Our Media Has Failed Us

If there was any doubt that American media has become the equivalent of a babbling idiot, the past month should have thoroughly erased it. The coverage of the outbreak of Ebola, and the small number of cases that have been diagnosed in this country, should prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that our news outlets have lost their minds. In the face of this disease, novel and thus frightening in this country, the public needs facts rather than intense speculation, but what they have been given by our media can hardly be considered the level headed presentation of facts that we need. Instead, we've been treated to ridiculous speculation about how a larger outbreak could happen, like conservative darling Dr. Ben Carson being given a platform on Fox News to spread his idiotic ramblings:

Little better, CNN brought on fiction author Robin Cook to hype fear about the disease, calling his fiction work Outbreak "prophetic" and giving him a forum to question whether the CDC was lying about Ebola. This is the kind of irresponsible journalism that causes people like me to lose faith in our media, to stop watching their broadcasts and reading their news online. In search of better ratings, they've abandoned their duty to provide news that informs and assures the populace during this time. Instead, they help to stir up fears, encourage the spread of ridiculous conspiracy theories, and degrade confidence in our medical capabilities.  

Yet this is hardly the first time our media has failed us. The institution that was meant to inform the public about the reality of the world we live in, and act as a watchdog to the powerful, has failed us again and again. As Mark Leibovich so devastatingly portrayed in his book This Town, the media has become the lapdog of the powerful, with journalists fawning over political and business leaders rather than asking the hard questions that need to be asked. Our media acted as cheerleaders for the debacle in Iraq, being thoroughly played by the likes of Cheney and Rumsfeld. Instead of questioning and probing the presented rationale for the war, many figures in the news media joined in beating the drum. Very few had the good sense to even question this rush to battle. Even worse, having learned nothing from this lesson, they continue to give press to the same architects who failed us in Iraq, bringing them on to ask them questions about Syria and Iraq, treating them as serious minds whose opinions need to be considered, when their glaring failures in the second Iraq War should disqualify them from being taken seriously ever again. 

In a misguided sense of fairness, the news media allows proponents of anti-scientific viewpoints a platform to spread their lies. In the continuing "debate" about global warming, which is no longer a debate in the scientific community, global warming deniers are allowed to spread arguments that have frequently been debunked in the interest of providing "balance." In so doing, the media perpetuate the idea that a host of scientific issues are still hotly debated in the scientific community, from climate change and evolution to vaccines, when in reality there is a wide consensus on these issues among scientists. The public, looking to our news media for answers, instead gets a misguided view of the world. These few examples hardly begin to cover the range of issues that the media fails in accurately covering. Most news outlets consistently fail to seek accurate information on a host of issues, and fail to challenge guests and commentators who make false and misleading statements. 

This is well beyond the typical debates over whether the news media are biased either liberally or conservatively. This is a central failing of those whose job is to inform, and thus guide and protect, our society, a failure to accurately report what is happening in our world. If media viewership is in decline in the United States, our news outlets have only themselves to blame. When we increasingly turn to alternate media outlets who, in spite of fewer resources, somehow manage to still provide better, more accurate coverage of issues, when half-hour comedy news shows provide better investigative reporting than the major networks, we know that our media has failed us.