Axl wrote:
You check out cnn.com every day and you don't consider yourself a consumer of "corporate media" news? I don't think you're being entirely honest with yourself here.
Nope. I check out the headlines, roll my eyes at what they try to pass off as "news", and usually laugh my butt off at the polls and the results. That's it. Literally 2-3 minutes a day.
That's hardly what I'd call consuming corporate media.
I looked at the website you referenced, and noticed that eight of the top ten stories listed were from the so-called mainstream media. The other two "articles" were opinion pieces, including one that encourages people to flood ABC with mail so they won't fire Rosie O'Donnell from The View.
I haven't checked it out much lately, thanks to my neverending crusade to play catch-up with everything I fell behind on over the last month. Don't know if that was an off-day, or Michael is becoming more and more swamped and just grabbing articles from mainstream sites. In the past, there were far more articles from more independent sites.
I'm not saying "the news media" couldn't be improved (especially on cable), but I think broad-stroke criticism that everything on the news is garbage really misses the point. Independent analyst Andrew Tyndall actually studies all of the network evening newscasts and reports on their content... he found that in 2006, the number one story by far (based on the number of times it appeared on the news) was the US fighting in Iraq.
Which, until recently, was so far slanted that it felt like it came from Pravda, in all honesty. Even to this day, I don't know if I'd call it accurate and unbiased.
You're right, though. The media could be improved, in two simple steps:
1. Quit giving us celebrity paparazzi crap and passing it off as relevant news. Who cares who Paris Hilton flashed now? Who cares about Britney's shaved head? And at the risk of sounding cold, I flat-out could care less who the father of Anna Nicole's baby is.
2. Get the corporations out. There's a reason why NBC News always seems to be "Rah rah! We love war!" everytime a conflict stirs up - because General Electric owns them, and stands to profit big-time everytime there is a war. Why? Because GE brings good things to death, in the form of weapons of mass destruction.
The money is tainting the news. Has been for some time, too.
Three other angles on what's happening in Iraq were also in the top twenty. In fact, the only "soft news" story in the top twenty was the Winter Olympics in Italy. The full list is here.
I for one find that interesting when it seems like everytime I hit a mainstream news site, it's Paris this, Britney that, Lindsay this, Dixie Chicks that, who's Anna Nicole's baby's father this, Madonna singing from a cross that.
In other words, if we were to cludge "general celebrity gossip" into one category instead of seperating it by celebrity, would that then wind up making the top 20 (or even 10)? I tend to think it would, yes.
