Does the Media run the world ?

RE: Does the Media run the world ?

“…they already knew the atrocity stories as told by the Kosovars weren´t all too reliable either. But that is a bit the problem with the BBC docus: they only ask authorities, and very little ´from the ground´. “

They didn’t do too bad a job with “Moral Combat”.
They spoke to the pilots about the civi convoy and they claimed there were reports of Serb tanks in the convoy.
They then interviewed a Kosovar Albanian who lost a limb in the attack and he stated for 3km in either direction of his position in the convoy he could not see and military vehicles.
While speaking to KLA members admissions were also made that before NATO went in they would stage attacks from near Albanian villages in the hopes that reprisal attacks would garner outside support.
(He admitted is was cold and calculating but they wanted independance and this was how they could get it.)

“The Patriot is still a combat-proven success… “

As is the Scud…

“You mean like “Top Gun” and especially “JAG”?

No, i mean the documentaries. “

Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I meant military assitance was required for Topgun and JAG and the resulting bias makes them rather trivial… much the same influence as the military assistance has with supposed doco’s

RE: Does the Media run the world ?

The pilots said it made no difference, while Blair stated it was having a significant impact on Slobodans ability to wage ethnic war
on Kosovars… he he he who to believe??… politicians or the guys in the planes flying over Kosovo?

…they already knew the atrocity stories as told by the Kosovars weren´t all too reliable either. But that is a bit the problem with the BBC docus: they only ask authorities, and very little ´from the ground´.

I agree it is too late to influence public opinion at the
time, but finding out a more rounded picture of what was
happening even months or years later reminds you not to take
everything at face value.

People forget the criticism about an old war when the new one erupts, and actually don´t want to know the facts anyway. Ironically, the only war to be ever properly reported on a what-happened-today-but-we-can´t-seem-to-find-a-bigger-picture-fitting-with-reality was the Vietnam War. Despite the absolute pro-US reporting (no wonder of course, it was the only accessible side for the media), the criticism coming out of those reports on how the war was ran was misunderstood as an anti-US bias, and indeed caused the US population to become weary of their government´s behaviour and comments (Watergate a few years later didn´t help either). But did it matter in the long run? Not if you look at the popularity of the Reagan administration during his reign…

How often have we heard recently about events that happened
10-12 years ago… say in Kuwaite as being justification for
doing things now?

…even the untrue news-reports of old are used as justifications for current actions. The Patriot is still a combat-proven success…

It is no longer really “news” any more but as it is not
restricted by deadlines andthere is plenty of time to get
the right footage together and if done correctly looking at
the subject in more than one dimension then it is far better
than the drivel we call news now.

Unfortunately, the pace in which information is expected to be filtered through the reporting, editorial and publishing phases is so high nowadays (both because of competition and because of public demand) gives little room for expanded, detached, objective journalism. The drivel is likely to worsen…

You mean like “Top Gun” and especially “JAG”?

No, i mean the documentaries. Life aboard a submarine, life aboard a USN carrier (without notion of the half a dozen suicides on average during a cruise), training with the Seals, the Rangers rescuing the Panamese population from the hands of the evil Noriega, the indestructability of an Abrams tank, the crime-solving qualities of the FBI… want me to go on?

It is amusing you mention that. The sailing of the sub is
actually sponsored by a Russian company… as was the refit.
The sailors were eating better than they had at sea for
quite some time for that reason.

On-shore Russian navy food used to be horrible during the mid-1990s. I ate at a naval officers mess in Kaliningrad in 1996 which ´went public´ to get some more funding to cater for food for the personell (there are reports of starved sailors, but i doubt those considering the general Russian resiliance). I have eaten better…

RE: Does the Media run the world ?

“The tough part of the job is to make such contradictory statements into a cohesive article/documentary/… But it´s fun indeed!”

It was funny with the Kosovo documentary… the higher up the ranks the more effective the bombing of Kosovo was at stopping the “war crimes” being commited. The pilots said it made no difference, while Blair stated it was having a significant impact on Slobodans ability to wage ethnic war on Kosovars… he he he who to believe??… politicians or the guys in the planes flying over Kosovo?

“but a documentary is almost by definition too late to influence public opinion and hence influence political decision-making”

I agree it is too late to influence public opinion at the time, but finding out a more rounded picture of what was happening even months or years later reminds you not to take everything at face value.
How often have we heard recently about events that happened 10-12 years ago… say in Kuwaite as being justification for doing things now?
It is no longer really “news” any more but as it is not restricted by deadlines andthere is plenty of time to get the right footage together and if done correctly looking at the subject in more than one dimension then it is far better than the drivel we call news now.

“Quite a few of those, especially the non-historical ones, come right out of the US DoD public-relations fund. “

You mean like “Top Gun” and especially “JAG”?

“but i can assure you that such a docu isn´t likely to be paid by the Russian taxpayer – hence, a more reflective view by the reporters is to be expected. “

It is amusing you mention that. The sailing of the sub is actually sponsored by a Russian company… as was the refit.
The sailors were eating better than they had at sea for quite some time for that reason.

RE: Does the Media run the world ?

Garry,

The BBC has produced some excellent docos on various events that (when they were screened) were still reasonably curent and fresh in the mind.

While you´re right that the BBC occasionally is quite fast with it´s docu´s (they did an excellent job in coming up with a great doc on 9/11 and the War on Terror in a matter of months, almost on the same level as the absolutely brilliant ´The end of Yugoslavia´ docu-series), but a documentary is almost by definition too late to influence public opinion and hence influence political decision-making. This is a sad thing, especially in a time when people rely on TV for their information about the rest of the world more than anything else. While television is a good medium to bring news around the world in a fast, superficious yet confronting way, it is extremely poor in providing insight. For the latter, written articles are still much faster (because they are easier to produce: you don´t need to dig for footage, no video editing, a phonecall will often do in stead of bringing in a camera team, etc) but the impact is far, far less.

Hehehehe… the number of different answers you can get to the same question even by asking the pilots vs the generals in the same AF is amusing…

The tough part of the job is to make such contradictory statements into a cohesive article/documentary/… But it´s fun indeed!

In comparison the Discovery docos on military weapons have been US flag waving affairs that ignore most foreign developments, though a recent doco on Russian submariners that took cameras aboard an Akula class (ie TYPHOON class) submarine patrol was very enlightening and for a change unbiased.

Quite a few of those, especially the non-historical ones, come right out of the US DoD public-relations fund. Those are the Discovery equivalent of cheap quiz shows: they cost very little, yet the bulk of the ignorant audiences love it… Personally, i don´t think such documentaries deserve to be called ´reports´ as they lack all sorts of criticism or even reflection. That would be pissing in your own beer.

I haven´t seen the Akula-docu (Discovery made me somewhat allergic for all sorts of sea stuff after airing Shark Week twice a month), but i can assure you that such a docu isn´t likely to be paid by the Russian taxpayer – hence, a more reflective view by the reporters is to be expected.

RE: Does the Media run the world ?

Garry, the BBC is publicly funded and is mandated to produce “quality” broadcasting, by contrast to other channels which have to raise advertising revenue.

I would advocate a similar approach in other countries – the major network should be publicly funded but strictly independent – ie not under state control.

Having said that the BBC does produce a lot of rubbish!

RE: Does the Media run the world ?

It is a bit more tricky than that really Arthur.

The BBC has produced some excellent docos on various events that (when they were screened) were still reasonably curent and fresh in the mind.
“Moral Combat” was a good example, where the journalist spoke to everyone… ie the US, the Europeans, the KLA, and the Serbs. (ie and also up and down the command chain from NATO pilots up to the NATO generals and commanders, and the politicians like Allbright, and Blair).
(Hehehehe… the number of different answers you can get to the same question even by asking the pilots vs the generals in the same AF is amusing… the gap between the military and the politicians is even greater… though the gap is less at the more political level of commander.)

Of course there are other docos that are out of date but still of great interest like the “The other Lockerbie” doco was triggered by the Lockerbie incident but looks at the late 80’s US shootdown of an Iranian airliner as a possible motivation for the Lockerbie incident. (This of course would suggest that Iran was behind the attack and not Libya as is widely assumed.)

In comparison the Discovery docos on military weapons have been US flag waving affairs that ignore most foreign developments, though a recent doco on Russian submariners that took cameras aboard an Akula class (ie TYPHOON class) submarine patrol was very enlightening and for a change unbiased.

RE: Does the Media run the world ?

Wasn’t Rupert Murdoch the bad guy in one of the recent Bond films?

There is a blurred line between news and entertainment. What annoys be is people who moan about say, media intrusion, then go and buy a tabloid “newspaper” like the Sun or the Express in the UK.

RE: Does the Media run the world ?

dont know if the media runs the world, But i can tell you Rupert Murdoch runs most of the worlds media. Maybe he runs the world. ))

RE: Does the Media run the world ?

I must say that CNN seem to have been improving recently but
still lag behind the BBC in the latters documentaries that
often try to look at both sides of a story rather than just
choosing and sticking to the party line.

The problem with documentaries is that they are by definition too late. The amount of research and work involved into making a proper, decent, well-put, interesting and informative documentary makes them not only expensive (only few channels are willing to spend money on them, and even if so hardly do proper research – CNN documentaries are hardly more than dossiers of the very same CNN whereas the BBC uses archive footage only to illustrate the ‘new’ work of the documentary team) but also that it takes a lot of time before they are finished. The actual issue is by then old news – including the decisions made on that old, and sometimes inaccurate or spindoctered or biased news.

Yes, or the fact that a boring story with good video footage
will always beat a good story with no video footage when it
comes to reading news stories on the TV news.

I hated working for television. I was absolutely disgusted by that attitude.

Oh, and a small correction on the news-value formula above: the number of deaths in an event can just as well be the (usually highly inflated) presumed number of deaths. After all, by September 12th we all were told that at least 10.000 people had died in the Twin Towers…

Oh, and revolting as the act was: the 9/11 attacks were schoolbook media events orchestrated by a party in conflict. I can imagine the media/PR/spin doctors in the US government were actually jealous about the media-affectionate way especially the NY attacks were made. Second strike long enough after the first to make sure enough cameras were around (something of which you can be sure of in NY), a target which is not just emotionally important to the US but to the rest of the world as well (at least here in Europe NY was considered to be something ‘special’ even amongst those who don’t like the USA), beautiful weather to make some of the most stunning disaster-photography ever…

RE: Does the Media run the world ?

[updated:LAST EDITED ON 24-11-02 AT 09:34 AM (GMT)]”If you’re not informed about things, that doesn’t mean things don’t happen.”

Reminds me of that stupid idea that if a tree falls in the middle of a forest and noone is there to hear it does it still make a noise? …or my favourite variation… If a man is alone in a forest talking and there is no woman there to hear him is he still wrong… }>

I think the media are becoming too market savvy and should just do their job in an unbiased way… of course private or government ownership of media will always make them biased.
Unfortunately most people are ignorant and need to be told what to think, rather than just presented with facts and left to decide for themselves.
(Note I said ingnorant… lots of them are stupid too, but that is a different matter alltogether… }> )

I must say that CNN seem to have been improving recently but still lag behind the BBC in the latters documentaries that often try to look at both sides of a story rather than just choosing and sticking to the party line.

“TV news saying:
“If it bleeds… it leads…””

Yes, or the fact that a boring story with good video footage will always beat a good story with no video footage when it comes to reading news stories on the TV news.

RE: Does the Media run the world ?

TV news saying:

“If it bleeds… it leads…”

RE: Does the Media run the world ?

does the media run the world ? Could we live without the
media (news reports, newspapers, radio tv etc). Just think,
no more…”today umpteen people where killed in aircrash,
more died in a sandstorm, petrol prices going up, more
people died at a football match, global warming on the
increase and Eastenders will be transmitted every night for
two hours, Good evening”…(why do they always say “good
evening”….I’d hate to be around if they ever say “bad
evening”.)

There’s plenty of stuff going on in the world you don’t hear about – or do you really think the riots in Nigeria are something completely new? No, they are a regular occurance yet the combination with the Miss World-contest gives it a different, more saucy, easier comprehendible angle, and conveniently Western press is more present for such an event.
No matter what people think of ‘the media’, most news-bringing organisations are nowadays very much market-oriented. News is written, gathered, compiled and edited less and less by journalistic standards (subjective as these might be), but more and more by public-consumption-demands-standards.

I’m sure that if the media was shutdown, for say a
week, the world would get a breather, most of the conflicts
would reduce because no-one is getting to hear about them
and so fuel the fires.

Uh… that’s a bit dumb reasoning, don’t you think? People in a far away country giving up their local conflict because you can no longer hear about it on CNN? Please give me a break! There are so many conflicts on the world, plenty of which are extremely brutal, with hardly any news coverage. If the media was shut down for a week the world would indeed get a breather, but only a breath of fresh ignorant air. Conflicts existed before the media started reported on them (in fact, only one of the few properly covered conflicts in the entire history of war-journalism was covered according to journalistic standards and not a propaganda tool), there are plenty of conflicts without global media coverage, and you think that withdrawing journalists brings world peace? Get realistic here.
If you’re not informed about things, that doesn’t mean things don’t happen.

The media by its very nature and irrespective of what medium
it uses, basically incites our emotions…if you think about
it.

That is easy: people in general just want to hear news about subjects they can relate to. And if the people can relate to something, it’s likely they form an opinion concerning the news around that subject. So you get ‘interesting occurence’ + ‘topic i can relate to’, and this easily adds up to emotional involvement of the audience. This is of course even more so because people are often too lazy to think for themselves, and allow the media to form an opinion for them (the opinion and editorial pages of newspapers!). As such, the media does incite people’s emotions just because people ALLOW the media to do so. In fact, most people prefer a newspaper or media source because it is emotionally on par with that person’s preferences.

When there’s a cup final on for footy, all you get is
wall to wall reports about how good each team is, and who
the best players are, how they got there and mentions every
five minutes on the news.

That’s because the bulk of the audience wouldn’t accept the media to be critical here, and especially the avid football supporter wants to be confirmed how good it’s team is. Happens with other kinds of reporting as well – it took some time after the 2PGW before the true military value of the Patriot or BGM-109 was published. Equally, it was never reported in the British newspapers that with the Task Force sent out to retake the Falklands in 1982 there was a cargo load with 5000 bodybags…

This ‘pumps up’ those who are
supporters to the level that they feel / are invincible (or
so it seems to them at the time) and whichever side looses
get’s boo’d, bottles thrown etc etc followed by riots.

Sports riots have occured for centuries, long before the media came around. In the Roman era, there were massive riots concerning wagon races, in the 16th and 17th century concerning boxing matches… I don’t think it’s fair to blame the media for this, although it can be argued that the scale of rioting has become bigger (but so have the numbers of sports spectators).

why else do the countries where these events happen, have to
massivley increase the police presence to hopefully control
whats going to happen after the match. Tho losing side feel
robbed and are out for blood, the winning side so far up its
own *rs* that it cant help but ‘wave’ to the loosers.

The human tendency to find social acceptance in a social group, and obtaining group identity by rejecting other social groups. The simple US against THEM theme. The media can only support the views of such a group, but i don’t think it can form such groups (unless you’re talking interactive media like this forum where we have our own Keymags-web-community, but this requires extensive input from the audience and not from the media itself).

I’m not slagging off either the media nor those who work for
it (honestly !)…

Don’t worry, i don’t feel offended at all (i’m a journo)

…it just seems that unless something can be
sensationalised to get more punters reading, seeing, hearing
about, then its hardly worth bothering with and if it is, a
carefull bit of word use can change the overall effect as
presented to the public.

Unless it’s sensationalised and/or brought into connection with the audience’s more direct interest or close references, most people don’t care to read the news. It’s as simple as that. I posted a formula on this forum a while back, with a simple equation to calculate the news value of a certain event.

it went something like: NV = (V*gf / d) * Ca
NV = News Value
V = number of victims
gf = gross factor (a saucy death is better than a car crash)
d = distance from the audience to an event (a sunk ferry in Bangladesh won’t be of much interest in Western Europe, but a sunken ferry from Ostend to Dover is)
Ca = Constant education/interest factor for the particulair audience your medium is focusing at. The Independent has different standards regarding it’s audience as The Sun.

Hope this makes any sense to you.

RE: Does the Media run the world ?

[updated:LAST EDITED ON 23-11-02 AT 05:19 PM (GMT)]The pen is supposed to be mightier than the sword isn’t it??

No I dont think we can do without the media, it’s human nature to want to know what’s happening, whether it be in our own town or on the other side of the world.
But unfortunately there is of course the gutter press which likes to sensationalise everything.
And lets not forget political spin doctors, surely without the media they’d be unemployed.
Without the media what would we talk about?

The weather, our favourite TV programmes, whether or not our team won, political unrest in the middle east,local elections, etc,etc,etc.

The media, like it or not, is part and parcel of modern living.

…..but, as you say Gary, wouldn’t it be nice to do without it for a week??

Dave 🙂

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