Bottom Line: If the old media cannot educate the viewer on Pakistan then what social function does it serve?
More:
Tonight I turned on the “news” and it was awash in the trivial.
While the major media fiddle, Pakistan is burning.
If things go badly there, then much of the good accomplished in the War could be lost.
While Pakistan burns, the “big three” report on the excellent violin concert by major political personality Nero.
The present government of Pakistan is tyrannical, but all the other options are worse. Long term support for a dictator undercuts our moral position in the region (such as it is), but idealism may lead to a nuclear armed terrorist state in the short term.
If that happens, then there may be no long term.
There are no good obvious answers. This is a non-partisan problem. Neither party has a “plan” for this type of crisis and there is no consensus amongst experts (as far as I can see) about what the nation should do.
This serious situation, on which the entire War on Terror may turn, demands bipartisan and thoughtful leadership from President Bush and the Democrat Congress. Will we get it?
Congress must stop fighting Bush long enough to unite on an issue on which there is nobody to blame (except the British for creating Pakistan?) and a desperate need for resolve and a coherent policy.
What about the voting public? In a republic, we expect our leaders to be the experts, but we cannot escape our responsibility altogether. We will have to vote for the next president and for Congress based on our knowledge of the response to this serious crisis.
A public ignorant of even the most basic facts regarding Pakistan cannot vote intelligently. The major media (unlike the new) has the resources to educate us on this crisis, but are not doing so. They are slower than the new media, cannot give us as broad a range of commentary as the new media, but they do have the resources (and alleged depth) to educate on a major crisis.
As far as I can tell they have utterly abdicated this role. If a nuclear Pakistan falls into the hands of radical Islamic terrorists, they will have done nothing to help us understand what is happening. In fact, everything I have learned from media of value I have learned from the new media.
The old media preens and prides itself on being “more responsible” than the new . . . but only by comparing itself to irresponsible pieces of the new media while ignoring the more serious parts. The old media news is no longer even middlebrow, but is rapidly sinking into a combination of shilling for entertainment projects such as movies and light, easy to understand, stories about such trivia as the presidential horse race.
Hugh Hewitt has spoken about, transcribed, and linked to more serious text and news on Pakistan than one can learn by watching the Big Three networks. National Review On Line has written an entire series of short, but informative posts with references to other sources.
Bluntly, the major media, especially those who use the public air waves, have utterly failed the public trust.
The crisis in Pakistan demonstrates that the major networks are utterly useless at news education.