[Imc] Evaluating IMC work

[Zachary C.Miller]

> The question seemed to be "do we slant, in response to their slant?"

I heard someone give a very interesting analysis of "objective
journalism" at a WEFT meeting a while back. If whoever said this stuff
is on this list I apologize for stealing your ideas!

Anyway the suggestion was that the very concept of "objective
journalism" is a product of capitalism and profit motive. Big profits
come from the economies of scale of mass media but you can't have mass
media unless you have a mass audience and you can't build a mass
audience unless your news is as thoughoughly homogenized,
uncontroversial, and painless to digest as possible. 

Before the advent of mass media (supposedly) media was highly biased
as each news outlet competed to carve out its political niche
audience, journalists did ideological battle. But with
industrialization and mass markets came the need to turn news
production into an assembly line, mechanized, dehumanized,
deemotionalized, rationalized process.

But of course this "rationalism" is only skin deep. We all know the
mass media is "objective" on in so far as such objectivity doesn't
question the capitalist system that it is based on and anything that
_does_ question that system is declared "biased".

So we have to recognize two things, 1) corporate media is inherrently
biased and 2) we don't have to fear bias because it is an inevitable
byproduct of having humans write stories.

But of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't have integrity. Facts and
numbers are always better than conjecture and rumors. Trustworthy
checked sources are always good. And overly emotional rhetoric should
be used sparingly, not because it betrays our "bias" but because its
just bad style. We may have a slant but we aren't writing propaganda. 

These ideas were originally brought up to defend against claims that
"Democracy Now" wasn't sufficiently "objective" to be worthy of WEFT
airtime. I think that Amy Goodman's kind of slant is exactly what we
should strive for actually. Amy occassionally gets a fact or two wrong
because she's got a shoestring budget but she never gets them wrong
on purpose. Amy's politics are clear from her content but it is not
propaganda, it is well researched and grounded in facts, sources,
numbers, and reality. So yes, lets sound and write like Amy
Goodman. No, lets not sound and write like Dan Rather (corporate
tool). Yes, lets write like Extra! and sound like CounterSpin. No,
lets not write like Worker's Vanguard (leftist propaganda). Yes, lets
sound and write like ourselves, each bringing our own unique "slant"
and "bias" to our stories.

Just my thoughts. 

-- 
Zachary C. Miller - @= - http://wolfgang.groogroo.com/
IMSA 1995 - UIUC 2000 - Just Another Leftist Muppet
 Social Justice, Community, Nonviolence, Decentralization, Feminism,
 Sustainability, Responsibility, Diversity, Democracy, Ecology
Take it easy...but take it. - http://www.greens.org