believer
Posts: 8,153
May 7, 2011 4:48am
That is correct. Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, etc. openly admit their political leanings and say they are NOT journalists. Beck's tag line, for example, when his show airs is "a fusion of entertainment & enlightenment."Writerbuckeye;761693 wrote:If a radio program is just that -- a program -- then there is no reason to expect objectivity. If it's a news program, say like an NPR, then it should be more balanced in how it presents an issue.
The difference is a simple one: is the person a journalist or not? If he or she says they are a journalist, then they should be held to a higher standard of objectivity. If they don't claim to be a journalist but are simply an entertainer, they are held to no such standard. It's their program, much like this web site is the intellectual property of someone, and they can express whatever views they like.
But taxpayer funded NPR, and for-profit sources like ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, etc. all claim to be journalists. If so they have a professional and moral responsibility to practice objective news reporting. We all know that's not the case. Hence the rise of Fox News and AM talk radio.