The "Downstream" Media

I heard a comment while listening to the fringe media recently. (Dennis Miller's right leanings cannot help force his radio show to be considered part of that fringe these days.) The comment made had to do with a term that gets a lot of use these days in every form of media, perhaps because it delineates part of it. It was the term "Mainstream Media".  

For those who you who have been stranded on a desert island for the last few years with a very thin man strangely reminiscent of Tom Hanks, the Mainstream Media consists of Network television, most cable news networks, and the greater share of the newspapers and magazines in the world. These self-defined arbiters of fact and truth have lost a bit of focus in their mission of late and a good bit of their reputation in the process. 

More and more, they seem to supply these facts and truths "from a particular point of view". Like Obi-wan Kenobi (from Episode VI for the Star Wars geeks out there), they feel that it is OK to filter this truth if such filtering serves the common good (as of course, they define it). 

Unfortunately, this is not the job of a journalist or a news program, but that of the commentator or editor. In fact the current level of filtering leads more to editorializing than it does to actual news in the media today. It would be both easy and accurate to say that the claims of an unbiased media have long since left the building with Elvis.  

Both sides have their own filtering agents of course. The right or conservative point of view has Fox News Network, talk radio, and the occasional rabid independent newspaper owner (fewer of those every day though). The left or liberal point of view has every other news outlet on the planet. The Mainstream Media liberal bias is now all but an accepted fact (you know, like Global Warming). Those with a different point of view are left to do a bit of filtering of our own, picking out the occasional kernels of truth and seeds of fact among that which they scatter in the dirt like chicken feed. 

Pecking away in our attempts to reach the truth, we are often forced to ingest more than a little unpalatable material in the process. Swallowing sometimes painfully the inedible bulk of what we are given, we must take what sustenance we can from what we can glean in the process and let the rest 'pass on through'. 

There is little excuse for the abuse of journalistic principles that were once held sacred, and no apology for what passes for it these days. In fact, it is considered the right of those in control of information dissemination to do so, as they alone have the proper perspective on the path of history and the required vision for the future.  

And so we come to comment that triggered this post and its point (I know, it's about time). Instead of the term Mainstream Media, the comment by the caller was that we should use the term "Downstream Media" to describe the media's current offerings. 

The frame of reference for this is one that many of us understand from our younger days. It was OK to wander the woods and make your way down to the stream to play back then. It was likewise OK to wade in that stream or even drink from it (yeah, I'm actually old enough to remember that). This would not be the case however, if you knew that you were downstream of a evil corporation pouring sewage into that same bit of water. Avoidance was then the order of the day. The smell or the smallest taste would quickly convince you that this was something that you wanted to stay as far as possible from if it didn't make you sick.  

So too with the media today. The smell from the decay of their dying ideals permeates the atmosphere around the stream of information that they attempt to tell us is news. The taste of their editorializing is bitter indeed as we are assaulted with facts and viewpoints carefully chosen for how they can influence our opinions and decisions. The sight of the nonsense that passes for news seems to get uglier every day, as the pundits paint their pictures for our edification.  

Careful filtering indeed is required if we choose to sample any part of this stream of data. Those who choose to sample, do so at their own risk and need to be aware that the water has probably been polluted by the run off of the Downstream Media. 

(I know that this probably should have been called the Upstream media instead fof the sake of scientific accuracy, but the positive implication of the term Upstream does not fit the message being attempted. Downstream, while not entirely accurate, does. I apologize for the minor logical discrepancy.)