"All I Know Is What I Read in the Papers"

I never really gave media bias or media literacy much thought until well into my college career. Sure, I endured the journalistic abortion that is Channel One News during middle school (which, truth be told, the only noteworthy thing that I remember about the show was that it launched the career of that Asian woman on The View) like many others in class, but I never bothered to consider anything close to resembling the 11 points on Ralph's sheet. The pivotal force behind my first examination of media bias was Chuck Klosterman.

For those out of the trivial, pop-culture essayist loop, Chuck Klosterman is a former senior writer for Spin and current feature columnist for Esquire. His second book, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, is a collection of essays spanning everything why John Cusack hinders my sex life to the psychological impact of what it means to befriend a serial killer. The 16th essay in this book, with a clever title making it accessable to Oklahomans, is one of the most insightful examinations of media bias I've ever encountered (certainly much moreso than Peter Hart's essay from the McChesney book) for one simple reason: It makes perfect, logical sense, and doesn't rely on preachy rhetoric or a heap of statistics to get it's point across. It's remarkably simple, and makes perfect sense to both the media consumer and the media vendor. It's the Occum's Razor of media theory - the simplest explanation is the right one for me, and the one I subscribe to.

In the hope of conveying my understanding to others, I'm going to exerpt key segments of Klosterman's essay "All I Know Is What I Read in the Papers." Since I couldn't find the text of the essay online, I've embarked upon the ambitious task of typing it out myself. Trust me, it will be worth your while.

"I would never try to convince someone not to hate the media. As far as I can tell, it's a completely reasonable thing to hate. Whenever I meet someone who feels a sense of hatred for a large, amorphous body - the media, government, Ticketmaster, the Illuminati, Anna Nicole Smith, whatever - I fully support their distaste. It's always better to be mad at something vast and unspecific and theoretical, as these entities cannot sue you for defamation. But here's my one..."

BLOGGERS NOTE: When previewing the essay, I lost what amounted to several typed pages of work. I managed to find the bare bones (and I mean scant) arguement of his online, but it doesn't do the whole work any justice whatsoever. So if you really do actually give a baker's fuck, just go out and buy the book.

""Everybody seems to be concerned that journalists are constantly trying to slip their own political and philosophical beliefs into what they cover. This virtually never happens. And I am not being naive when I say this; it really doesn't happen. There are thousands of things that affect the accuracy of news stories, but the feelings of the reporter is almost never one of them. The single most important impact on any story is far less sinister. Mostly, it all comes down to (a) who the journalist has called and (b) which of those people happens to call back first...There is no way the espoused Aryan masterminds who run the world can affect the content of any daily story; they usually have no idea what the hell is going on with anything in the world....I work in the Knight Ridder chain for four years, and I never got the impression that the CEO read anything other than Golf Digest. The media machine is too bloated to "manufacture consent.""