even if its blatant lies, race baiting, non factual, mostly made up opinion? because they are not accountable to anyone, thats why. other industries directly affect peoples health, wallet, the environment, etc and so are regulated or held accountable to some extent, but "journalism" is something that you can decide to pay attention to or not. Its that simple. I always wondered why the media gets away with what they do and that is my conclusion.
The First Amendment is the only one that has no qualifications at all. Check it out: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." No qualifying phrases like the one in the second amendment about a "well-regulated militia" or anything like that. Simple, direct, straightforward.
thats true. people automatically assume integrity though, "well, NBC is a big corporation that makes lots of money and so they must be telling the truth right?"
These days? Not so much. With all the alternate sources out there, well, there's tons of places to get news. I found out about the New Orleans breach a day before it made the news because I was on a journal site looking at stuff about some other subject completely. Don't remember now what it was, but someone who had lived in NO said she'd just heard from a friend that one of the levees had been breached. She said if that was true it was going to be a major disaster. I vividly remember it. Showed me just what the Internet could really do.
They are pretty muchly paid propagandists. I guess our culture has weighed the value of letting anybody speak their mind vs all the ensuing bullshit and we have a lot of freedom of speech and a lot of ensuing bullshit. If I want to really know about a subject I don't pay a lot of attention to the press. I wait until somebody does a real investigation and then I buy the book. The real investigation can bring out an entirely different story than what I get from the press sometimes. The press never seems to provide any "education", just prepackaged information typically designed to foster their pov. Data is what can be observed, information is what somebody makes of the data. When listening to the press it's a good game to play in trying to pay attention to just the data and try to see past how their information gets formed up. The press is in the business of selling headache medicines essentially. They are shills for Big Medical and anybody else that might advertise with them that start with "Big". Notice that they never, ever, have anything good to say about the Internet, quite the opposite, they are losing eyeballs to the internet continually. The internet is a much better venue for truth that doesn't have to be vetted by sponsors because frequently there aren't sponsors. The downside of not having a vetting process is that anybody can say anything [and frequently do] and we have little recourse in finding out their cred. We develop a talent for keeping an "open opinion" on matters I'm quite sure.