The Media Game: Creating the Hound Pack of the Day

by Yves Mamou • December 16, 2016 at 5:30 am

To be published on the front page of your own newspaper, to open the news on your own television program, you must bring the "killer news" -- the news that kills all others -- and, more importantly, the news that all other media will copy and paste.
Journalists are obsessed with creating the hound pack of the day and then enjoying the status of top dog. In hound-pack logic, there can be only one news item a day -- repeated and reprinted infinitely.
Poverty can make a headline when data are officially released, but who cares about what poor people think?
The problem begins when people not on the radar become the majority of the population, and when this majority become "dissidents." Then, when the invisible people (in the media sense of the term) engage in the democratic process and protest with a vote, it sounds like a bomb: No one saw it coming! No one could have predicted it!
According to the media, the only poor who need help, support and attention are immigrants. Other people who are poor -- especially whites -- do not, for the media, exist. And if they did protest, presumably they would have no right to.
"Representing the middle and working classes as "reactionary" or "fascist" is very convenient. This avoids asking critical questions. When someone is diagnosed as fascist, the priority becomes to re-educate him, not to question the economic organization of the territory where he lives." – French geographer, Eric Guilluy, in Le Point.
Trump understood well this disconnect of the people from the media. During the campaign, in fact, Trump spoke to very few from the media: He made his own media: tweeting every day, obliging the mainstream media to amplify his words. The more the lying media treating him as a liar, the more he was trusted.
Democracy depends for its survival on journalists doing correctly the job for which they are paid: reporting facts and not stigmatizing people who do not resemble them. It is not the "noble" duty of journalists to prevent things from happening. Just report facts, propose analysis, and let people think for themselves.
New media have appeared on the internet, in the mold of Breitbart in the U.S. and Riposte Laïque in France -- many dozens across the U.S. and Europe. Their audiences consist of millions of readers.

(Image source: Young Turks video screenshot)

There is something wrong with the media -- internationally.

In Great Britain, they were unable to listen to British people who wanted to "Brexit." In the US, they were unable to listen to American people who wanted Trump. And in France, they were unable to predict the victory of François Fillon who "unexpectedly" won the presidential primary election of the center-right party.

In each country, the media and journalists stigmatized and labeled the majority of the people -- those who wanted to Brexit, such as Trump and Fillon -- idiots and racists.

So the question is: are journalists and media still people and companies paid to describe the world as it is? How did they go so wrong on such important questions? And go wrong so massively, with almost no exception? The corollary question is: are the media just playing a game? If so, what is the game? And why?