shakran

Hehe. Yes, they do tend to include more details in the body of the story

Good. I wish more people would start thinking like that. An uninformed populace cannot be a free populace. Democracy cannot exist without an informed public.


Well it sure didn't surprise me any. Depressed me, but then any time I take a good hard look at the state of my craft I tend to slide toward depression. Journalism is not what it was, and it's not what it needs to be, but two things are standing in our way. Corporations owning us (bad, BAD idea), and people not giving a shit.

The corporate ownership means we're automatically beholden to the very institutions we ought to be dogging. While you don't see obvious conflicts of interest daily (i.e. NBC would not shy away from a story about, say, a defective run of GE jet engines), you do see conflicts of interest regarding issues, especially the politically charged ones. Corporations by and large skew republican, which makes sense because the republicans give them the best deal. Unfortunately that means journalism tends to skew toward the right as well, despite the frenzied bleating of the right and Fox News Channel about how liberal the media is. And that frenzied bleating has many of my colleagues bending over backward to try and appear to be "fair" to the right (which means not calling the right out when they screw up unless it's REALLY obvious to everyone).

The second problem is even worse, however - mainly because it's a societal one, and one which journalism cannot cure, although it could certainly stop contributing to it. People would much rather see an episode of Cops, Fear Factor, or Nanny 911 than the news. Today's society is disturbingly attracted to displays of human misery and conflict. My kid took an interest in the police several years ago, and started watching Cops. I watched an episode with him and was frankly disgusted at the idea that so many people are attracted to watching this half hour parade of humanity at its worst.

Unfortunately, rather than taking the high road, journalism, especially television journalism, has decided to appeal to this lust for misery. Watch the average newscast and you'll think your city, no matter where you live, is a warzone. Murder, rape, fights, crime, drugs, all paraded in the A block accompanied by flashy graphics and useless live shots.

Rather than tackling real issues (foreign policy, the economy, global warming, ethanol) that effects each and every one of us, we'd rather do a live shot from an car wreck involving 3 people and that MAYBE 20 people in the entire viewing area have a personal stake in.

Instead of exploring the why's of teen violence, we'll just show you that 30 second clip we ripped off of youtube that has 2 kids from somewhere 700 miles away duking it out.

Why? Well first, it's easier. Takes much less effort to pop out to some dipshit liveshot and babble into the camera for half a minute than it does to actually research and present issues in a coherent manner. That's not to say we journalists don't WANT to do that - -we do. Oh hell yes we do, but we also have bosses who hold the power to fire us, and those bosses have decided that what you the masses want is sex, drugs, violence, and human suffering - but you just want to revel in the images and not look into the root issues underneath them. And unfortunately for many of you that's true - if it wasn't then asinine shows like Cops would never have made it. In my opinion, however, journalism should not cater to what people want simply because they want it. Adults are supposed to be mature enough to realize that sometimes they have to experience things that might not be as much fun as seeing people get shot. Journalism should not be encouraging the infantification of the country.

Didn't think you'd get this long of a rant out of me, did you?