Trump v. Public Media
Many Trump supporters would agree that he is a bullshitter, but they’d also claim that he’s an effective leader. Interestingly, his handling of his purported issues with public media has been almost all bullshit and zero efficacy — IF his goal is to increase truth in media.
His claim is that “the media” is biased. Notably, he’s not saying that media is useless. No, of course not, since he needs the media. He’s just saying he doesn’t believe certain media outlets, including public media such as PBS, NPR, and local public media stations (which is interesting, coming from a serial liar, but I digress).
So now we come to the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of his leadership: Here is a man who has nearly all the lawmakers on his side, and rather than enact a law that would encourage truth in media (say, oh I don’t know, the Fairness Doctrine), he defunds public media instead , leaving the remainder of media funding solely in the hands of private special interests and, by the way, mostly affecting things like small, local natural disaster coverage (because NPR will survive, but the local radio stations that report on small government issues may not). It’s like he shot a purported bad guy in the toenail and killed 100 innocent farmers in the same spray. Curious way to stop bias...
In 1949, the FCC, which oversees execution of the Communications Act, began applying the Fairness Doctrine to public media, which ensured that any publicly-funded media outlet devoted time to controversial issues in a way that presented contrasting viewpoints accurately and dispassionately. The Fairness Doctrine was eliminated by Reagan in 1987, feeling at the time that there were sufficient competing news outlets.
But Reagan didn’t make that decision in the context of the massive information overload and rabbit-hole-inducing algorithms that we face today.
Competing media outlets can no longer present opposing viewpoints with any practical effect on actual public opinion because no one is watching both Fox News and ReidOut, both Alex Jones (God, help us) and Tony Michaels. They’re watching whatever video they get fed next on whichever platform they’ve chosen, regardless of its money-hungry algorithim which was never programmed to seek dispassionate accuracy.
So Trump’s solution is to defund the media outlets that are currently the LEAST biased of any outlets and reporting on, say, tornados in rural Kansas?
Even the bigger news outlets that will be (marginally) affected by this cut are the least of the purported problem. Take a look for yourself at where PBS lies on the bias chart:
Interestingly, there’s a broader conceptual issue here that isn’t even being addressed, which is this: since when have the random set of principles that we’ve designated “right” or “left” become synonymous with “truth” or “lies”? The individual principles that are adopted by the political sides aren’t even necessarily related to one another. They come in a set but they certainly don’t have to. Here’s a secret: some people can actually agree with part of the Right’s principles and part of the Left’s. Crazy, right?
So explain to me again why we are putting the pressure on Daniel Tiger and Severe Weather Alerts instead of giving direction to tax-funded outlets to increase bipartisan coverage and regulating the algorithms that feed our citizens endless inflammatory videos about cannibalistic cults in the basement of the White House? I forgot what it is about Daniel Tiger that I’m supposed to hate…
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