A plane disappeared in the Pacific Ocean, and I woke up to CNN “breaking” the news on conspiracy theories for months.
A dud of a snowstorm hit New York, and panic-inducing news coverage exaggerated it to apocalyptic lengths.
Michelle Obama chose not to wear a headscarf in Saudi Arabia, and the media became the political fashion police.
To American news networks, if a story bleeds, it leads. And if it doesn’t bleed, just stab it until it does.
As cable television and the Internet gained ground in the 1990s and 2000s, broadcast television news programs lost large percentages of viewers, and newspaper circulation declined rapidly.
Americans stopped watching Walter Cronkite and tuned in to Bill O’Reilly or Bill Maher.
They canceled subscriptions to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and looked to Drudge Report or their local conservative wacko-fest, The Hayride.
The age of the politically moderate ended, and the age of extreme partisanship began.
When MSNBC and Fox News began airing shows like The Rachel Maddow Show and Hannity in a sly news-like format, the networks picked up partisan audiences, creating a bubble of political extremism.
When people are told what they want to hear, they keep going back for more, killing any chance for consuming a diversity of news coverage.
NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN found it difficult to hold viewers. Desperate times called for desperate measures.
Broadcast news began clawing and scratching for any story that would glue viewers to their programs. During the Malaysia Airlines fiasco in 2014, CNN’s viewership skyrocketed. Why cover hard news if covering a seemingly unsolvable mystery for months on end brings in millions of viewers?
While the news hysterically covered the missing plane, political pundits passed off their opinions as fact, and no one was there to correct them.
Budget cuts and layoffs at newspapers and broadcast media have muffled watchdog journalism’s bark. The only way to take off the muzzle is to increase media literacy among our citizens.
Americans need to differentiate between political pundits voicing opinion and news anchors reporting hard news.
Shepard Smith produces hard news on Fox News. Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity do not.
Bill Maher from HBO and Scott McKay from The Hayride do not produce hard news. They produce their opinions.
McKay, O’Reilly and Maher don’t mask their true identities as political commenters, but their viewers go to them for news anyway, which has only inflamed American political polarization.
Last week, McKay wrote a piece calling LSU students idiots for practicing their freedom of speech during Bobby Jindal’s prayer rally. McKay pointed to them, along with two of my fellow columnists, as the reasons why legislators will not have a hard time cutting the University’s budget.
Quoting an angry citizen who believes the American Family Association’s hateful position on homosexuality and Islam are ideas protesters should relax about, McKay portrays LSU students as heathens who hate Christianity and support terrorists.
This is how pundits exacerbate the polarization and degradation of American political culture — they take their opinions, deflate the opposition and close the minds of their followers, keeping them in a perpetual loop of identical political ideas.
McKay fails to mention that the University Presbyterian Church held its own prayer gathering in opposition to Jindal’s politically motivated rally. He fails to mention that the Unitarian Church also prayed outside of the PMAC in opposition.
The AFA creates propaganda that does a shoddy job of differentiating devout Muslims from radical Islamist terrorists. McKay chooses not to mention that protesters held signs opposing Islamophobia, not defending radical Islam.
Commentators like McKay, O’Reilly, Maher and Rachel Maddow denounce opposing opinions as idiotic, digging deeper holes in a faltering political culture.
I do not produce hard news. As a columnist, I write opinions, as blatantly stated on the letterhead. I synthesize facts and make a subjective argument. But the front pages of The Daily Reveille allow readers to gather the facts in hard news pieces before they reach my column in the opinion section.
If you want news, read The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or any other page of The Daily Reveille. If Americans continue to look for news on sites like The Hayride, which spews ultra-conservative propaganda, or MSNBC, which dispenses intensely liberal ideologies, the political climate will never cool down.
The flames of divisive and hateful politics will heat up and devour our nation.
Justin DiCharia is a 20-year-old mass communication junior from Slidell, Louisiana. You can reach him on Twitter @JDiCharia.