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Originally Posted by cyrnel
Shakran, is it really possible for today's MSM to move beyond tabloid mode and cover the important aspects? The vast majority of stories I've seen concentrate on "quotations of horror", another submerged car, and bodycounts. Headline time and reader attention spans are wasted on dress-stain sensationalism.
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Well, you have to admit, something like this doesn't require much effort to make it sensational. It already is sensational. We can't help that. It's not our fault. And actually from what I've seen there've been updates on the happenings at the bridge (divers looked for more wreckage, more cars found, etc etc etc) but I've also seen a lot of reports about bridges in the area of the station, bridges in the state of the station, etc. And it's not just my shop that's doing it, a lot of 'em are.
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How much of a battle is it for you guys to sneak real information into otherwise junk stories, or is it a battle against editors doing the reverse?
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Look the people in the newsroom, the reporters and photogs, by and large want to practice real journalism. Unfortunately the corporate owners listen to consultants instead of us, and the consultants tell them that what you viewers want is sensationalism, sex, and crime, preferably all in the same story. They tell us you want lots of fast stories with little detail, and that we need to do lots of flashy graphics and handheld shaky camerawork in order to convince you that it's "real" and "current." It's all bullshit of course, but the guys signing our paychecks do unfortunately get to call the shots.
But yes, we do slip a little real journalism in now and then. It's not nearly enough, and more than a few excellent journalists have left the profession in disgust. I'll admit I've many times seriously considered that myself, and I'll probably consider it again many times in the future. Journalists get paid crap - - many of us make less than your average manager at McDonalds for the first MANY years of our career, and we do it because we want to provide the public service of telling you guys what's going on. If people wont' let us do that. . .we often wonder why the hell we stay when we could hop to another job, make 4+ times as much, have weekends and holidays off, always, and never have to work all day in the sweltering heat or the bitter cold again.
So basically, we're fucking stuck. It sucks, but them's the breaks. We can only squeeze in real journalism when something like this happens, and you'd better damn well believe we're gonna do it when we can. We'd like to do it all the time - most of us feel that you the viewer deserves it, and we believe you want it as well.
It's very frustrating - they tell us to be sensationalist jackasses to get ratings, and then the ratings go down, so they tell us to be MORE sensationalist, and then the ratings go down, so they tell us to be EVEN MORE sensationalist, and here we are stuck under the thumb of clueless idiot managers. All the while we're fully aware that the real way to get ratings is to give you guys good, intelligent stories about issues that impact you. . But of course that costs money, and requires hiring good (and therefore not as cheap) people, and ignoring the idiot consultants, so it's the rare station that gets to do that.
And it's even more frustrating that, when we finally do get the go ahead to tell you guys about a SERIOUS problem (and guys, the infrastructure problem in this country is serious as a heart attack), people start yelling at us to shut up because they assume we're just sensationalizing again.
Well, we do sensationalize quite a bit (and we hate every bit of it), but in this instance, for the most part, we're not.