Culture in the Blender

When I was a college freshman (first-year university student in the US), I wrote a paper arguing that CNN delivers objective news, because their market niche is just that. The professor gave us an assignment to write about bias in the media, or something like that. The only thesis I could come up with was just that simple: to me, there wasn’t much in that topic to write about. The professor’s comment was that it was an interesting and unusual view. I wasn’t sure what they meant by that, but soon got busy with other work and forgot about it.

I was in a pub with a television turned to CNN with a college friend and my boyfriend recently. I was facing the TV and could read the captions. Some sort of discussion show was on, and to my great astonishment, two white, middle-aged, male Americans were talking about “the media” as if they in the act of being televised weren’t part of it, and then started discussing the “liberal media”. The “liberal media” is a conspiracy theory that some American conservatives believe that’s like a mutation of the libel that Jews own all the newspapers, except in this case it’s “liberals”. (Don’t be confused like I was initially upon re-expatriating to the US: the word “liberal” may have nothing to do with the political movement of liberalism and might be defined very loosely as “person American conservatives don’t like”, including libertarians, communists, and gay people. There is no ideology attached to “liberal” here.) So I’m sitting in this bar, choking on my pint, and I remember the paper I wrote and the professor’s comment, and realize in a flash what he meant was that to believe that the US media isn’t biased was unusual. But I had just re-expatriated to the US and had been taking in a fare of European news over the past 10 years or so, followed by CNN International and BBC World.

Perhaps American politics gets its unique attributes from the poor communication of real news to the American people. I don’t know if it’s been this way for a long time, or whether this is something that started occurring with the rise of the neoconservatives around the time we repatriated. But one thing is for certain, namely that most US newscasts are about on par with Chinese when it comes to objective reporting and truth-seeking. I’ve been trying to understand how Bush got re-elected and how people in the US were so taken in by what (to me) was obviously propaganda. Maybe the news is the key to understanding what happened.