Choose your own reality, pilgrim

When our founding fathers still walked the Earth in their dogged pursuit of creating a new nation 232 years ago, surely they did not have in mind the electronic images of Bill O’Reilly, Chris Matthews,
Keith Olbermann and Wolf Blitzer showing up on glass screens in our living rooms every night. If they had, they may have thought better of the whole idea, and we’d probably still be living in our ancestors’ native countries instead of our own. (You think D.C. has a bad commute? Wait till you see Rome, London or Mexico City on a rainy Monday morning.)

In a nation that believes being pampered is an inalienable right, these days not only do we get to pick our own “reality” when it comes to our preferred brand of news, but these various brands have taken to feuding with one another other on the air, and now it’s reached into the hallowed corporate chambers of the network executives. While Olbermann over on MSNBC often uses a nightly feature that routinely chastises his direct competitor, O’Reilly, in a segment called “The Worst Person in the World” (subtle title, no?), Fox News routinely slams the “liberal media” for always getting it wrong.
Meanwhile, both news channels slam each other at every turn and this week the head of Fox News was griping about it all to his counterpart at NBC.

Meanwhile, CNN tries to stay above the fray with its heavier diet of international news, but CNN is not terribly different than MSNBC (although it’s less venomous). CBS News is struggling for ratings with
Katie Couric in the anchor chair, but the network that once brought us Walter Cronkite still brings its own brand to the news game. ABC News, for its part, may come off somewhat more conservative than
many viewers may fully realize in their nightly newscasts with Charlie Gibson, even with former Bill Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos on board.

Thus, we have a wide array of news brands that allows us to choose who we want to filter our news — which is almost tantamount to “selecting” our news in the first place. In effect, we now get to choose
our own “reality” and have it spoon fed to us bite by bite, in the manner to which we are accustomed.

Looking for some spirited Bush or Hillary bashing? Tune into Olbermann every night on MSNBC’s “Countdown” and you will never be disappointed. How about today’s latest gripe about Obama and “those
other liberals?” O’Reilly and most other talk-show hosts on Fox News are more than willing to oblige. Or if you’d rather see no fewer than a dozen political pundits of all persuasions lined up in rows like a
phone bank at a public TV telethon, simply tune into CNN any night during this waning primary season for “the best political team on television,” as CNN modestly calls themselves.

Part of this deal with viewers also includes the exclusion of unsettling negative coverage, as well. Don’t tune into MSNBC if you expect John McCain’s latest criticism of Obama’s foreign policy experience
to lead the show. Likewise, Fox News should not be your first choice if you want to learn more about the Democratic Party’s charges of GOP dirty tricks, unless you enjoy waiting for a possible 18-
second “mention” of it near the end of the newscast.

The plethora of distinctly different preferences in how we like our “news” served up certainly underscores the chasm that continues to divide the country. This highly selective pandering by the media also
very deliberately disallows one group’s news coverage from bleeding into the other’s (God forbid either side is exposed to a contrary viewpoint) — thereby strengthening the already-rigid views of each
faction’s ideology.

I guess some observers would look upon all this and call it “diverse.” I look upon it and call it big trouble in the years ahead. “Extremism in the cause of liberty is no vice,” to partly quote the famous
phrase. Yet extremism of any kind by the media does us all a disservice.

John Merli has been a Potomac News columnist since 1985. E-mail him at j.merli@comcast.net.