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infotainment: melodrama drowns real news

I continue to be naïvely amazed by the journalistic mediocrity of the New York Times in the article In France, Strike begins as Union ends on october 19th, where the priority of the article is dramatizing the personal melodrama of the Sarkozy divorce rather than analyzing the reform of the French retirement pension system. The divorce melodrama, easy to report and add emotional appeal, fortunately is of little interest to the French public. On the other hand, the reform of the retirement pension system concerns all the French, and indirectly Americans as well since aging of the population is destabilizing their pension system as well. Personified melodrama has replaced the news. Readers can only regret that the media all too often shirk their responsibility of providing quality independent investigative reporting that is a key for citizens to be informed and actively participate in democracy.
But this independence is at risk in an incestuous give-and-take relationship between the media and political leaders. Nicolas Sarkozy, after having carefully analyzed the Bush administration's manipulation of the news agenda, continuously creates newsfeed to satisfy the media's hunger for breaking news, thereby maintaining control over the news agenda. This manipulation has been brought to new heights with the timely leak of his own divorce as a smokescreen to distract the French public from the issue of French pension reform. At the same time, in Lisbon he played the "double jeu", playing both sides of the media fence, by commenting with distain "Le Monde's" questions about his divorce. Sarkozy benefits from the smokescreen provided by the leak of his divorce and by being able to protray himself as the victim of media harrassment about his personal life. The CBS news program "60 minutes" dwelled on personal questioning and commentary of the Sarkozy divorce - the result: Sarkozy walked out on the interviewer. CBS 60 minutes reporting of Sarkozy
Journalists learn quickly to toe the line if they are to maintain access to the political newsfeed; being cut off is fatal to their career. The result, journalists learn to play it safe and write infotainment.

Labels: France, media, politics, Sarkozy

posted by Brett @ 11:58 AM