Being informed is a funny thing. I mean one can want to know what's going on in the world but any attempts to find out generally end in frustration. Personally any time I watch the news or read a newspaper I usually end up quite annoyed, not so much at the events that are reported but at the way in which they are reported.
While the media like to portray themselves are unbiased purveyors of fact nothing could be further than the truth. Now that is not exactly a new or shocking revelation. Even those of us who trust the general motives and intentions of the media still have journalists who they don't like. Just because somebody reads the Irish independent it doesn't necessarily mean they love Kevin Myers. (It simply means they are either conservative or gullible).
However let's hypothetically take a well intentioned Irish independent reader, who, while they may not question the basis of our society is still offended by the likes of Mr. Myers. They don't like what that fella says because they don't have an irrational hatred of minorities or the disadvantaged people. Yet they will consider what is printed on the other pages of the paper as news.
Where does news become opinion?
Where should this line be drawn?
Obviously everything that is printed in a paper is written by somebody who has their own views and opinions, who works under an editor who has their own views and opinions, who reports to a board of directors who have their own views and opinions, who report to shareholders who have their own views and opinions.
However in theory the views of all of these people don't really matter as the job of the journalist is to report facts. It is merely incidental that the journalist was employed by the editor as their opinions were not out of line with his or hers and the editor in turn was employed by the board of directors as his or her opinions were not out of touch with the board's and the board of directors are appointed by the shareholders because, well you get the point.
Now, all mainstream media is controlled either by business or the State. State Broadcasters such as RTE or the BBC are there, in theory to provide a service, they are however controlled by the State which in reality exists as little more than a facilitator to business and privately owned media is obviously never going to question the motives of its owners. Otherwise those journalists who did would find it difficult to find work.
People such as Rupert Murdoch and Tony O'Reilly (Independent Media) are easy to single out for criticism in the way media is run as they are majority shareholders in large media organisations and as such what they say goes. However in picking such easy targets we are falling victim to the old George Bush syndrome where we blame one easy target for all the ills of the world. The likes of Murdoch and O'Reilly are not solely responsible for all the problems in media, they are merely symptomatic of it. In the same way as George Bush was merely the figure head of an extremely corrupt system, putting all our hopes in a better looking President is not going to do anything to end the problems caused by Capitalism and Imperialism.
In a capitalist society mainstream media is never going to do anything to undermine it's bosses. It would be illogical to expect it to. So we shouldn't be surprised that it simply enforces the status quo, what else would you expect it to do? However it is foolish to look at everything outside of the mainstream media as a minority or fanatical view. It is important to remember that the media is far from democratic and represents only a minority view. While it may purport to give a variety of opinions, they are merely a variety of opinions from within a certain spectrum.
It is easy to slate the Irish Independent (because it is a shit paper) but is the Irish Times really much better? Let's face it is not really more left, liberal or progressive than the Indo, it just likes to think of itself as a bit more high brow. It is a newspaper for senior rather than junior civil servants. It is as much a voice of the establishment as the Indo.
One decent paper we can buy in this country is the Guardian, but let's face that's not exactly the Weekly Worker either. The first thing I don't like about buying the Guardian is that it is all a bit too English. I just don't need to know the internal workings of another country as much as I need to know the workings of my own. So we get a deluge of English news at the expense of national news, although their coverage of world events is far superior to anything in the Irish papers. And while the opinions they publish might be a little closer to my own than those printed in many newspapers they are still far from revolutionary, at best they are left liberal and their features leave us in little doubt that it is the paper of middle class liberals rather than a publication aimed at any sort of meaningful social change.
So what about the internet? These days it seems you're nobody if you don't have a blog and you're really somebody if you have a podcast. And what about Indymedia? Well first of all Indymedia is hardly any sort of a reliable source of news. Its Anarchist and Libretarian editors feel that any sort of editing is oppressive and so we are left with content which is not only not representative of the broader left but generally very badly written. Those who write articles for Indymedia do so with no mandate from anybody but themselves, which doesn't mean they are less entitled to their opinions than a mainstream journalist, it simply means they are representing a different (and often tiny) minority opinion in a less professional manner. Often these articles tend to be more sensationalist than even the worst of the tabloids and can exaggerate so much that they often undermine their own argument.
So what about blogging, the brave new world of self facilitating media nodes? Well let's face it blogging is merely an activity for feckless, opinionated people who really should be doing something else with their time.
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