Issues in the news. How do they do it?

Television news is quite an amazing medium. Why you ask? The reason is simple because in this war as with the wars as far back as in the 1960's we have to wonder if we would have been better off not knowing what is going on or in other words what is supposed to be going on. There are many sides to the story of the war and it seems that they are always trying to target the market as a whole in order to please everyone by giving them what they want to hear instead of the truth.

Taking a look at all of the sides of the story. Starting with the support and working our way down to non-support. You have the people that support the war and support everything that the administration does. These people are most likely on the very far right and a lot of the time do not take a time to rationally sit and think about what they do and do not support. Next you have the average right of center person including your libertarians somewhere close to this and are rational thinking and are no puppet to the administration. The center is most likely the hardest position to take and for that reason if news always took the center no one would watch. The left of center crowd or your average democrat who is not in support of the war but is at least not going to stone our troops. And then you have the Irrational thinking left of left people that do not think about what they say, who do not support the war and do not support the president and who will do anything and everything to get him out of power and the war stopped.

Now that we know about all of the sides lets examine the why news programming is actually hurting us rather than helping us. About a year ago when the hurricanes were in full swing and everything was crazy I found it amazing how little reporting about the Iraq War the cable news programs actually did. And that fact alone left me with only one conclusion that a lot of what comes out of the news rooms has to be spun in order to go on forever and by the time they're done spinning it they're very far from where they started. The Iraq war is a back-up story, something that will always be there and something that they can always ask a question about that doesn't really matter. The reason why we know that these stories are spun a lot is because when we hear stories from the news rooms and news from bloggers like Michael Yon and other people who are in Iraq with the troops they are telling the truth and not catering to a certain audience.

We see the same thing happening now with Israel and the Iraq war as we did with the hurricanes and the Iraq war. So lets examine this question are we hurt or helped by all of the news that we have? The short answer is yes and no. No because we are not hurt by acquiring information. The only reason that the answer would be yes would be because we have to trust people to give us true information rather than give us information that caters to all points of views or a position that caters to the radical points of view in order to get ratings. After Walter Cronkite put on his show for the American people in opposition to the Vietnam war I think that the networks liked it. The only problem is that it doesn't work as well as it did 20 or 30 years ago.