To be fair, Bennett also had recommendations for politicians and journalists, but there was no avoiding the idea that as a citizen, my best option to counter the deleterious effects of this news-politics mess was to think harder, look more carefully, and read more.Ĭut to 2007: I was attending the annual meeting of the National Communication Association in Chicago. Politics is dominated by spin, the news media aren’t adequately explaining the important issues of the day. “Become better informed by decoding the news.” Sounds good. We have to become critical news consumers. But how?īennett outlined five recommendations, ranging from discounting standard story formulas to paying attention to stray facts and recognizing spin. And finally, urged Bennett, citizens could seek out “additional sources of information” and run “independent checks on various claims.” Over the course of the semester, I became appropriately outraged. I sipped my latté with anticipation as I got to Bennett’s last chapter: “Freedom from the press: Solutions for concerned citizens.” “Proposals for citizens,” it read. On top of all this, political professionals had learned how to use these constraints to their advantage, increasing the role of handlers and spin machines in the deliberate construction of political issues and images through the news. The resulting pressures had also led to an emphasis on news that was overdramatic, hyper-personalized, fragmented, and supportive of the existing social order. I started to see that my twenty-something cynicism toward media and politics was at least in part driven by institutional problems within the news: Media deregulation of the ’80s and ’90s had increased pressure on the news industry to cut costs and maximize profits, thereby reducing investigative reporting and foreign coverage. ![]() Lance Bennett’s News: The Politics of Illusion, became my bible. ![]() In spring 1998, as a senior political science major at the University of New Hampshire, I took a transformative course on media and politics.
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