John Hockenberry, late of “Dateline NBC”, describes here his insider’s view of the transformation of network news from the time of Murrow and Cronkite to its current, well, superciliousness. He attributes it to both ithe press of the corporate thumb, insisting that news be profitable and incidentally that it promote management’s preferried views, and to its failure to adapt to technology changes. He does not address newspapers, but they obviously have experienced similar changes.
What Hockenberry says isn’t exactly news to those of us on this board who, like Comic Book Guy, “get our news from the Internet, like any normal person under seventy”, but it’s perhaps still worth some thought. I personally rarely watch network news anymore, since I already know more than I want to about Britney Spears and Michael Jackson and Lady Di, and when I grab a newspaper I go straight to the comics and sports, since they’re the most informative sections anymore. For up-to-the-minute information and analysis and thought and information and investigation, the major web sites devoted to those things do a far better job than the time-constrained networks ever even could.
So why even bother with the legacy media anymore? Are we already past the tipping point of this shift? Can they be fixed, or should they? Is this self-imposed irrelevance even a problem to anyone else?
I dunno, I get my news basically from reading blogs and of course, the Dope. In both those places though, its basically analysis of news stories from newspapers. Granted some websites do their own original reporting, but I’d say 90% of posts on current events type website at least start with an article from a paper (granted a good number are about how the article in question got something wrong). So I’d say traditional papers remain quite relavant, even if they’re increasingly unprofitable and forced to do their reporting with fewer resouces and more scrutiny.
The first problem that exists isn’t with TV news, it’s with the people who have insinuated themselves into control of it. They’re the same knobs who are running things at the RIAA, and have no real idea what to do with a changing audience.
Some organizations get it – the BBC, the New York Times – and they understand that it’s no longer enough to work in one medium. You’ve got to work in something that’s broadly available to all, and back it up with a strong web presence.
The organizations that don’t get it – like the websites people were bitching about a few weeks ago that post reporter’s draft scripts as new stories – are the ones that will fail.
The second problem is that there are many people who never see any news unless they happen to catch a TV or radio broadcast. My own brother was ignorant of the WTC attacks for three or four days after the fact. He’s part of a trend in western society of embracing ignorance in all forms. Didn’t happen to one of his friends? Doesn’t care. To his town? Doesn’t care. Something happened across town that will make his taxes go up? Figures he can’t do anything anyway, doesn’t care. But he’ll watch Family Guy every night…
I can’t stand television news, I hate fakey, trite news stories with that same “script” voice, dumbed down to 30-second segments, with the important issues covered shallowly and then shoved aside for “human interest” stories like “dog rescued from gutter” or “children give turkeys to homeless shelters” or “more and more teens wearing abstinence rings”. Who the hell cares? I read international news from blogs and I get my local news from the paper.
I can see the complaint about TV news, which is awful, but what’s wrong with Newspapers. The Washington Post has its flaws, but it’s still a good way to get your daily news, and easy to cart around too.
And who runs those major web sites? Many of them are run by newpapers, TV news channels, or newsmagazines. Which would make it the same provider of information, just a different format/medium.
Some people prefer reading off a screen and clicking links to get to the parts they’re interested in, others prefer reading off newsprint and turning pages to get to the parts they’re interested in. I retain a certain fondness for the printed newspaper. (And so do my cats.)
I hardly ever watch national network news, but I do usually watch the local news. If I want to watch national news, I’ll watch NPR’s New Hour with Jim Leher. But… you’ll have to pry my newspaper out my cold, dead hands! I love sitting down in the morning with the paper. It’s the SJ Mercury News for me, which is OK, but not great. Still, they get much of their news stories intact from the NYT or WaPo. I do consider myself to be a critical reader, though, and I try not to take anything at face value-- I find that I often end up doing a little research on the web if I read something that isn’t sourced and sounds rather suspicious.
Of course, my newspaper habit predates the existence of the WWW, so I’m probably not a good predictor of what people in the 20s or 30s are going to do.
I’m not saying you’re a liar, but I don’t believe you. 9/11 news was everywhere minutes after the second plane hit the WTC. The only way someone could not hear anything about it until 9/14 was if they had no human contact for those days, didn’t go online to any major website, didn’t see a single newspaper and didn’t turn on the television.
Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t avoid hearing about it 24-7 from the day it happened for weeks on end. The media earned my everlasting contempt with the choking flood of uninformative disaster-milking they undertook.
I get very little “news” from the Internet. Occasionally I browse the AP offerings on Slate or Salon, but that’s because I was a news reporter and editor for over 25 years and I trust the AP. I trust the mainstream news networks to tell me breaking news but I don’t trust their analysis. Nor do I trust networks with “judgement” stories – things are going well/not going well in Iraq. For analysis I mostly look to the op-ed pages of the Denver newspapers, Time and Newsweek. I read Salon and Slate, but I understand they have clear political biases.
I don’t read blogs because there’s no gatekeeping, so they amount to little more than unsupported opinion and sensational fabrication.
TV news is still important because it is still the primary and often the only source of news for many American idiots – iidots who vote. What we personally prefer doesn’t matter in that respect: our votes are easily cancelled out by a portion of the idiot vote who get their news solely or almost solely from the idiot box. And voting is how you make your preferences known.
That said, I do think newspapers still do an OK job with local news but you have to know their biases.
I produce TV News, and my show was on the air the morning of 9/11. I had my director throw up a a live shot of the towers when the second plane hit – and for a few minutes wasn’t certain if I was looking at a replay or a second crash.
My brother is the complete opposite end of the bell curve. He turns on a TV to watch DVDs or play video games. He never reads anything. To be honest, I’m not sure he qualifies as literate. He never listens to the radio unless it’s playing music.
Everyone in his circle of friends is the same way. If they work, they work joe jobs which pay just enough cash that they can smoke, drink, or snort it away.
Absolutely, it should be fixed. Why should greedy, corporate conglomerates be allowed to control the information that people *need * to understand their world? Why is it okay for the media to violate antitrust laws and lobby away every FCC regulation in order to make obscene profits? Think about the power corporate media has to persuade voters this election simply by the coverage or lack of coverage and endless political analysis (spin) of the candidates.
People seek out news information on the internet because the mass media is not doing its job. Unless a person is raised in an informed home or attends college, alternative news sources are usually not considered. As already pointed out, most people still access news information from traditional sources. I don’t watch network news, as I am sure most people on this board don’t depend on the traditional media, but I assure you, the vast majority of Americans do get most of their information from one of the major news outlets on cable TV. Actually, the majority of Americans watch Fox News, which is owned by an unscrupulous man who cares about nothing except the size of his wallet. Comedy Central seems to attract plenty of people looking for alternative news.
Local newspapers continue to be a staple for Americans. Unfortunately, virtually all local newspapers are chain/monopolies. The media conglomerates don’t consider newspapers important because the respectable profit generated by newspapers is not quite enough money for them; greed dictates the need for astronomical profits. American newspapers have a long tradition of quality, award winning, investigative journalism that was fueled by competition and dictated by ethics – not anymore. I don’t believe the conglomerates plan to pay investigative journalists or invest in costly news teams. It is soft news about missing teenagers in Aruba and mentally disturbed celebrities for the American public.
Corporations merely provide the goods and services that people want. They don’t “control” information. Anybody who is halfway curious can find a whole host of cheap or free sources of news.
I think a better question is why we allow the government so much authority to reguate the news media. I find it far more dangerous to give the government power to approve or control the media. When there were more regulations on the media (the Fairness Doctrine, for instance) these regulations were used by government to silence or intimidate the media. In fact the media ownership cap has been used by Teddy Kennedy to try and silence Rupert Murdoch. Whether or not you agree with Murdoch’s point of view, surely you cannot be in favor of any elected official trying to intimidate the press, can you?
The Internet – isn’t that built and deployed by – gasp – greedy corporations?
No, the internet was built by the Defense Department and deployed by hackers. The corporations got into it when they realized there was money in it, well after it was fully functional.
A newspaper has to be dealt with after you read it- you have to throw it out, recycle it, or whatever. That’s not true of online news- you close the browser window and you don’t have to do anything else. Online news is nice for those of us who tend to procrastinate when it comes to housekeeping tasks, or those of us who don’t like dealing with all that paper come trash or recycling day.
Even better, if you want to re-read an article from an online news source, it’s very likely that someone is keeping it for you, without you having to find somewhere to keep a physical piece of paper.
Online news is searchable, newspapers aren’t. If I want to see if there’s news about a specific topic, most online newspapers have a search box that I can use to search for news about it. This is especially useful for somewhat obscure topics, which don’t tend to make the front page of a newspaper.
If you want to read news about an area of the country other than where you are living, that’s much easier to do online. I moved from California this summer. If I want to read the San Francisco Chronicle, it would be difficult and expensive to get a subscription here. It’s trivial to type sfgate.com into a browser from pretty much anywhere in the world.
It’s much easier to see what multiple sources are saying about a news story if you read it online than if you get a newspaper subscription. To do that without online news, you’d have to buy several papers or have subscriptions to several papers. Multiple browser windows are much easier.
That’s one of the reasons I’ve stopped getting information from television news and newspapers - they’ve proven themselves fairly untrustworthy.
Whenever I read a story, I either know that there is more to the story that they are not reporting, or get the suspicion that there is.
For me, it’s pretty much the internet. However, Malodorous is right that many stories still start in the newspaper. There’s no reason that cannot change, as some websites are demonstrating (e.g. Talking Points Memo and the firing of US attorneys).
I love sitting down in the morning with the paper. It’s the SJ Mercury News for me, which is OK, but not great. Still, they get much of their news stories intact from the NYT or WaPo. I do consider myself to be a critical reader, though, and I try not to take anything at face value-- I find that I often end up doing a little research on the web if I read something that isn’t sourced and sounds rather suspicious.