Media Bias: Not Liberal, Not Conservative

I commend to you an article in the January 25 issue of The New Yorker by Ken Auletta. I hope you will read it...and if you have time, read it again, because it contains the essence of the governing problem faced by today's leaders in Washington. Here's what Auletta says about the impact of the 24/7 news cycle:

"The news cycle is getting shorter -- to the point that there is no pause, only the constancy of the Web and the endless argument of cable. This creates pressure to entertain or perish, which has fed the media's dominant bias: not pro-liberal or pro-conservative but pro-conflict."

When the goal is not to inform or illuminate but to stir the pot of "conflict" constantly, there is little room for reasoned heads to be heard, understood, and God forbid, followed.

I know. The media are a favorite whipping boy for those in power who don't like what is being said about them. But this is different. This is the continuing and growing cacophony of uninformed voices coming at us from a thousand directions -- some with an ax to grind (NRA, NARAL, etc.) and some just seeking to entertain (Limbaugh, Beck, etc.).

The Internet has opened the flood gates and now everyone is a "Presidential Advisor." The power they have found is sometimes incomprehensible to those who only recently have discovered how to use their blog, their Twitter account, Facebook, YouTube, etc. But just because they are there does not mean we should listen to them, must less adopt their point of view. If anything, it means we should read all of it with the largest grain of salt we can find and use our heads to think through as carefully as we can what the truth is and what the next course of action should be for our leaders, our government, ourselves.

Several years ago, a lady slipped by the telephone screeners on the Rush Limbaugh show (she was not the typical sycophant that let on the air) and she caught him in an outright lie, a total contradiction of the facts and she knew it, he knew it and it was clear to the audience that he had lied, too. He gave that now trademarked Limbaugh chuckle, "heh, heh," and finally said to her, "Madam, you must remember, this is only entertainment.

Trouble is, Rush, governing is not entertainment, serving the people's best interest is not entertainment, and to put it in terms you might more easily understand, love of country is not entertainment, it is our duty.

This genie is so far out of the bottle, the genie has forgotten where he put the bottle...and as a result, I fear for our country.

The gridlock in Washington has been imposed upon it by the people -- the people who were supposed to elect representatives to go to Washington and vote their best judgment when issues were laid before them. But now, we don't permit them to fulfill that duty. Instead we use the various communications tools at our disposal to tell them, and tell them over and over, loudly, how to vote and what we are going to do to them if they don't vote today exactly how we feel they should vote today. That is not the representative republic envisioned by our founding fathers. It is not!