Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Returning to the truth

Today’s international news coverage not only focuses on the earthquake that hit Haiti on Tuesday, but also on Rush Limbaugh’s response to the natural disaster and commentary on the country itself.

In Wednesday morning's press conference, President Obama addressed the nation on relief efforts that were already underway and how the government planned to proceed in Haiti in the coming days.

“Military overflights have assessed the damage, and by early afternoon our civilian disaster assistance team are beginning to arrive,” Obama said in the press conference. “Search and rescue teams from Florida, Virginia and California will arrive throughout today and tomorrow, and more rescue and medical equipment and emergency personnel are being prepared."

On his Wednesday show, instead of reporting on the tragedy that had just taken place in Haiti and the relief effort, Limbaugh decided to criticize Obama’s actions and excite the Conservative base against the president. Limbaugh dismissed Obama’s relief efforts for the Haitians as little more than currying favor with the African American community.

“They’ll use this to burnish their, shall we say, ‘credibility’ with the black community—in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country,” Limbaugh said on his Wednesday show.

With Americans becoming increasingly sick of the two parties not coming together to work on our nation’s issues, here is yet another example of someone who had a political ax to grind and decided to try and use it to hit Obama over the head. Limbaugh, like many others in the media today, took an international tragedy and turned it into political diatribe.

In fact, this is a phenomenon we’re seeing increasingly in today’s news. Last year in my Principles of Journalism class, Professor Yulsman told us that a journalist’s primary obligation was to tell the truth. Once upon a time, a journalist’s duty, first and foremost, was to inform citizens about disaster, crime, the government’s actions, and other noteworthy current events that might impact their lives in some way.

However, in today’s media, some people choose to take advantage of the news and use it to criticize the opposing team. Every time the president takes a stand on something, no matter how good or bad his position is, there is always someone there to criticize him. It doesn’t even matter if the issue is political or not; when Obama ordered a hamburger with Dijon mustard last May in Virginia, the Chicago Tribune clucked disapprovingly as Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham criticized Limbaugh Obama of being elitist.

Walter Lippman was completely correct in saying that "the task of selecting and ordering the news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy." Journalists like Lippman and H.L. Mencken, who were watchdogs of truth, would be rolling over in their graves if they could see the way people like Limbaugh have bastardized it. But in a 24/7 cable news environment that encourages shouting more than it does thoughtfulness, its unfortunate that radio talk show hosts like Limbaugh can use the news as a platform for their own egomania.

3 comments:

  1. Good post. I don't disagree with most of what you posited.

    However, I think you had one major typo:

    "... when Obama ordered a hamburger with Dijon mustard last May in Virginia, the Chicago Tribune clucked disapprovingly as Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham criticized Limbaugh [OBAMA?] of being elitist."

    We also need to work on that personal voice, but we'll address that in class.

    Keep up the good work.

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  2. Solid post Mindy. I'd really like to hear more of what you have to say about the state of the news media today. Personally, it makes me sad that news coverage is taken so lightly but then again times change and so must we.

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  3. I agree that we get too much sensationalism in our news today. Perhaps we need personalities like Rush Limbaugh, Jon Stewart and Stephan Colbert to give us different views of situations, whether we agree with them or not. We must hope that people will be able to determine what is accurate reporting and what is hearsay.

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