BBC’s take on the US media “growing a pair” as someone put it.
Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina.
National politics reporters and anchors here come largely from the same race and class as the people they are supposed to be holding to account.
They live in the same suburbs, go to the same parties, and they are in debt to the same huge business interests.
Giant corporations own the networks, and Washington politicians rely on them and their executives to fund their re-election campaigns across the 50 states.
It is a perfect recipe for a timid and self-censoring journalistic culture that is no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration.
But last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow, from slick anchors who spend most of their time glued to desks in New York and Washington.
The most spectacular example came last Friday night on Fox News, the cable network that has become the darling of the Republican heartland.
This highly successful Murdoch-owned station sets itself up in opposition to the “mainstream liberal media elite”.
But with the sick and the dying forced to sit in their own excrement behind him in New Orleans, its early-evening anchor Shepard Smith declared civil war against the studio-driven notion that the biggest problem was still stopping the looters.
On other networks like NBC, CNN and ABC it was the authority figures, who are so used to an easy ride at press conferences, that felt the full force of reporters finally determined to ditch the deference.
As the heads of the Homeland Security department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) appeared for network interviews, their defensive remarks about where aid was arriving to, and when, were exposed immediately as either downright lies or breath-taking ignorance.
And you did not need a degree in journalism to know it either. Just watching TV for the previous few hours would have sufficed.
:lol: BBC’s take while not wrong per se, is highly amusing coming from them. Considering they are the “mainstream liberal media elite” in Britain and indeed have influence in the world. One might wish to tell the vaunted BBC (whom I’ve generally been fond of given I’m an anglophile) to “grow a pair” themselves and be a bit more objective in their news coverage as well.
Not really. This seems to confuse a lot of people, but the BBC isn’t state owned - it’s owned by the public. It is paid for by fees that are not controlled by the government. The BBC has traditionally been a thorn in the government’s side, both for right and left wing parties. I would say it is much more probing of, and antagonistic towards, the government than any of the private mainstream media in the US, hence the comments about American media growing a pair.
I guess the problem is that private media can’t afford to upset its customers, half of whom voted for Bush. The BBC doesn’t have that problem so much. If the private media companies push too hard these customers may become upset and switch to another newspaper or station. It’s one of the reasons I like the balance in the UK between the private media and the BBC. If it wasn’t for that then our media would be dominated by the likes of Murdoch and we’d have very little in the way of alternative opinion.
The UK broadcast media, at least non satellite (though I think it also extends to UK based satellite news channels) also has an obligation to be “balanced” in its political reporting, hence Sky News is a lot less rabid than Fox news.
I can’t think of a government since Thatcher that has considered the BBC to be anything other than carrying an agenda against it. Funnily enough the opposition parties tend to say the same thing at the same time.
I dont know why, but ITN never seems to attract the same amount of flak as the BBC when it comes to political reporting.
Evidently Shep Smith’s been out and about, thanks for the update. He showed up on The O’Reilly Factor after Letterman. Anyone got transcripts of these? I’d like to see what he’s saying these days.
Olbermann’s great. Countdown is a cable newstainment show I’ll sometimes sit through after News Hour wraps on PBS.
