I am not a big Rush Limbaugh fan. The political right now has a whole cadre of these types, like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and the old-school Bob Grant that choose an unwavering position on a you-pick-it polarizing issue and harp on the evils of the other side for an hour to pump ratings. This kind of demagoguery, driven by prejudice and in the name of nationalism has had a fairly infamous history, leading ultimately to the gas chambers when employed with greater effect in Nazi Germany. But I must admit that he comes out with a good point once in a while, like this week’s discussion about what he termed ‘Drive-by Media’.

This is when a news outlet hypes a breaking story unrelentingly without having first done the basic investigation that good journalism demands and then disappear when the real facts of the matter come to light. This type of reporting is now…the basic form of news delivery from the major news organizations. The insidiousness of this practice was laid bare by Ted Koppel, who recently joined NPR as a news analyst, after retiring from the popular news magazine, Nightline. Koppel was on NPR yesterday and made some interesting (and scary) points about the future of news delivery in this country. Over his 42 year tenure with ABC News, Koppel saw a big change in how management made the decisions for what was news-worthy and what wasn’t. It basically comes down to corporate control of news media outlets. The big corporations will hype news that interests the group of people they percieve as being most susceptible to their advertising. ‘Why do you think we ran stories about Lacy Peterson for three weeks?’ Koppel asks (paraphrased, I can’t find a transcript right now). ‘…because that’s the demographic corporate wanted to hit’. There is a cozy relationship between major corporations and the current administraion which is frankly, quite unsettling. The government shouldn’t place the desires of corporate big-wigs above the good of the nation, that’s not in the spirit of the Constitution which clearly protects the rights of all individuals, and doesn’t say anywhere that certain groupings of individuals (when together as a corporation) should have more rights than others. I see the right-wing radio, TV, and print media jockeys as cheer-leaders for the administration’s policies, which, if not identical, usually run parallel to corporate interests.

Good journalism can still be found in some places. BBC World still does a decent job of delivering information about what is happening around the world, and NPR does a fairly good job (against all odds since this administration would dearly like to take control of it) of providing a balanced view of most issues.

Even though I give credit to Rush for assigning a catchy name for a really big problem, I see him as one of the main perpetuators of that problem, which is a bit ironic.