You Must Be Kidding

As we all know, the printed press is dying. The factor most often mentioned as the cause for this is the rise of the Internet.

No doubt, the fact that I can get most news for free on Internet, news that are updated by the second beats buying a printed paper that contains yesterday’s news basically.

But it seems to me that one factor that is not often mentioned is the lack of interest of the public for the nature of the news.

What started me on this track was the feeling that during press conferences national leaders seem mostly to answer factual questions about their politics but rarely to be challenged about their positions.  This seems true for Obama, Harper in Canada and Sarkozy in France.

So what exactly is the press, and the media in a more general sense, doing?  Isn’t the usefulness of the public medias seriously curtailed if their only achievement is to relay government politics and decisions?  Where has criticism and challenging of policies gone?

It seems to me that challenging the powers that be in the media is a dying tradition.  This was specially obvious to me during the last days of the Bush presidency.  Before the last 2 or 3 moths of his term, barely any criticism about Bush’s policies could be found in the medias, and then, with the rise of Obama and the nearing of the end of the term, the floodgates seemed to open and criticism was flowing from every direction.

Traditionally the medias were the guard dogs of our democracies and served as safeguards against abuses by the governments.  No more it seems, they have become channels for government propaganda and little more.

Nowadays it seems that the government is making the medias by giving it it’s daily subject matter and medias are making governments as we could see in the case of Berlusconi coming to power:

While all three articles adopt different positions, and point to the complexity of what happened, one thing remains clear. Berlusconi would not be ruling Italy now if he did not dominate a massive media empire that enabled him to manufacture a political party.(Open Democracy)

If the medias are going to just keep relaying government policies without serious questioning and criticism, why not just make the media part of the government?  At least it will be up front and we will have no doubts as to who’s talking.

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Tags: challenging of policies, criticism, governments, medias, press, press conference

This entry was posted by Francois on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 8:58 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.