitive information about things. We want them to make it easy for us to decide whom to vote for. But that's not really their job. They are responsible for providing us with a conduit of information. They can hire analysts to read the facts for us and offer their opinions as to what it means, but nobody really knows, ultimately, what it all means, and it's all guessing anyway. Finally, all we can really do is take it all in and then trust our own instincts when it comes to decision making.
I'm not saying that the media always do a good job of reporting all of the facts, but I find that they do more often then they don't
It is true that we cannot know what the media choose to omit from their reports, but only up to a point. You may recall my story of hearing a report of Wall Street meddling in the affairs of Mexico in Chiapas. I know that the mainstream media chose to ignore this story for a month before they finally ran it.
Something I really appreciate about being multi-lingual is that I can browse through international news reports and learn something about events that U.S. media may choose to ignore, but which other countries find important. That can often be very interesting. And of course, I think you and I both agree that it is important to read some news sources outside the mainstream, who will also be willing to run stories that are ignored by the biggies. Obviously, there is no way to get ALL the news—and I wouldn't want to; I do have a live to live when I'm done bringing myself up to currency. I find it important to strike a balance between maintaining a healthy skepticism about the news and trusting professional news reporters to know their job. If I want to try to do their jobs for them, I'm in the wrong career.
Á bientôt,
Mark
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 21, 2005
# Msgs: 26
Latest: April 23, 2005
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A new world begins today
So how are you all reacting to the news of Pope Benedict the XVI? What do you think? What do you thing it will mean? Do you think that the world will be different with him in the Vatican than it was with Pope John Paul II?
Mark Springer
Sacramento, CA USA
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 20, 2005
# Msgs: 2
Latest: April 26, 2005
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Media Madness Part II of II
The fundamental problems with the media, I think, are that they don~{!/~}t take enough responsibility for raising the bar on national / social discourse. They pretty much give us whatever we want, and for our part, we take very little responsibility for what we want, demanding lots of sex and drugs and spectacle (In Rome, they called it bread and circuses~{!*~}nothing~{!/~}s changed, just the technology), and then we demonize the media for giving us so much trash and so little meaningful content. Meanwhile, we and the media continue pointing fingers at one another, and they keep giving us lots of trash, and we keep enjoying it as we continue to complain that it is all trash.
The continuing reduction of competition among the major media corporations, of course, is lowering the bar further, giving media companies more and more autonomy in constructing programming. And they continue providing what makes them money.
I agree that the media tend to be a lot kinder to the president than he deserves, and that puzzles me. On the other hand, I don~{!/~}t see them hiding important facts that we need to have in order to know what is going on. We know about Abu Ghraib. We know about the results of Afghanistan, we know that Iraq is still in some real chaos. I have no reason to believe that important facts that we need are being withheld by the media.
I agree that a free and productive media system is crucial to a free democracy. But we still have yet to design a good media system that is motivated primarily by the quest for the must informative, clear, accurate, and timely news, rather than by profit.
But your very last comment is the one that makes me certain that there is no media system better than ours. For all of its blunders and fumbles, the fact that our media program will stand up publicly and confess them convinces me that they are doing the right work and they are constructed effectively.
The other thing I find it important to remember when I~{!/~}m evaluating someone else~{!/~}s work, is that it is always very easy from the outside to point fingers and tell them they~{!/~}re doing this all wrong, but that~{!/~}s very different from being the one doing the work and having everyone else criticizing me. I think that, all things considered, the news media probably do more well than they foul up. I~{!/~}m not ready to fire them all yet :-).
Of course, the President is a different matter entirely. I have done my very best to put myself in his shoes, and the only thing I can come up with is that he is a willful, ignorant, fearful, dangerous man. If I had my way, we~{!/~}d have fired him a lot time ago. Of course, I~{!/~}d never have given him the job in the first place. Just his record in Texas on capital punishment alone was enough to convince me that whatever this guy uses for a conscience has nothing to do with justice.
Talk to you later.
Mark
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 19, 2005
# Msgs: 26
Latest: April 23, 2005
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Media Madness Part I of II
Hi Arnaud,
I~{!/~}m certainly not saying that our media is perfect, and I don~{!/~}t deny that there have been some horrible goof-ups now and then. Certainly there are problems with our public media, and as the large networks continue to snake around and remove FCC anti-trust regulations, things are certainly not going in a positive direction.
The problem is, what would you do to fix the system? As long as the U.S. continues to be a capitalist republic, the primary motive of the media will continue to be profits and market share. This means that they will air what people want to watch, and the sad truth is that sex and violence always sells. I would love to see a whole lot more socially valuable content, but then, that~{!/~}s why we have public stations and why I use them.
There is a tremendous amount of pressure on reporters to ~{!0~}scoop~{!1~} the competition by getting their reports in quickly. But these people are professionals. They know that that is what the job consists of when they decide to take it, and their job is to excel at getting and confirming the facts quickly and keeping their own network out in front. This is the basis of free market competition, and it is true of any industry. This is the market system we have chosen to work in. So if Dan Rather (whom I~{!/~}ve always respected deeply) makes his allegations about the president without having all of his evidence in order beforehand, he lets us all down. He fails in his efforts to bring the truth to life, and he fails to behave professionally as a news reporter. It broke my heart, what happened, but I have to confess that Rather bungled his job worse than a first year rookie. I don~{!/~}t know how it happened, but there it is.
The Florida election announcement in 2000 was also a terrible blunder on the part of the media. I have no doubt that it may well have altered the outcome of the election. But that, I blame, not on the media, who are human beings with a job to do, and should be expected to make mistakes now and then, but on the Democratic party, for failing to do what it takes to get a solid message out to the voters and provide the party leadership we need in order to win the White House. It is wrong for one news station to skew the outcome of the election, but it is wrong that the Democratic party let the election get so close.
This doesn~{!/~}t justify the irresponsible behavior of the station in question. Whoever decided to make that announcement and whoever made it should both have been fired. Nonetheless, I hold the news media responsible for reporting news, and I hold the political parties responsible for getting their candidates elected. But I attribute this to incompetence of individuals, not to fundamental problems with the media.
(Continued: See Media Madness Part II of II)
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Language pair: French; English
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Mark S.
April 19, 2005
# Msgs: 26
Latest: April 23, 2005
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Quentin Reply Part VII of VII
President Bush. Agh. You're going to get me started again. I think his people get to say whatever they want off the record. I think he would kick their behinds if they ever said anything "off message" publicly, but I think this is true of any President. The mission of the Whitehouse is to provide national leadership, and everyone, especially the key officers have to project a unified, perfectly disciplined image to the public. That goes with the job. I'm certain that, off the record, Bush will generally ignore anything he doesn't like or doesn't understand. And I don't think that Bush is running the country. I think Dick Cheney is. I think that, like the stereotype of a wise wife, Cheney is adept at listening carefully to what Bush wants to do, showing Bush how to get it, and in so doing, getting his own agenda on the table, having convinced the president that it was his idea in the first place.
But you're right, if you think that opposing viewpoints have no role in the Whitehouse. Bush has made that nice and clear up front. Facts don't seem to have much role in the White House.
Well, I've managed to go on forever. I'm going to go back and thin this out a little before I send it.
Thanks again for the message. I look forward to talking to you again soon.
Mark
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 17, 2005
# Msgs: 26
Latest: April 23, 2005
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Quentin Reply Part VI of VII
Maybe that's why it seems okay to voters in California to pass an amendment to the constitution saying we're not going to offer any more health care to the children of people who came into the country through unofficial means. We figure, "why should we give health care to people who broke the law to come into the country? Let them go home and get health care in their native country." This ignores so many important facts, of course. People are desperate to get here because they're not able to meet their families' needs in their own country. They're here, and they're going to stay. We can throw them out, and they'll come back. So we have to find a way to deal with it. We need to give health care and education to their children, who did not choose to be born in another country and did not choose to be brought here to be treated as criminals. If we don't keep them healthy, they will simply create a public health problem, and we'll have to spend the health dollars anyway, only by waiting, we'll make the problem much more expensive. Yes, it's a serious problem that "illegal aliens" as we try to call them get free health care that is not available to many citizens who can't afford health insurance and need this kind of health care, too. But the answer is not to remove the service, but to make sure it's available to everyone who needs it. We play way too many games with health care in this country. We've got to stop screwing around with this stuff and start taking care of people when their health care needs are still really inexpensive. We create such outrageous problems for ourselves.
And, by the way, why do these people come here anyway? Do the sneak across the boarder, move into an apartment somewhere and start collecting unemployment and welfare? I'm sure a lot of voters must think this is true. The fact is, these people come here because they get jobs that pay them enough money to support their families, something they're unable to do in Mexico. If that's true, then, the criminals are NOT the foreign citizens coming to earn money and feed their families. The criminals are the companies that hire undocumented workers, offering them wages that draw them across the boarder. If our companies weren't paying them good wages, they wouldn't have any reason to come. But we want to have our cake and eat it too. We want to hire workers to do our ugly jobs for us at low (by our standards) wages, but then we want the immigration service to throw these people out of the country as soon as they need some public services that might come out of our tax dollars. Sure is rough, doing business in the United States.
(Continued: See Quentin Reply Part VII of VII)
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Mark S.
April 17, 2005
# Msgs: 26
Latest: April 23, 2005
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Quentin Reply Part V of VII
Anyway, there are way too many Americans who get their ideas about the world from…I don't even know what people are watching on TV these days. Survivor, I guess, and maybe something like Jerry Springer (Not that I'd admit it if we were, but I promise. I have no relationship to Jerry. The last name is just a terrible, unfortunate coincidence. ) Like any human culture, we are still very suspicious of anything that seems strange to us. I suppose I shouldn't get so angry, when we discriminate against people who come into the country, or against homosexuals. But it really makes me crazy. It seems like the Civil War, the Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee, the Haymarket affair, none of these things get through to us. We keep finding new ways to be just as sick as we always were. It's no longer fashionable to discriminate against African-Americans or Mexican-Americans, so now we'll just discriminate against foreigners in their own countries like Iraq, or Homosexuals, who are really easy to pick on because we're a good Christian Nation and God hates gays (so we're told), or people who want to come to the United States to work or to become U.S. Citizens.
Anyway, yes, we have a lot of values that I can't understand. We are deeply involved with our TV Sets, and it makes sense that there is a significant connection there. I know that I grew up in the 60's and 70's, and in those decades, the TV's were telling us a lot about liberty, civil rights, feminism, cultural tolerance, and a society moving towards greater value of diversity. Archie Bunker from All in the Family was funny because he was so ignorant, and we couldn't believe that there were real people who thought as he did. We were getting in touch with our inner liberal.
More recently, it's shows like Married with Children or Bart Simpson. Al Bundy talks very much like Archie Bunker, but now we're laughing "out of the other side of our mouths." He says things that cross our minds and that we're ashamed of even thinking. Bundy makes it okay to be Archie Bunker. He helps us to get in touch with our inner bigot. Now there's something to be proud of.
(Continued: See Quentin Reply Part VI of VII)
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Mark S.
April 17, 2005
# Msgs: 26
Latest: April 23, 2005
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Quentin Reply Part IV of VI
The media did get involved with Perot and with Anderson, because they were obviously big news. Even if they weren't likely to win the election, they had tremendous power to upset it, like Nader did in 2000. Whenever you have a third-party candidate who's polling higher than the difference between the two big guys, and who seems to be taking voters from the guy in front, you've got the makings of an upset. Of course, this is why you'll see a lot of anger from democrats directed towards Nader. Statistically, it's pretty clear that if Nader had dropped out of the election before Election Day, Al Gore would have one in 2000, and we wouldn't be living this eight-year nightmare we're suffering through. That's true enough, but is based on some ridiculous idea that Nader's votes somehow "belonged" to Gore and that Nader "stole"' them from him. Of course, there's been no evidence of any ballot tampering by the Nader Campaign, and if you believe in democracy, you got to believe that votes belong to voters until they are cast. So if Nader upset the Gore campaign, it has to be because Gore didn't take enough votes from Bush to cover himself with Nader. Nader has always been a third-party guy, and had no obligation of any kind to the Democrats.
Another really big impact of a significant campaign by a "third-party" candidate is that it does have a tremendous influence on the winner's agenda after the campaign, and this is where independent parties really do have some power in American politics. The core of these campaigns, certainly of Anderson's and Perot's campaigns both were about balancing the Federal budget. When ten or twenty percent of the voters are backing the guy who promises to balance the budget, it sends a pretty clear message to Washington, and the issues ends up staying on the table through the following term. OF course, this is nice and I appreciate it, but I don't see this as any substitute for a viable multiple-party system.
(Continued: See Quentin Reply Part V of VI)
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Mark S.
April 17, 2005
# Msgs: 26
Latest: April 23, 2005
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Quentin Reply Part III of VI
But as I watch the elections, I am at a loss to understand how people can think a brainless oaf like George Bush could provide us with leadership. He promised us jobs and economic recovery and national security (which, coming from a republican means jobs for the rich, tax cuts and more loopholes for the rich, lots more national security than we need, which is always really good for the rich, and of course, since we really need to find a way to pay for all of this, we'll turn back the clock on all of the critical social programs that are giving lower middle class, working class, and poor people a fair chance at "the American Dream" Also, let's go back to the days when abortion was illegal and women were being murdered by back-alley abortionists who had no accountability because their job was illegal. I'd better shut up. I could go on and on. I know that there are some sensible, well-intentioned republicans in the world, I've met them. And the Republican Party has some values I respect a great deal. But I can't find any word to describe the Republican Party de-facto as it exists in this country on the agenda that it pursues, other than evil. What they're trying to do is simply wrong, and a huge mass of the country, mostly people who stand the most to lose a great deal by their success, is happily cheering them on. I don't know if I'll ever understand this.
I don't know about the media. There are some issues now and again, but over all, I find them reasonably objective. Of course, there's no way to put the news together without making necessary filtering decisions, and these decisions are always ideologically driven. But they don't seem to me to promote one political agenda over the other overall. They do obviously favor democrat/republican candidates over any independent party candidate, and that is wrong, but it is more a problem with our political system than with the media. The media cover the candidates who are going to make an impact on our lives, and most of the time, under our present system, those are going to all be republicans and democrats.
(Continued: See Quentin Reply Part IV of VI)
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
April 17, 2005
# Msgs: 26
Latest: April 23, 2005
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