The big example of the day was a video of US Dept of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod at a NAACP speaking engagement. A website called biggovernment.com ran a clip from the speech and the lack of context made it out to seem as though Sherrod was a racist and deliberately helped white farmers to a lesser extent. This manipulative video caught on and as other news outlets ran the story Sherrod was eventually fired from her position only to be asked back when all the details were pieced together. Sherrod declined the offer.
Sherrod is not the only victim of this media manipulation. Stories are twisted to fit political agendas all the time which begs the question in my mind: where is the retribution? Even in smaller missteps by media such as misprints or inaccurate numbers there is no official punishment set in place. While some news stations do abide by the ethical principle of retractions just as many news stations do not.
During my time in Australia I took a journalism course called Press and Society. For my final paper I explored the Gillard government's attempt at media reform laws. These laws had a bunch of different proposals but I thought the most logical was the idea of an Australian Press Council that had legitimate power to punish the media for a failure of ethics or accuracy. Like in America, the majority of news outlets are owned by the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, which in turn leaves Australia with many of the same problems as America. Their media is highly concentrated and intensely infiltrated by vested interests.
The Australian Press Council as it functions now (the media reform package was shot down in late march) acts as a more symbolic body. The APC can send out letters of disapproval or suggestions of how to address discrepancies in reporting but in actuality they have no real power to enforce any kind of action. Perhaps even more ironically the Press Council is funded mainly by the papers that it has been created to monitor, putting the APC in a sticky situation. If the APC was to fire out harsh crackdowns (despite the fact that they would not have any real legitimacy) they could risk losing funding and potentially shut down for good. So, the ever-growing conundrum of a media without regulation lives on in Australia.
The same issue rings loud and clear all the way on the other side of the world. While there has been no real solid proposal for media regulation in America to my knowledge I think this is something that needs to be legitimately addressed. A lot of the argument against media regulation in Australia centered around the reluctance of both journalists and citizens to have government oversight into the press. However, the Gillard government repeatedly assured that this new Press Council would be elected democratically and be free of government attachments.
While it is hard to guarantee such strings-attached representatives it is undoubtable in my mind that there needs to be some sort of penalty for missteps by the media. When the mainstream media today is largely functioning as an arm of the government there should be some form of outside ombudsmen to make sure innocent people like Shirley Sherrod are not painted to be something they are not by way of savvy video-editing and sneaky omissions of fact. And that if this kind of unethical behavior flies under the radar that it is addressed quickly in a highly visible retraction/formal apology to the parties affected.
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