Meanwhile, while most American media are obsessed with the Andrew Weiner scandal, life goes on, both in the US and in the rest of the world. Amy Goodman wrote an article for the Guardian, titled "A Perfect Storm of Stupid," and I thought it would be a critique of the media vortex engulfing Weiner like this one (via), say, but it's about global warming.
But this is what I meant to tell you about: Peru just elected a left-wing president. (Or "left-wing" -- I don't know yet if he's left-wing except by the standards of American corporate media, where the New York Times and the Washington Post are "liberal" and CNN and NPR are "left".) FAIR has a blog post up about US media coverage of the left's fortunes in elections, which contains this memorable conclusion:
Viewing elections through the eyes of the investor class might be helpful for some, but it's doubtful that it's a great way to understand what the people in any country are thinking.The link to a quite good Guardian piece on the Peruvian election is worth clicking through, but isn't that a great description of the "mainstream" media in the US? Looking at the news through the eyes of the investor class isn't a bad thing per se; openly espousing an identified bias is better than pretending to be objective. The trouble is that you have to do some digging to find news coverage done through any other filter. Wouldn't it be nice if the TV broadcast and cable news networks, and the mastheads of elite print media used that phrase as a tagline? Not "All the News That's Fit to Print," not "Fair and Balanced," but "News Through the Eyes of the Investor Class." Then we'd all have fewer illusions about what we were getting.
