To Their Right Praise, and True Perfection!

To look back in the not too distant future of media and compare it with its present state can be very disheartening.

Looking at famous journalist such as Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings and even more recently Tom Brokaw it is hard to fully comprehend the media's fall from grace.

According to a 2003 USA Today article, "Trust in the media has dropped from 54% in mid-1989 — about the time of the fall of communism — to a low of 32% in December 2000, during the post-election confusion over George W. Bush and Al Gore."

However, a lot of this can be chalked up to the commercialization, sensationalized, subjectivity of the present state of the news; as pointed at quite aptly my Farhad Manjoo in his book True Enough.

According to Manjoo the overuse of terms such as "breaking news" have essentially created a boy who cried wolf scenario. As a result the news is harder and harder to believe.

This is perhaps chiefly because in the world of 24-hour news coverage there is a constant power struggle between networks to have higher ratings, so any new detail must be sensationalized to draw viewership away from the increasingly sedated American audience.

This competition has lead cable news to become more entertainment and speculation in stead of just the news and straight facts. As a result commentators such as Bill O'Reilly, Glen Beck and Keith Olbermann have very successful shows and because the networks are always competing for first; the cycle is perpetuated.

Cable news has seemingly become a competition of who can be the loudest, most brash and best showman or woman. Naturally you can see the type of problem this creates with the public when this type of programming is presented as news on an "all news" network. As Stephen Colbert aptly put, "it's now what you say, but how loud you say it."

As a result and somewhat due to the hostile media effect less and less people believe that the media is unbiased and being truthful. The hostile media effect is a psychological effect where the media has become so untrusted and the consumers so staunch that anything is perceived as going against each individual. For example a democrat and a republican can watch the same segment of news and each will perceive it as hostile to their party or ideology.

To quote Manjoo: "On the left now, just as on the right, people believe the press is out to get them...Republicans and Democrats each claim to see some media sources as routinely favoring the other side."

As a result more than half of the country views the media as either too liberal or too conservative with a minority of people thinking the coverage is where it's supposed to be. The 24-hour news stations have seemingly become more polarized and anything in the middle seems foreign to the niche in viewers that they have created. "If I see the world as all black an you see the world as all white, and some person comes along and says it's partially black and partially white, we both are going to be unhappy."

This is illustrated here (which for some reason wont copy as a picture)

This sort of thinking is perpetuated by the idea that, "both sides think the other side is just being strategic." This stems from the belief of each party believing they are the only reasonable option. Accordingly everyone else who is reasonable must arrive at the same conclusion and anyone who arrives somewhere else is clearly unreasonable.

This fallacy in logic unfortunately is prevalent in most if not all conflict. Everyone takes this stance at one point or another Manjoo and myself included. When Manjoo questions the sincerity of people like Lou Dobbs and Anne Coulter when they say the things they say. The normal vitriol that often finds its way coming from Coulter and Dobbs mouths generally I find questionable at not. However, questioning their sincerity implies that you know better and your way is the only reasonable way. It is an odd situation though as I actually do agree with Manjoo on this in particular.

The counter to this argument is that personalities like the aforementioned are clearly labeled as being on opinion shows, not news shows. Paraphrasing Bill O'Reilly from a recent interview with Jon Stewart, said that anyone who didn't know his show was opinion was a pinhead. However, I am not sure it is as common knowledge as Mr. O'Reilly believes.

All this confusion and mistrust has resulted in Jon Stewart, a comedian whose show is self-titled fake news, to become one of the most trusted names in news. According to a recent poll on Time.com Stewart beat out fellow anchors, Katie Couric, Brian Williams and Charlie Gibson.

I am a Jon Stewart fan, and this is disturbing. That being said reading True Enough was a strange sort of vindication, because I had grown so frustrated with the state of news that I was starting to think it was only me. So reading someone who had noticed the same things I had and felt as frustrated was relieving.