As any educated U.S. citizen today will tell you, it’s essential to be an informed voter. We are blasted by information at such a nonstop rate that the ability to discern and choose what to believe is more important than ever.
As we continue down the road to Election 2012, the question for many American citizens stands as this: What do you want to believe in as you face a blitzkrieg of articles, interviews and advertisements?
Candidates certainly don’t make it easy for us. Mudslinging occurs in such incredible quantities that one is often left with an image of two frustrated candidates sitting in a sandbox arguing over a toy. A candidate’s efforts to put down his fellow candidate and countryman can certainly be effective, but is it justified?
What about the rest of the field or the other candidates? What does the record show, and should we as voters really have to make a standout effort to get the correct information? Although it may be obvious, it’s important to reiterate that political advertisements are never the right way to receive the right information.
So to where then do we turn? The obvious answer would be the media, although it too is not invulnerable to bias. Despite the goals of journalism to be fair, honest and accurate, the motivations of media outlets across the country are always in question, as some UMass professors agree.
[N1] Fox News for example, has been so criticized for being GOP-friendly and yet, its website features the phrase “Fair & Balanced” underneath its logo. In turn, it is commonplace to hear some politicians blasting newspapers and TV networks alike for endorsing the “liberal agenda.”
The mark of a good journalist is that the reader does not know how he or she feels about the story. What’s more, I feel that such writing is hard to come by when the big issues surface – especially with regard to politics. In today’s environment, one must be cautious to read the news while simultaneously understanding the power of the media.
When media organizations alluded that Mitt Romney was the front-runner to win the Florida GOP primaries, I wondered why that was. How is that statement justified? The clear answer would have to be polls, but then again, are they trustworthy? Isn’t it possible that somebody in Florida gave Romney their vote in a pre-election poll just because a newspaper told them that he was in front? It’s not hard to imagine that a candidate can appear fashionable to the uninformed voter just because a headline told them so. It would be interesting to see what would happen in an election without those kinds of stories.
Shifting our focus away from newspapers, one could argue in favor of television reporting.[N2] After all, there isn’t much bias to a reporter saying “Candidate X won the Y primary last night. Here he is at Z giving his victory speech.”
But the devil is unfortunately in the details. Think about it. How much airtime do networks give to one candidate? What about the others? What do they discuss about each candidate? One can never assume that TV stations don’t have political motivations. After all, the entertainment industry as a whole recently got extremely political as it pushed for SOPA/PIPA to be passed.
As a whole, news outlets can’t possibly be as neutral as they would like to or at least appear to be. One can openly mock Fox News for questionable coverage in the past, but what about the Boston Globe right now? At the beginning of January, the Globe endorsed Jon Huntsman for the GOP nomination. With the justified and fair goals of good journalism in mind, does that even make sense? If the Globe endorses Huntsman for the GOP nomination, then as readers we have no choice but to take most stories published by the Globe about Huntsman with a grain of salt.
This is a world in which the media tries to impress ideas upon us voters. We are the ones that unfortunately have to sift through the information and pick out what we want to believe in. It’s no small responsibility, but in this era of instant information stemming from every source imaginable, it’s one that we seem to be stuck with.
This is a time to think. Think about where you’re getting your news on this election and what motivations the producers might have. Think about what it means to be informed, and make educated decisions both now and when it is time to hit the ballots. Candidates, reporters, writers, human beings – we all have goals. This election year, if you think about what they are and why they exist, I’ll have accomplished one of mine.
Tyler Reilly is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
