Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
I hate watching election news on TV or reading it in certain publications. It makes me angry. In a futile quest to make elections interesting, the drummed up fake balance reporting is in fact hurting our democracy.
From Media Matters:
One thing that grinds my gears every election season is the lack of effort from the members of the national journalist class. Basically most of them turn into stenographers – just repeating what political people tell them. Robin Roberts, a morning show host who thinks she is a journalist, knows what her job should be but misses the point of what it is suppose to do.
Summer repeats of TV shows are a nice time to come across things like an interview with Good Morning America host Robin Roberts on the Ellen DeGeneres show from back in February. She is asked about the 2016 Presidential election:
I found an interesting guest column in my local paper the other day from Dennis Hetzel, who is executive director of the Ohio Newspaper Association and president of the Ohio Coalition for Open Government. In his column, he admits that journalists in Ohio need to do a better job in reporting on the upcoming elections. Hetzel believes it should be based on issues and not the horse race. I’ve been complaining about that for years and I’m glad Hetzel offers some solutions.
Last week there were protests at the University of Missouri that led to the resignation of the school’s President for not responding to incidents of racism on campus. After the good that came from that organized action I was bothered by the treatment of student journalists by protesters who were biased just because of past treatment of their issues by other journalists. Discussion of controversial issues can’t happen with silence and/or censorship. Creating a bubble in public as a safe-space doesn’t actually resolve problems, it creates more of them.
Northwest Ohio has a large Catholic population and at least two of the Toledo TV stations fall over each other promoting the Church and their events. Most of the time it seems like they act like PR agencies rather than news reporters. Both stations plan extensive coverage of Pope Francis’ visit to Philadelphia. Those plans made me wonder who was paying for it.
Next week the Pope is visiting the US with time spent at the World Meeting of Families Congress in Philadelphia and WTOL and WTVG are planning on having full news crews traveling with Toledo area families going to the event. WTOL also had a 2 part sit-down interview with the Archbishop of Toledo and it was so fluffy my teeth hurt from the sugar.