Beyond making you laugh till you soil yourself, the above depiction of the fearmongering of the media should raise some questions. After seeing it, I got to thinking about the role of the media in our society. Freedom of the press, friends of liberty have always thought (and rightly so), is an essential safeguard against government power. The press helps to keep its people informed and to question authorities and expose their failures. Most contemporary media outlets, however, it seems to me, totally fail to serve this purpose. The media are friends of the government, not a means by which it is kept in check. They nurture the fear that big government feeds upon. And this is just as true of Fox News as it is of CNN. The right has scared us into an unnecessary war, and the left has scared us into unprecedented deficit “stimulus” spending. And it’s easy to laugh when the media overdramatizes the flu, but maybe we should consider that they’ve done the same with much more serious problems.
