Whether it was Fox News during the Obama presidency or CNN and MSNBC in the during the Trump presidency, the constant obsession over every little soundbite, tweet, leak, and opinion is getting really old, really fast. Eight hours of panelists across five networks over a single soundbite when Flint still does not have clean water and Americans forgot about Puerto Rico is not only irresponsible but discourages Americans from paying attention to current events.
I can admit to deleting news apps off my phone and rarely watching the news when I get home after work not because I have some aversion to the mainstream media or think what happens in our country every day does not matter, but because it is always the same people talking about the same thing every day. Ratings have taken precedence over substantive journalism that truly exposes the issues plaguing our society today. In the political realm, every day the Trump administration rolls back regulations that previously protected Americans from abusive practices and most days these actions barely make it to the news crawler at the bottom of the screen.
As the headline states, these practices inhibit political discourse by hyper-focusing the narrative in political debate. Because of this, being a Democrat has to mean you are a communist Bernie supporter and being a Republican means being a white supremacist conspiracy nut. However, if you were to pluck ten Democrats and ten Republicans out the electorate into a room these expectations would not be met, but if you turn your TV on or check Twitter, you see Antifa beating up members of the press and Rudy Giuliani saying "truth isn't truth." As fake news sources like InfoWars become more and more of an issue, legitimate press sources need to be vigilant in their efforts of preventing the legitimization of the fringe by giving them airtime.
Speaking of Rudy Giuliani, the media would better serve the people if news anchors did not invite guests on just to be trending on Twitter. During the 2016 election, Trump got almost two billion dollars of free press through airing his rallies and hosting his surrogates that routinely lied or made outrageous claims that kept lowering the standards for TV journalism. Allowing surrogates and guests to get away with misinformation with only a slap on the wrist again damages the integrity of networks. For the media to truly serve its viewers, surrogates who have a history of spouting lies to distract from the larger issue at hand should not be welcome on networks.
Media obsession practices also exaggerate what should be passed on notable mistakes of the week. Every Trump tweet does not need a ten-hour dissection when there are fifty-six wildfires, half a million homeless people, melting Arctic poles and ninety-six gun deaths each day. The media should be educating the public about the issues affecting us every day that politics prevent conversation on. Using climate change for example, while Republican lawmakers continue to ignore the problem because of fossil fuel mega-donors, their base does not have to be ignorant of the problem if they could turn the TV on while they eat dinner and see Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow talk about greenhouse gas emissions and increasingly severe weather events.
