Media: Whatever Happened To Non-Biased Reporting?

Photograph by Gilbert Mercier.
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Some of us remember the "good old days ".
In France we had 3 TV Channels and a couple of Public Radio Stations.
In America, the options were limited as well, most Americans were getting their daily news from Walter Cronkite. He was called " The most trusted man in America", and he anchored CBS evening news from 1962 to 1981. Cronkite's nightly sign off was " And that's the way it is". What made this quality reporting possible was a strict separation of the news divisions from the purely business divisions of the respective broadcasters.

The media landscape, needless to say, is drastically different today. It is fragmented, partisan and not necessarily anchored in reality. Real reporting has become hard to find in all the media outlets. Let's explore this by categories.

Major national newspapers.
The written press is shrinking very quickly, partially because of a decrease in readership, but also a substantial slide in advertising revenue. Even the very big & most reputable newspapers such as The New-York Times, the Washington Post and the LA Times are feeling the pinch.

Some ( such as the LA Times or the Wall Street Journal) were bought by conglomerates.This is not helping in having a press independent from corporate or advertising pressures and it doesn't seem to be a workable business model either.

As far as objectivity in the most "reputable" newspapers some alarming trends have been emerging in the last two decades. We all remember that during the build up to the war in Iraq, many journalists, even at the New-York Times were beating the drums of war to make American public opinion favorable to the invasion. The New-York Times has also a long tradition of bias in favor of Israel whenever they cover the Middle-East. More recently, some serious allegations were made into a collusion between some journalists of the Washington Post and their sources at the CIA.

Cable news.

Most Americans following the news closely watch cable news. This is where the partisanship, and lack of objectivity is the most blatant.

Of course, the worst example is Fox News. But to be "fair & balanced " strong political bias affects CNN & MSNBC as well.

The big stars of cable news are not journalists, they are entertainers and are mainly concerned in influencing & feeding their respective audience the type of "red meat " they want to get for their "news" regimen.
To some extent, this is the case from all across the political spectrum. From Glen Beck, Bill O'Reilly on the right to Keith Olbermann on the left, and even Lou Dobbs somewhere in "minute man anti-immigration land"; it is all the same.
All those media personalities have a very specific political agenda, and they do their very best to make the reality of their choice fit a preconceived opinion.

Let's take the example of CNN. What is striking with the network is when you watch it overseas ( CNN International) the quality of the broadcast is much better than the one in the US.

NPR & PBS.

NPR & PBS are the exception in this, otherwise, increasingly bleak news reporting landscape. They do not shove down the throats of their respective audience an opinion, instead they do their very best to report the facts. The audience can then process the information & come to their own conclusions. In the grim US news landscape NPR & PBS are islands of reason & sanity.

He is way too modest to say so, but when Jim Leher sign off after his news hour, it would not be inappropriate for him to say like Walter Cronkite did "And that's the way it is". Because, even if it is not, it is probably as close to it as you can get on American TV.