shakran

Hehe. Calm down. We're slow, but we're-a-gettin' to it


I think you're mostly wrong, but not for the reasons you probably think. And the core of your ideas is correct.

This is gonna be tough to explain all this - people have written very large books on it and I'm gonna try to compress it into a post that won't use all of TFP's bandwidth

Yes, the public wants stories about sex, crime, and scandal (not real scandal, such as congressmen funneling billions of dollars into a pork barrel project run by one of their campaign contributors, but idiotic scandal, like the president fooling around with an intern). They want reality shows. They want Fear Factor.

But they WOULDN'T want this stuff if the media hadn't given it to them in the first place. 10 years ago did you ever say "Shit dude, I wish there was a show on TV where they made people eat bugs for money?"

Now, if you go up to a GOOD journalist, he's not gonna want to give you all that crap. But the owners of his newsroom, generally a large corporation, want to get as many advertising dollars with as little expenditure as possible.

Sex, crime, and fluffscandal are easy and cheap to cover. Got a murder? Send one photographer and maybe a reporter and call it a night. Sex? That's easy too. Political scandal involving illegal funneling of money? Gee that'll take time and research and maybe FOIA lawsuits, and gosh that's just too much money to spend.

So in the first part I object to the characterization of journalists that has happened in this thread. Saying WE deliver crap like you said we do is rather like saying it's the garbage man's fault that the dump stinks.

Now people aren't gonna stop rampantly buying shit unless we convert to true communism, which isn't gonna happen. Journalists aren't gonna stop being forced to do what their owning corporations want until we give the journalists a place to go (constitutionally mandated large public endowment for the news media that CANNOT be touched and who's employees the government has NO control over) where they are not forced to work for a corporation. Again, blaming the journalists for the situation the megacorporations and the government (by allowing megacorporations to become media empires in the first place) has gotten us into is completely disingenuous.

And where you're largely wrong is in your vitriolic comments about the american public. The public ate Edward R Murrow's stuff up. They loved it. Harvest of Shame was a hugely successful documentary. His reports on McCarthy brought that SOB down. The public WANTED that. But even back then his idiot corporation (which at that time was ONLY cbs, not CBS/Viacom/etc) thought the public REALLY wanted interviews with stars, so he was forced to do that crap in order to get permission to do the real journalism. And it's only gone downhill from there.

In other words, if the damn media wouldn't feed you guys bullshit like "what's J-Lo doing?" then you wouldn't consume it. Where you and I differ is that I feel the public would THEN consume REAL news, if we gave it to them.

The BBC is a good example. Americans are no dumber than the Brits. We don't even drive on the wrong side of the road Yet the brits consume the HELL out of the BBC, and are on the whole much more informed about what's going on in their country, and the world, because of it. I think Americans would be the same way, if only they were given the chance.