Media's "agenda"

A few things have happened the last few days that got us talking last night that I think should be brought to everyone's attention.

Here's the jist of it, and I'll go into detail later: We the media, or at least our station, do NOT have an agenda against Republicans, Democrats, the University of Wisconsin, or any other specific organization, nor are we a mouthpiece for any political organization.

Here's the detail:
One of our anchors misspoke on air recently when he said a student who was found drowned went to UW-Madison, when actually he went to a different school in downtown Madison.

A viewer responded on our Web site by correcting his mistake, then saying that we "never miss a chance to take a negative shot at the UW!!"
We were a little dumbfounded as to why this would be a negative shot at the UW, and he responded by saying that students at the UW are under the university's care, and that anything bad happening to them that we report would reflect poorly on the UW.

First of all, students at the UW are considered adults and are not under the constant care and supervision of the university. This is the first time we expect them to take care of themselves.

Second, many of the people who work at NBC are UW grads who are proud of their alma mater, myself included. Moreover, we do report a lot of positive stories about the UW -- that same night we reported about a new vaccine being researched at UW that could help people quit smoking.

This really got a few of us in a discussion about the perceived agenda of the media, especially the "liberal media." In actuality, there are quite a few conservatives that work in our newsroom, and we always strive to get both sides of any issue, even if it means putting someone on the air that a lot of us don't agree with. I think that people wrongly isolate a single story or even a single sentence and use that as evidence of bias. It's our job as media to report what happens, and sometimes what happens may not be good for one side of the political spectrum.

Which brings me to another story. Yesterday, I received a call from someone complaining about a story on the national news that supposedly showed the mutilated bodies of two soldiers who had just been found. I wasn't paying attention to the national news show because I was busy doing something else, but I don't know if they even did show any mutilated bodies, or if they just reported that the bodies were mutilated.

Anyways, this person was really angry that we would show something like that on TV. I told her we have no control over what the national network broadcasts on their news show, which is true, but what I really wanted to tell her is that they were just reporting what happened.

Our soldiers in Iraq have to deal with death and destruction on a daily basis. That is fact. Just because something from overseas makes somebody sitting comfortably in their living room uncomfortable doesn't mean we shouldn't show it on TV. War is not a comfortable matter.

I don't think we realize how good we have it over here while our brave men and women are risking their lives in the Middle East. We have not been asked to make any sacrifices whatsoever, but have actually been told to keep living our lives as normal.

The reason that it doesn't look like the war is going so well right now is because the war isn't going so well right now. Any number of figures can show you that incidents of sectarian violence now are much higher than they were at the beginning of the war. The media are reporting all these incidents of violence because they are, well, newsworthy.

A major turning point in public opinion against the Vietnam War, many say, was the Tet Offensive, when lots of images of bloodshed made their way through the media. Even though the U.S. had scored a major victory, it has been argued, the images that the public saw didn't portray it as a major victory, and therefore turned the public's opinion against the war. From then on, the media has been blamed at least in part for losing the Vietnam War because the public was no longer behind it.

There are several reasons why we lost the war that have nothing to do with the media, most of it from the fact that we didn't understand the type of nationalism that the Vietnamese had and that we had less of a military strategy and more of a political strategy for winning the war.

Anyway, I believe in that case and in this case now that the media should report what was happening. Just because it doesn't look good on TV doesn't mean it shouldn't be reported. I would argue that it's a good thing that people get uneasy by these images, because war is not pretty. Maybe if we all knew what war was really like for the average soldier, we wouldn't go rushing into these kinds of conflicts.

That isn't to say we should never go into war. I understand that we have a duty to protect the homeland. But we now know that Saddam didn't pose a serious threat to us, compared to, say, North Korea or Iran, who seem to like to boast about their nuclear programs.

There are many things I could go on about, but I just want to stress the point that we as the media aren't out to "get" anyone. One of our functions is a watchdog of the government, and if we didn't sometimes push the people in power or question them about certain information, we would not be doing our jobs. Then general public would complain that we were the mouthpiece of the government, and the whole argument would start over again.