Broadsheet

I can talk about this all day, for American media has sucked ass for years. I read somewhere that CNN spent like 300 billion on resources (ie, reporters in other countries, etc) whereas Fox spent 60 billion (mostly to pay opinionated talking heads to sit around and spin news from AP). And, of course, Fox's ratings were better, so now CNN is going to pay a bunch of airheads to shill the corporate line while reading AP reports. If CNN starting reporting news again, I guarantee you they would be the highest-rated network because people are starving for a news source. Why do they think blogs are so popular? So I turn on the TV to CNN Friday night and Larry King's show is devoted to Martha Stewart. So I go to the gym Saturday morning and CNN is on. What are they talking about? Martha Stewart. I so wish Ted Turner had enough money to buy CNN back. Al Gore's been talking about creating a liberal network for years, and Air America has been growing leaps and bounds the past year, but I don't even want a liberal voice. I want the NEWS. Until the MSM can provide me with it, I refuse to buy another newspaper or watch TV, although I do read the Post online now and again just so that I can write to Howie Kurtz and tell him how much I hate him.

 

Given that you already seemingly "apologized" for this post offline, it may be piling on to take issue with it. But hell, I've been drinking, and I'm not likely to do any work on my own hackish MSM-revenue-generating article (read "special-sections hack work") tonight myself, so what the hell.

1. With due respect to Jen, whom I don't know, it's ironic that a comment supporting a thread that basically pleads for greater wonkishness glosses over the shallowness of the assertion that Fox is beating CNN. Huh, you say. Check this out, for the details that us news geeks (me included) purport to want.

2. Yes, it's true that TV news was once a relative bastion of NON-profit driven work; but please let's remember that newspapers have always been profit driven, and have simply been able -- through much of the past hundred years -- to derive much of their revenue via mechanisms that neither determined nor were determined by their reportorial responsibility. Classifieds brought home the bacon. Now they don't. Publishers are not so much "less responsible" as they are forced to deal with a more unforgiving financial landscape. But it's oh so much more comfortable to blame corporate greed.

3. Does this mean I think things are great now? Of course not. I'm probably a bigger MSM critic than Broad or Steve, though perhaps not more so than jwer.

4. Pop quiz: American readers who tout the European media -- who are your three favorite European columnists? What is your favorite Asian paper? Can you name the largest circulation daily in India? In my experience, two-thirds of Americans who tout the foreign media haven't gone much further than watching BBC World News now and then on PBS.

5. I love Europe. I love European cities above all others. I practically worked at the UN for awhile. But can we just stop for a moment and note that European news is more internalist BECAUSE IT IS ECONOMICALLY IMPERATIVE THAT IT BE THAT WAY. That is to say, when you're a landmass of small-to-medium-sized countries, an internationalist media is a foregone conclusion, not proof of cosmopolitanism.

6. We get the media we deserve, or at least the media we choose to watch. I'm sorry but being a congressional press secretary attuned me all to well to people's propensity to say they want one thing while simultaneously proving they want another. Day in and day out, I saw voters decrying negative campaigns and responding to them all the same. In the media sphere, I see people saying they want McNeil/Lehrer but watching ... well, whatever. Not true of you? Great! But it's still true of most.

7. Why in the hell do we continue to insist upon playing a monolitchic "MSM" against the blogs? For my money, the bigger question is words vs pictures, with words staging a comeback. The secondary question is personal voice vs. he said/she said "neutrality." Subjective objectivity seems to me to be kicking the crap out of facile objective objectivity. And is it just me, or do we all pretend in having this discussion that the classic opinion mags like Atlantic, The Nation, New Repubic, etc. don't exist. We're obsessed with creating a simplistic dichotomy for the sake of argument. Haven't Jon Steweart and Bill Maher already died for these sins?

Ok, I've embarassed myself enough for one evening. I'll go now and amuse myself with stories of the glory days of MSM, when we got the real dirt on the sinking of the Maine . . . .

Caustic with Cab Sauv indigestion,
Mark

 

I think you've underscored my point, Mark--why should anyone have to reference the Fairness and Accuracy in the Media web site against everything they've read or heard in the media? The media should strive to be an objective source--opinion belongs on the opinion pages, and distortions and omissions belong nowhere.

 

Jen,

I think we are all (even troll Steve, who's in the belly of the beast, as it were) largely on the same page here. I also think that I am more sober now than I was last night.

That said, I have to continue to underscore the idea that we get the media we deserve, by in large.

Media outlets, whether part of a media giant like The Tribune Syndicate or not, need to get paid. Once upon a time, the papers got paid mostly be classifieds, which created an environment in which said papers could conceivably afford to be somewhat elitist (read: the way we'd like them to be) about content, because they were working local monopolies in many cases and there was enough in the paper that was indispensible to the masses that they could afford to shove more stories about Rwanda or Azerbajan or whatever down the masses throats than the masses might actually want.

TV news had ad revenue and support from the much-larger penumbra of the networks that hosted them. Now we have cable and TIVO.

We don't blame Britney and Ashley for BEING Britney and Ashley; we blame their listeners for being lame. So why then do we blame the media rather than its consumers for its vacuity.

It's pleasant to blame THEM, but the problem is largely US. And even if you don't buy that, I don't see how banging on MSM is going to change much until Quality Gets Paid. Hopefully, that will start to happen incrementally through blog-centric micropayments. Maybe MSM will start slowly shading into a model in which they act as Golden Corrals of journalist-sanctioned blog content. Maybe something else will happen.

But from everything I hear from my friends in MSM, MSM's current financial problems are less a function of corporate greed for obscene margins and more a function of ... simply ... surviving.

That's the landscape in which we're banging on MSM. I share y'all's frustration. I want to win, too. I want better MSM and better-read blogs. But if we don't address the economic realities of MSM, we're to a large extent just jerking off.

That said, Jen, keep the heat on Howie; MickeyK can't do it all!

Cheers . . . .
- Mark

 

Mark -

That's OK, I was having one of my insomnia episodes when I posted it, and actually worked for a living today, so I'll respond point by point:

1. I agree with Jen.

2. I think the bottom line here is economics - period. Whether you attribute it to corporate greed, shareholder profits, or financial liquidity. All MSM (and most msm), rely on basic economics to survive. They've got to follow the money in order to get a story out. My gripe is that those financial pressures have largely overidden or even dictated the makeup and ability of MSM organizations to do the job properly. Couple that with pandering to the masses (again - an obvious financial concession), and you get mediocrity, or worse. I guess one of the things that ticks me off the most is that MSM seems to cater to the lowest common denominator in American society. I firmly believe they don't give the majority of Americans enough credit for being intelligent. Europeans do (for Europeans anyway, they think Yanks are dumbfucks too). I mean, look at old clips of "Your Show of Shows", or even "The Ed Sullivan Show". The skits were brighter, smarter, had more literary, cultural and historical alliterations. Why? Because only the wealthy could afford TV back then and the advertisers were pandering to a more affluent homogeneous audience. Nowadays - anyone can own a TV or computer, and MSM realizes that their income and ad revenues are based on appealing to a broader, perhaps less educated audience. I say - bullshit. There are enough channels, papers, and choices out there that people will drift to the MSM of their choosing and reward that medium for doing so. NPR does (despite the annoying fund drives).

3. No argument.

4. Ageed (although I notice you didn't chime in with answers). I would add Le Monde, Bild and Spiegel to your list of regularly accessed or read European rags. And to answer one question: My all time favorite European columnist for over 10 years has been Jancis Robinson of the FT for her wine columns ;-)

5. No argument. In fact, D'uh. I hope I didn't imply otherwise. My gripe is largely with the US media.

6. I agree, and see #2. You know me better than most people, and you know I like to watch entertainment like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", and laugh all you want - but it was one of the most smartly written shows of all time and full of alliterative goodness. It was popular because Joss Whedon would not dumb it down, and in fact challenged his audience. Yes, I watched the first season of "Survivor" religiously, but I honestly have not watched a single reality TV show since. Ever. Not even American Idol. Does that mean I'm glued to CNN? No, but I do spend more time on the Discovery Channel, cooking shows, and National Geographic than is probably healthy. Frankly, Tivo has really made this entire point a moot one with me and many others. I rarely watch live TV anymore, and I love having the control it affords me (but then, I'm all about control and you know that better than anyone! hah) Anyway, I would watch news and talk shows a LOT more - if they covered issues I cared about IN DEPTH. Frankly, I prefer my news in written form to begin with, since I can pick and choose and generally ingest it faster than if someone reads it to me.

7. No, I use MSM (perhaps incorrectly) as a catchall. If that's too simplistic or dichotomous for you, sure. I agree that there are plenty of opinion and more in-depth or niche magazines and journals out there, but let's face it, most of them have the circulation of a smallish blog, and again, the economic realities of generating a quality journal or magazine also requires a pretty steep subscription price. Honestly? If my job didn't pay for my subscriptions to many of my Medical journals and the WSJ, I can't say I would make the investment given what I can access on-line for free nowadays.

I look forward to continuing this conversation with the "troll" this weekend (he is SO gonna get you for that!!!)

 

I think we're all measuring the media from a standard that doesn't exist. A lot of people point to Watergate as the high point of reporting, but based on my research, it seems more like an anomaly than a zenith. I mean, the Post under Katherine Graham also participated in the Mockingbird Project with the CIA to filter and supress certain news stories unfavorable to the government. The press has never told the complete truth, in part because of the government and also because of sensitity to advertisers, some of whom are corporate entities with dubious dealings. It seems, because of the Internet and globalization, we're just more aware of the fact that we're being lied to, but we're asking to return to something that never really existed. We need to break the mold and create a nonprofit citizen media, a fifth estate (since the fourth was always bogus).