Please lets try to avoid the question of whether the press is biased or not and just focus on core competence. What I’m asking is why does the U.S. press do such a poor job of things like reporting issues instead of gossip. Or asking follow-up questions. Or fact-checking to determine if statements are true or not.
The press used to be better. And from what I read and hear from sources like the BBC it still is better in other countries. Why has the U.S. news media become so awful at executing on the fundamentals of journalism?
I hope this isn’t a hijack, but my local paper is pathetic in all aspects. They will tear our long reigning congressman for years between elections but when an election comes out they start endorsing him, saying about all the jobs and money he brings to the region. It just stuns me, and I think that is horrid journalism isn’t it?
On to the question you had, our page 2 usually has a few corrections, most from the local a couple from the AP. They try to scoop the TV news I think, and it’s hard to do when you publish once a 24 hour period. They try by throwing out gossip and hope the “fog of war” lifts and there guess was correct.
On mainstream 24/7 news shows, well they do have real news squished between 23 hours of filler material. I miss when CNN was first 8 minutes hard news, then commercial then business etc. And that was the end of a 24/7 real news station that I get on cable anyway.
OP: Tough question. TV news has always been superficial, and over time it’s gotten worse. So avoid it. Traditionally, smart people would read the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal business news pages, and leave the fluff to others.
That’s the first effect. The 2nd effect is that modern conservatives have complained about bias so much that much coverage has been infantilized, including that of the majors listed above. So those who read the news in order to be informed, as opposed to being reassured, have to dig a little. Luckily, the internet makes this straightforward, though I think that news aggregator technology could use improvement.
On the plus side, there’s no shortage of conservative stroke on the airwaves and liberal stroke on the internet.
The best reporters don’t write the editorials. (The worst don’t either: it’s given to those with some, though not a lot, of experience, or so I understand.)
The publisher often dictates the endorsements, and the rest of the staff plays along. It’s a perk of press ownership.
Source: My memory of “Interesting if True” published in Granta Magazine.
A longer answer is that cable news, and the 24 hour news cycle, has changed the way news is gathered and reported. And not for the better. Sometimes it’s a good thing, such as when there’s a crisis. Then the ‘instant news’ going 24 hours a day is a godsend. But it doesn’t serve well during the doldrums, when there’s quiet time to discuss serious issues. People turn to the news now for entertainment, and policy wonks discussing macroeconomic policy just isn’t very entertaining. So we get tabloid trash.
Another factor is the Balkanization of the media. The news had to be more fair in the past, because with only three major news broadcasts, they had to appeal to all aspects of the country. So you got balanced reporting and a fair hearing of all sides.
Today, you’ve got enough bandwidth for new programs to tailor their coverage to certain audiences. So you get bias. The cold market logic is that you do better, as MSNBC has found, by really making one side of the debate happy so they all listen to you, than by being balanced and pissing off enough people on each side that only 10% from each side listen to you. Fox is huge because a huge majority of conservatives choose them. That leaves a gap for the left, which is now being filled by MSNBC, it looks like. This trend will continue. Eventually, you get to a point where the news programs become little more than talking points for the audience they are trying to reach.
What I would like is just ONE news source to watch that is like this:
News Item 1: Category 3 Hurricane Zebra caused an estimated 40 Billion in damages today in the State of Hurricania today. Early reports are 10 dead and dozens injured. FEMA is mobilizing and getting to the scene while the the National Guard are currently leading rescue efforts. Authorities are asking for donations to help Hurricanians out in this time of need.
What we get is this, less information, and just a bunch of talking.
News Item 1: A massive hurricane smashed into Hurricania today lets talk to our talking heads
TH:Oil prices will go up now!
TH2: Yes but lets talk about why FEMA isnt already there doing something
TH1: FEMA is going in it takes a while to get a system together!
TH2: But what happens to those that need help now
Newscaster : Well it does say the Na…
TH1: Your missing the true story behind all this why do they live there?
TH2: It is America we can liv…
Newscaster: Sorry we have to cut to commercial thanks for stopping by with us to talk about tragegy TH and TH2.
Also, here’s a dirty little secret: the majors aren’t that great, and they never have been.
Examples:
Tanta from the specialist blog Calculated Risk, regularly critiques Gretchen Morgenstern of the New York Times, who is one of their top financial reporters. It turns out that while she’s great in constructing a narrative, her work is filled with shortcuts and misperceptions that only those familiar with the industry are likely to pick up on. It’s embarrassing.
Top economic theorists from the 1970s such as Lucas and Sargent were pretty much invisible in the MSM, at least until they won their Nobel. What I’m saying is that there’s a whole lot of specialist stuff that is passed over by The New York Times et al. In NYT’s defense, they established a science section I think in the 1970s, which comes out every Tuesday.
The good news is that the internet rocks. And someday, we’ll have editors who run RSS feeds, and direct different sets of stories to different personality types. Either that, or a purely automated site like Google News will have better algorithms and better customization. (Or a hybrid!)
Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps? (1273 examples and counting from the economist Brad DeLong. The page will take a while to load and may stall your computer. Hit “stop” on your browser if you feel like it, or try a fast browser like Google’s Chrome).
In my opinion, capitalism, combined with the ( mostly ) conservative media bias. On the bias side, someone who’s trying to sell you a position is mostly going to tell you lies, and fluff; the last thing they want is to give you good information.
And by capitalism, I mean modern American capitalism. Not simply an economic system, but an ideology that holds that profit is ALL that matters. That profit is the only good. So that media people will send out whatever makes them the most money, lies or fluff or otherwise, and never even consider whether that’s good for society. Forget about any obligation to tell the truth or uncover important facts the public needs to know; what matters, all that matters is making money.
Not that the press in the past was allergic to making money; nor is it in other countries. But they weren’t as one dimensional; concern for things other than profit wasn’t regarded as silly or outright immoral. More and more, they are in America, and not just in the media.
I think that this is a pretty fair analysis of broadcast media, although I would cast some aspects in different lights.
Originally, CBS, NBC, and ABC only devoted a few minutes a day to news coverage (since it was not a money maker). Their efforts at “fairness” actually tended to be a matter of staying away from really hot topics (so as to not offend too many people) and as they got larger, that fear/self-censorship remained. In addition, it is still difficult to get viewers to sit through long complex examinations of complex situations, so facing a loss of viewership/revenue, they smply avoid such efforts.
Originally (based on some indefinite period in the past), the Big Three print papers were every bit as good at news reporting as the Beeb is reputed to be. They still have some of that luster, but they have fallen with the general fall-off of newspaper readership and the various constraints they feel as each has been purchased by larger companies that want to watch the bottom line.
What few Americans remember (or are old enough to have seen), is that during the heyday of the newspaper business, no paper was “fair.” Each was partisan in one direction or another and thoughtful people would have to read two or three or more papers to get all the pertinent information, (just as folks now should be reading far more than one internet news service to find out what is really going on). There are several old quotations regarding the way in which one could determine a man’s politics (or who he would vote for) by finding out what paper he read.
As newspaper costs rose against income, a lot of the earlier papers failed. (Actually, papers have failed regularly throughout our history, but there has always been enough partisan interest for new ones to take their places.) As we got into the 1950s, the numbers of papers had finally been winnowed down so that there was more need to attract broader readership and the papers tended to follow the broadcast networks in avoiding serious investigation if it would result in too much (non-revenue generating) controversy. It was during this period that the papers garnered the reputations of being beacons of honest reporting and truth–simply by printing artticles as close to the middle of the road as possible.
As to fact checking (and simple grammar and spelling errors), those too have fallen away as papers watching costs simply do not employ fact checkers or sub-editors to actually control for those problems.
FCC deregulation has been a major culprit as well. By allowing more media outlets to be owned by fewer and fewer companies, and allowing a huge relaxation of requirements for percentage of non-entertainment programming the perception that broadcast stations are public trustees of the airwaves has decayed and news outlets have become mouthpieces for the views of their owners and ratings chasers. The big losers in this game are the viewing public and the truth.
The antidote to that is the press baron model. Somebody makes boatloads of cash in one industry and buys a loss-making newspaper as a vanity holding. I understand that some of the papers and tabloids in Britain run under this model.
BTW, the New York Times is listed on the New York Stock exchange, but the publisher’s family holds a special shares that have more votes than those that are publicly traded. So they can sacrifice profits for news quality.
That depends on where you’re sitting. The mainstream media have been asleep at the switch for about 6 of the last 8 years. I don’t give them the benefit of the doubt that it was an accident. They’re now STARTING to turn on the White House hand that feeds them access, because the public is starting to turn on that same White House. But it took them fricking long enough.
Not to totally malign capitalism, but a lot of it comes from squeezing out every last dollar for the shareholder. When I was a kid the network news organizations had strong bureaus all over the world. They got ratings, but they still lost money, but were seen as prestige operations by the networks. Today the management would have to explain why they were funding a money losing show while the opposition was broadcasting crap to larger audiences and making money. It comes down to the same reason you pay $50 for your second bag. No wonder the average age of network newscasts is very high - I suspect people watch them out of habit.
I get 3 newspapers, one the NY Times, one the Mercury News and one our local rag. The owners of the rag bought the Murky News and the quality has plummeted as more and more people got laid off. The rag is a joke. They get their national news from wire services, and cut to fit, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, sometimes right after the reporter has asked a question to be answered in the next paragraph. Even the Mercury News is now cutting Times stories to shreds - not cutting to retain sense, cutting to save time.
They’re horrid because they don’t like being caught off guard. They like to be a step ahead of the story. And when something like the announcement of Sarah Palin happens, it’s as though someone hit them with a curveball in the face. So they go postal with assumptions, rumors, lies, misdirections, chauvinistic insinuations, and everything else we’ve experienced in the past week from them … It got real ugly.
Your link has only one entry by Tanta on the main page, and it isn’t very impressive. Ranting about what is clearly a typo (dealing in 1989 with the 90’s real estate bust) and not understanding how mortgage brokers could lie to borrowers about their credit worthiness. Hint - lots of people are optimistic and/or clueless - mortgage brokers are supposed to be professionals. I’ll take the Pulitzer committee myself. Do you have an example of where she was wrong?
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Top economic theorists from the 1970s such as Lucas and Sargent were pretty much invisible in the MSM, at least until they won their Nobel. What I’m saying is that there’s a whole lot of specialist stuff that is passed over by The New York Times et al. In NYT’s defense, they established a science section I think in the 1970s, which comes out every Tuesday.
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If you mean by this that she simplifies things the way writers in the science section do, I’m sure you’re right. I think few reporters get the specialty stuff perfect, since they have to cover a wide spread of areas. I’ve gotten interviewed lots of times by people in the trade press, people with engineering degrees, and I still have to correct misperceptions. Add deadline pressure to that, and it is amazing they ever get it close to right. It isn’t just science - my father worked at the UN for decades, knew everyone, and was less than impressed by news coverage by most reporters. This was back when the UN counted for more, by the way.
What about accountability? Is it not the case that in America papers (maybe other segments of the press too?) can lie with impunity unless it’s shown they lied with malice?
