Thursday, April 22, 2004
Poking a Hole in the Media Balloon
Check out this funny series of photos of a Washington DC protest over the Gitmo detainees from INDCJournal
Look at the media cage. There's almost as many media as protesters!
And all the cameramen are out there eager to make the protests look as big as possible, of course. Because nobody wants to go out with a crew and have to come back to face the news director and say "well, we were wrong. Nothing happened."
News types are ambitious, and they want to get on TV. If they spend all morning out there with nothing to show for it on the evening news, then they've failed. Do too much of it, too expensively, and they're out of a job.
So they're going to try to package things to make the protest actually appear as something other than a joke--to lend substance and conflict to their story. So they'll do their damnedest to overdramatize the image.
Of course, if they did serious commentary and analysis of the case while using the court as a backdrop, that's one thing. But if they at any point mentioned the protesters with a straight face, and tried to fill the frame with them at any point, then they misled you.
INDCJournal boils it down to this:
Does it bother anyone that this nearly infinitesimal group of protestors has such a disproportionate impact on the public debate via the misleading dramatization provided by a national news correspondent?
Thanks to INDCMedia for pulling the curtain back on the Wizards of Air.
Splash, out
Jason
Hat tip: Glenn
Look at the media cage. There's almost as many media as protesters!
And all the cameramen are out there eager to make the protests look as big as possible, of course. Because nobody wants to go out with a crew and have to come back to face the news director and say "well, we were wrong. Nothing happened."
News types are ambitious, and they want to get on TV. If they spend all morning out there with nothing to show for it on the evening news, then they've failed. Do too much of it, too expensively, and they're out of a job.
So they're going to try to package things to make the protest actually appear as something other than a joke--to lend substance and conflict to their story. So they'll do their damnedest to overdramatize the image.
Of course, if they did serious commentary and analysis of the case while using the court as a backdrop, that's one thing. But if they at any point mentioned the protesters with a straight face, and tried to fill the frame with them at any point, then they misled you.
INDCJournal boils it down to this:
Does it bother anyone that this nearly infinitesimal group of protestors has such a disproportionate impact on the public debate via the misleading dramatization provided by a national news correspondent?
Thanks to INDCMedia for pulling the curtain back on the Wizards of Air.
Splash, out
Jason
Hat tip: Glenn
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