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Deciding that you are going to cover one specific thing, and only one specific thing, and ignore absolutely everything else, is neutral?
by rufus_foreman 4y ago
Deciding that you are going to cover one specific thing, and only one specific thing, and ignore absolutely everything else, is neutral?
- Dalewyn 4y agoC-SPAN's mission is to cover, and merely cover, Congressional proceedings and some other governmental affairs, and I would say they are very successful in that endeavour. I won't say the same of any other "news" or "journalism" outfit in their mission to journal goings-ons. Everyone from CNN to BBC to NHK to Al Jazeera to Wall Street Journal to New York Times can all go screw themselves for being propagandists disguised as journalists.
- rufus_foreman 4y agoBut by covering Congressional proceedings in that way, they ignore the way laws are actually made. If you watch only C-SPAN you might think that laws are enacted by Congress after some debate or deliberation on camera about the content of those laws. But that's not how it works. The way it works is that members of Congress spend a huge amount of time, sometimes the majority of their time, soliciting donations. And then a lobbyist for a company that has donated money to a member of Congress will give them the exact text of a law that they want enacted. The member of Congress will get that into a bill that makes it through committee, possibly by trading votes. Then the bill will come up to a vote, no one will have read the whole bill they are voting on, in some cases that would be impossible, the bill will be hundreds of pages long and it is only given to the members of Congress a few hours before the vote. Then they vote on the bill that lobbyists wrote without any idea what is in it. Is that what they show on C-SPAN? If not, why not? Because someone made a very non-neutral decision that that is what they will show on C-SPAN.