How Mass Media Fails Democracy

In an interview with Lip Magazine, media critic Bob McChesney discusses mass media's failure to provide context and understanding in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. "We need our media to really lead and show direction in all three areas: explaining what's happening, explaining why it's happening, and leading debate over what can and should be done about it," said McChesney. "One of the ironies here is that journalism, which is supposed to engage people and get them informed about politics and policies, has the effect of basically depoliticizing them, because it makes politics so confusing and uninteresting by taking the partisanship out of it. Therefore you get situations like these, where you get these fairy-tale storylines straight out of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie...All we need is Schwarzenegger or the World Wrestling Federation smackdown team, with The Rock. Because that's basically what we're seeing: pure good versus pure evil."