Why I Love the Mainstream Media and You Should Too

Conservatives, while wrapped in the flag, never seem miss an opportunity to bash the ‘mainstream media’ or MSM as it’s referred to by some. They call it biased, and lately just claim it’s ‘fake news’, a term that is used to describe pretty much anything said by the Trump administration and their merry band of propagandists, but is nevertheless used by the aforementioned to discredit legitimate journalism.

But I love the mainstream media because I understand what the country would be like without them. Like them or not, they are the closest thing we have to a ‘check and balance’ on government power at all levels, and without them we might as well just give up on the country altogether because we’ll never again poses the tools necessary to vet our information.

You can hate the MSM, but whether you like them or not, we can all agree that the mainstream media is accountable. Large media organizations like ABC, NBC, CBS are accountable to voters and viewers alike. They are accountable to politicians who claim foul when misinformation is sometimes accidentally disseminated. And they are accountable to advertisers who sometimes pull ads over objectionable content and would certainly pull ads if the content was deemed to be willfully dishonest.

Consider the alternative to MSM. No mainstream media means a complete lack of any kind of third party accountability. It means hollow and unaccountable standards for (and I use the term loosely) ‘journalists’ like Project Veritas hack and convict James O’Keefe who thinks lying to advance his belief system is fair game. We already have this problem with right wing rags pushing conspiracy theories to gullible conservatives who love the red meat subject matter but lack the critical thinking skills to correctly filter the noise from the actual news. No, former president Obama is not a Kenyan Muslim who hates America.

Without the MSM, how would people be able to determine what news to believe? Accountability is critical for our democracy and we should honor and protect it as such. Once the mainstream media is gone, what does that leave you with? Hyper partisan hack news organizations like Breitbart and Fox that act as de facto state media for the administration, and a virtual Wild West of so-called and deceptively named (and again, I use the term loosely) ‘news’ outlets with a wide spectrum of dubious journalistic standards that includes everything from innuendo to outright lies.

Attacks on the mainstream media weaken the only verifiable sources of independent news that exist on earth. Without them, the only official news we would get to hear would be from our government and subject to their willful deception and propaganda. Who wants that? During Obama we could trust most of what the government said. Under Trump, we can’t trust anything. So it’s no surprise they consider the media the enemy. They actually ARE the enemy of the Trump administration, and for good reason. They are the only bulwark between Trump’s constant blather or twitter lies and the actual truth of what happens in the world.

So when you hear someone disrespecting the MSM, correct them. Remind them that without the mainstream news, they would be at the mercy of the government to disseminate any news they saw fit without any checks or independent verification. We should protect the MSM with our very lives, even before we protect our own government. For a government without this kind of check is on it’s way to becoming a dictatorship sooner or later. The MSM is the ultimate check on power and without them every bit of information becomes suspect.

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