The Media’s Job
It goes without saying, the media is annoying. It is the media’s job to be annoying. – Campbell Brown
Is it really true that, as Campbell Brown asserts, it is the media’s job to be annoying? I find that particularly hard to swallow unless Ms. Brown is trying to make a pitiful excuse for the inability of American journalists to move away from sensational journalism and focus on real issues that plague the planet. The recent rant by Campbell Brown about President-Elect Barack Obama’s impatience with trivial and diversionary questions at a news conference exposes, once again, the deep deficiencies of the media in the United States. Granted, whenever there is a scandal, crisis or non-news events that crop up, the tendency is for journalists, especially in the U.S. to beat such issues to death, to the point where TV viewers, radio listeners, and newspaper readers are afraid of watching, listening or reading. On a day when a cabinet member was introduced, shouldn’t the expectation be that most of the questions will be about the sector for which such a candidate was announced? In this case, shouldn’t the questions be about the current state of education in the U.S. and the candidate’s qualification for scuh a post? But as often happens, the questions were about the scandal in Chicago, the same questions that were asked several times prior. The sense one gets from the rants of Campbell Brown and others like her is that they will have a hard time getting used to a president who is smart and is not afraid to admonish the media. It is not the media’s job to be annoying. It is the media’s job to investigate the issues, present the facts and ask the parties involved for credible explanations. But the preference for the media in the U.S., particularly, is to engage in endless speculations and sensationalism. There is no respect for the rule of law that requires for an investigation to be concluded before sentences are delivered. It drives the need for “scoops”, “leaks” and sometimes outright blackmail in other to be the first. It is a hatchet-job style of journalism. It is this hatchet-job nature of the media in America that led to the deaths of close to 5,000 American soldiers because they were too lazy to follow the facts and were too eager to heap praises on a president who gave the media sensational stories to air on TV and radio.