I don’t mention it often but I actually have a degree in journalism. I graduated with distinction from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2003, and while it would be another 13 years before I’d ever put my degree to any use, the experience played a massive role in forming my opinions about the…
I don’t mention it often but I actually have a degree in journalism. I graduated with distinction from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2003, and while it would be another 13 years before I’d ever put my degree to any use, the experience played a massive role in forming my opinions about the mainstream press.
One of the lessons I think about a lot came at the beginning of my two- week internship with Channel 10’s Eyewitness News (now 10 News First) when I was watching the show’s bedraggled news editor put everyone’s story assignments up on the whiteboard one morning. I’d been paying a lot of attention to TV news at the time because that’s what we were studying, and I’d noticed that the stories Channel 10 would cover were always exactly the same as the ones that would be covered by Channel 7 and Channel 9— usually in exactly the same order.
“Why do you guys always cover the same stories as Channel 7 and Channel 9?” I asked. “Do you guys phone each other to coordinate?”
He laughed.
“No, but it is a bit strange isn’t it?” he agreed. “I guess it’s what you call ‘news sense’.”
Even back then I had a hard time believing that all news editors had some magical “sense” which caused them each to know which are the most newsworthy stories day after day in a whole world full of events and ordeals.
Since that time I’ve learned about the groupthink effect that working in the mainstream press tends to have on people’s minds according to those who’ve made careers there, and the fact that journalists who either don’t know how to or don’t care to dance to the the agenda-setting task of the plutocratic media don’t find themselves promoted to news editor. It’s not that editors are coordinating with each other across outlets or receiving instructions on what to report from oligarchs and government agencies, it’s that if they were the type who needed to do such things to know what to report, they wouldn’t be working where they’re working.
How did the mainstream press know to ignore the scandal of a Ukrainian Nazi being applauded in the Canadian parliament? How did they know to smear Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn? How do they know to support every war while ignoring homelessness and economic injustice? It sure ain’t “news sense”.
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