The Media Game: Creating the Hound Pack of the Day
by Yves Mamou
December 16, 2016 at 5:30 am
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9585/media-hound-packShare
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To be published on the front page of your own newspaper, to open the news on your own television program, you must bring the "killer news" -- the news that kills all others -- and, more importantly, the news that all other media will copy and paste.
Journalists are obsessed with creating the hound pack of the day and then enjoying the status of top dog. In hound-pack logic, there can be only one news item a day -- repeated and reprinted infinitely.
Poverty can make a headline when data are officially released, but who cares about what poor people think?
The problem begins when people not on the radar become the majority of the population, and when this majority become "dissidents." Then, when the invisible people (in the media sense of the term) engage in the democratic process and protest with a vote, it sounds like a bomb: No one saw it coming! No one could have predicted it!
According to the media, the only poor who need help, support and attention are immigrants. Other people who are poor -- especially whites -- do not, for the media, exist. And if they did protest, presumably they would have no right to.
"Representing the middle and working classes as "reactionary" or "fascist" is very convenient. This avoids asking critical questions. When someone is diagnosed as fascist, the priority becomes to re-educate him, not to question the economic organization of the territory where he lives." – French geographer, Eric Guilluy, in Le Point.
Trump understood well this disconnect of the people from the media. During the campaign, in fact, Trump spoke to very few from the media: He made his own media: tweeting every day, obliging the mainstream media to amplify his words. The more the lying media treating him as a liar, the more he was trusted.
Democracy depends for its survival on journalists doing correctly the job for which they are paid: reporting facts and not stigmatizing people who do not resemble them. It is not the "noble" duty of journalists to prevent things from happening. Just report facts, propose analysis, and let people think for themselves.
New media have appeared on the internet, in the mold of Breitbart in the U.S. and Riposte Laïque in France -- many dozens across the U.S. and Europe. Their audiences consist of millions of readers.
