What makes the cut: two actual examples of media suppression

Here at News boycott, we’re pained to see our efforts to help stop media sensationalism and to shame NBC News depicted from time to time as urging “censorship”. To point out the difference, we bring to reader attention these two instances in which the media decided that the public didn’t need to know about certain viewpoints or couldn’t be trusted with certain information. First, former US Senator Gravel, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, who in spite of a record of public service longer than two of the “leading” candidates, and no worse name recognition than certain “mainstream” candidates who are also polling at zero percent, has received almost no coverage in the mainstream media, and will likely be barred from future presidential debates. He explains the situation here:

We at Newsboycott are not about to start evaluating individual candidates for office or their positions, and we know the news media may have good reasons for not focusing on every candidate equally. However, we ask our readers: is the self-centered ranting of a young man with a chemical imbalance in the brain really more worthy of airtime than the foreign and economic policy positions of a former two-term US Senator, whose legislative achievements included the end of the draft and the Vietnam War and the building of the Alaska pipeline—especially when those political positions reflect concerns of a big chunk of the candidates’ party that are not clearly addressed by any of the other candidates?

Secondly, in this article on the fallout from the indictment of the head of a Washington, D.C., escort service for allegedly running a prostitution ring, the Washington Post reports that the indicted businesswoman has provided one of the networks with a list of phone numbers of her clients, which are widely assumed to include many powerful inside-the-beltway figures. What is the network doing with this information? So far,

ABC is grappling with the question of whether to air a report or identify some of those on the list. “We can’t comment on ongoing reporting,” ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said.

In the case of the Seng hui Cho multimedia package, as we know, the principal question NBC and its competitors “grappled with” was how and when to air them in order to get the biggest ratings boost. So it seems that one set of decision making priorities comes into play for the networks when dallying Washington fat cats are in danger of embarrassment, and another when the families of Virginia Tech shooting victims are in line for prolonged, unnecessary pain and the public is to be put at further risk by culturally transmitting these abnormal images and rantings.

Maybe there’s no easy answer to any of these quandries. Maybe it’s just inevitable that the media has to make decisions every moment of the day what to select for broadcast and promotion from the rivers of information that flow into its offices around the clock. But, in any case, these decisions determine whether the media’s role amounts to serving the public by informing it or assaulting it by degrading the collective conscious. If you’d like to give these companies any feedback as to which you’d prefer, you can sign our petition.