User:Nunamiut

The Centrist Ideology of the Media

The problems with wikipedia on controversial issues seem to be that many of the US users and others have a thoroughly conservative view on history as well as economics. In this respect they seem to believe that any attempt at even remotely displaying signs of the actual controversy that has in fact occured throughout the years must be POV. I don't know if this has something to do with the educational system, the US media or just the users of wikipedia, but it creates a huge gap between europeans views of what is a fair and balanced view of history and the US version one meets on wikipedia. No serious debate is generated and there seems to be a grave lack of understanding what the history subject is all about in some cases. Often encyclopedic form is used as an excuse although huge amounts of wiki articles on current entertainment industry pieces are far more extensive and cover several scores of pages and references and supplimentary pages.

One media analyst summed it up in this fashion in his article "Propaganda from the Middle of the Road" The Centrist Ideology of the News Media

"Another hallmark of centrist propaganda is to affirm, no matter what the evidence, that U.S. foreign policy is geared toward promoting democracy. Journalists are not unaware that the U.S. helped overthrow democratic governments, for example, in Guatemala in '54, Brazil in '64, Chile in '73 -- but these cases are considered ancient history, no longer relevant. (In centrist ideology, since the system is constantly fixing and renewing itself, U.S. abuses -- even against democracy -- become distant past overnight.)

Mainstream journalists respond to such criticism by explaining that articles for the daily press are not history texts and cannot include everything. That's true, but centrist propaganda finds space for certain histories and not others.

from a www.fair.org article by Jeff Cohen

from www.fair.org http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1492