America's news media system is in as much of a crisis as America's system of financing health care is.
Hey! Someone in the media has figured out the <i>real</i> significance of the Cambridge, Mass arrest of Professor Gates in his own home and why it matters to President Barack Obama. That someone is Frank Rich writing in the New York Times. ("http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/opinion/02rich.html?_r=2")
The answer is: it doesn't matter to the President in his role as President at all. But the media would rather run a story about Race than one about health care. That demonstrates that the news media system has failed to meet the needs of the American public as thoroughly as has the American health care lack-of-system. Wonder why?
Race is safe, sexy and increases viewers or readers for the media at a time when newer and less well-developed issues offer only the danger of feeding conflict. That conflict is more likely to lose readers/viewers than to increase them. The media does not work to cover news. It works to increase media revenue and satisfy Wall Street.
So the editors emphasize the peripherally race-related issue the arrest of Professor Gates in his own home than the much more important policy debate about health care. The policy debate on health care is frankly boring. Besides, the media has evolved now to cover race. Race has been a key American media topic since World War II, so the dangers to media revenue of covering it are well known. The newer and generally more contentious issue of national health care financing is a subject with unknown revenue risks at a time when the media is strapped for revenue. In addition, the media has few reporters or editors who understand government or policy well enough to write about it generally. They have even fewer people capable of understanding the issues involved in the disaster that is the current health care lack-of-system together with the parasites who use fear of illness and the lack of easy access to health care to get rich. But the biggest problem is that covering the true issues in the national health care financing debate will not increase media revenue at a time when the reliable revenue streams for TV and Newspaper organizations are under heavy attack by competitors.
That's not all. There is also the problem of failed journalistic standards. Whether these failed standards are a cause or a result of the general revenue stream problems for the media is not clear. But the fact is that the standard method of reporting political conflicts does not tell the public what they need to know about the issues. Here's what journalists today do. The sacred and unquestionable journalistic orthodoxy is that there are two and only two reportable sides to a political policy debate. Both sides are of equal importance, the job of the media is simply to give equal weight to each of the two sides. It is up to the readers to determine which of the two sides is accurate or more meaningful. The journalistic community rarely reports anything that would provide readers or reviewers some standards with which they could measure the relative importance of the two sides. The journalistic substitute for reporting on the standards the readers or viewers could use to evaluate the news is to get biased pundits to offer their opinions in a "he said - he said" conflict that is likely to increase ratings but provides no real information.
Finally, the media is supposed to cover only the political and entertainment aspects, never the boring policy aspects themselves and the reasons why the policy itself matters is irrelevant to the media buying public. The only thing that matters is what draws ratings that can be sold to the media advertisers.
The result is that the media generally tells the public little comprehensible about the health care debate since most of the people on both sides of the debate are already locked into fixed positions and do not appreciate it when the media actually tried to inform them of the real facts.
The real matter of importance to the American public right now is the extended health care crisis which the forces of status quo do not want corrected. The media itself is facing its own crisis of relevancy which this health care debate highlights. Both the big city newspapers and the TV networks have been centralizing and building local monopoly positions within larger national near monopolies for the last five decades as they have fought to make more money and show up well to Wall Street.
The technological challenges of removing the sunk cost of news distribution has knocked the pins from under the traditional model of news gathering, bundling and distribution as the Internet has replaced the need for local department story and classified advertisements and for the daily distribution of the news on dead trees or over limited TV air time at a few selected times of day.
The result is that what now passes for TV and big city news organizations are reduced to trying to pander to selected niche markets which demand entertainment or selected reporting that supports the market's political beliefs. The commercial market for entertainment "news" provides all the so-called news that is needed to fill the available TV airtime or the newspaper entertainment news holes. The political partisans provide the needed talking points to fill the political opinion pages and TV pundit air time.
This explains what is wrong with the misnamed "News" media. The media is shrinking the entire news gathering process to whatever pays for itself, and it does so without searching for new sources of news because there is no known business model that pays for that kind of journalism any more. That's why so few news organizations maintain foreign bureaus any more. It's also why the editorial decisions about what is important out of a Presidential News Conference is about a trivial and only peripherally racial incident rather than the crisis surrounding the failed methods America has developed to pay for health care for a lot of its citizens.
So why is the media no longer properly a "news" media? That's because it has become a "revenue generation" media and nothing else. Of course, if they were honest and renamed it the revenue generation media then they would lose more revenue. So they will try to maintain the fiction that they are still a "news" media.
The answer is: it doesn't matter to the President in his role as President at all. But the media would rather run a story about Race than one about health care. That demonstrates that the news media system has failed to meet the needs of the American public as thoroughly as has the American health care lack-of-system. Wonder why?
Race is safe, sexy and increases viewers or readers for the media at a time when newer and less well-developed issues offer only the danger of feeding conflict. That conflict is more likely to lose readers/viewers than to increase them. The media does not work to cover news. It works to increase media revenue and satisfy Wall Street.
So the editors emphasize the peripherally race-related issue the arrest of Professor Gates in his own home than the much more important policy debate about health care. The policy debate on health care is frankly boring. Besides, the media has evolved now to cover race. Race has been a key American media topic since World War II, so the dangers to media revenue of covering it are well known. The newer and generally more contentious issue of national health care financing is a subject with unknown revenue risks at a time when the media is strapped for revenue. In addition, the media has few reporters or editors who understand government or policy well enough to write about it generally. They have even fewer people capable of understanding the issues involved in the disaster that is the current health care lack-of-system together with the parasites who use fear of illness and the lack of easy access to health care to get rich. But the biggest problem is that covering the true issues in the national health care financing debate will not increase media revenue at a time when the reliable revenue streams for TV and Newspaper organizations are under heavy attack by competitors.
That's not all. There is also the problem of failed journalistic standards. Whether these failed standards are a cause or a result of the general revenue stream problems for the media is not clear. But the fact is that the standard method of reporting political conflicts does not tell the public what they need to know about the issues. Here's what journalists today do. The sacred and unquestionable journalistic orthodoxy is that there are two and only two reportable sides to a political policy debate. Both sides are of equal importance, the job of the media is simply to give equal weight to each of the two sides. It is up to the readers to determine which of the two sides is accurate or more meaningful. The journalistic community rarely reports anything that would provide readers or reviewers some standards with which they could measure the relative importance of the two sides. The journalistic substitute for reporting on the standards the readers or viewers could use to evaluate the news is to get biased pundits to offer their opinions in a "he said - he said" conflict that is likely to increase ratings but provides no real information.
Finally, the media is supposed to cover only the political and entertainment aspects, never the boring policy aspects themselves and the reasons why the policy itself matters is irrelevant to the media buying public. The only thing that matters is what draws ratings that can be sold to the media advertisers.
The result is that the media generally tells the public little comprehensible about the health care debate since most of the people on both sides of the debate are already locked into fixed positions and do not appreciate it when the media actually tried to inform them of the real facts.
The real matter of importance to the American public right now is the extended health care crisis which the forces of status quo do not want corrected. The media itself is facing its own crisis of relevancy which this health care debate highlights. Both the big city newspapers and the TV networks have been centralizing and building local monopoly positions within larger national near monopolies for the last five decades as they have fought to make more money and show up well to Wall Street.
The technological challenges of removing the sunk cost of news distribution has knocked the pins from under the traditional model of news gathering, bundling and distribution as the Internet has replaced the need for local department story and classified advertisements and for the daily distribution of the news on dead trees or over limited TV air time at a few selected times of day.
The result is that what now passes for TV and big city news organizations are reduced to trying to pander to selected niche markets which demand entertainment or selected reporting that supports the market's political beliefs. The commercial market for entertainment "news" provides all the so-called news that is needed to fill the available TV airtime or the newspaper entertainment news holes. The political partisans provide the needed talking points to fill the political opinion pages and TV pundit air time.
This explains what is wrong with the misnamed "News" media. The media is shrinking the entire news gathering process to whatever pays for itself, and it does so without searching for new sources of news because there is no known business model that pays for that kind of journalism any more. That's why so few news organizations maintain foreign bureaus any more. It's also why the editorial decisions about what is important out of a Presidential News Conference is about a trivial and only peripherally racial incident rather than the crisis surrounding the failed methods America has developed to pay for health care for a lot of its citizens.
So why is the media no longer properly a "news" media? That's because it has become a "revenue generation" media and nothing else. Of course, if they were honest and renamed it the revenue generation media then they would lose more revenue. So they will try to maintain the fiction that they are still a "news" media.
