RB, Bourdieu

The media’s “audience ratings mindset” (333) is little different than corporation’s shareholder appeasement mindset. In fact, audience ratings are important in order to create ad revenue which is important in order to appease shareholders. Bourdieu writes that journalism has a distinguishing characteristic: “it is much more dependent on external forces than other fields of cultural production, such as mathematics, literature, law, science, and so on” (333). This is disturbing considering mass distribution of information is, arguably, more important than anything else on that list. After all, the media is a filter through which math, lit, law, science, and so on pass.

However, someone once told me that the media is a good indicator of how free a society is. The more the news is openly critical of hegemony, the freer the country. Though US news isn’t without propaganda and censorship, it isn’t without criticism of hegemony either: corporate media control is no secret, Bill Moyers still works for PBS, and people accuse our president of engineering the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Even Fox News outfoxed itself in a segment meant to disprove accusations of water boarding being torture. In the segment, soldiers tip an anchorman’s head back and pour water on his face and the anchorman says something like, “This isn’t so bad.” Then the soldiers begin to cover his face in saran wrap, and the anchor reacts the same way most humans would react to torture—he freaks out.