Wednesday, December 03, 2008

MSNBC is the new FoxNews, The Daily Show, and Objective Journalism

We have a new Democratic president and apparently the cool thing to do is have a network in your corner.

"Thankfully," MSNBC has accepted this mantle. Witness Chris Matthews say that it's his job as a journalist to make Obama's presidency successful.



And truly thankfully, The Daily Show has taken their role as court jester seriously and is pointing out the hypocrisy.



Which they also did last night in pointing out some of the things that Obama and Hillary Clinton said about each other during the campaign. (Warning: some adult humor, if that kind of thing offends you...)



So, I'm curious. Is it possible for a news organization to be completely objective or is this a case of people recognizing biases and making them work for them? Do we need a completely objective media or is it just that all sides get presented equally?

5 comments:

Chris said...

Are you just now realizing that PMSNBC has been in the Democrat corner for ages? You might not have realized it because only a few dozen people watch it.

Phil said...

Of course not. I mean, I have eyes and ears and a semi-functioning frontal lobe. My reference was to the fact that FoxNews was in the tank for the conservative movement (and Bush for the most part) and MSNBC will be mostly in the tank for Obama.

Brian Hight said...

I guess I'm kinda old school, because I like the classic BBC style news, where everything is even toned and neutral. 'News' should be about what happened, whereas 'commentary' is what people think. These days, there seems to be more commentary in what should be news, or more subtly, journalists don't have the time to ask, or perhaps just don't want to ask fully rounded questions to enable a story to be fully developed.

Tony Arnold said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Tony Arnold said...

Objectivity and media have never been bedfellows. Media likes to claim objectivity, but if you study the history of the press as far back as you can go, the media has never been objective as a whole.

It is run by humans and humans have bias. Throw in money, and bias becomes stronger.

But this is not necessarily bad. As long as there is multiple media groups having their own sets of bias, you get a good cross-section of views with each one pointing out strengths or weaknesses of their subjects that the other media groups might not.

If a community has only one or two media groups available, as seen in certain regions of the world, you have a problem. If an individual only realies on one source of info, they are in trouble.

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