The Media: Who's fault is it?

     Despite what reporters may say, there is a lot of money to be made in journalism. If you don’t believe it, take a trip down to Hearst Castle in San Simeon. Newspaper publishers have traditionally enjoyed profit margins nearly double that of other industries.

     The internet may have ended the salad days of print news but the explosion of news sites online would certainly suggest that there is still a vast marketplace of news consumers. There are, after all, enough consumers to support four separate 24 hour cable news networks. Those are in addition to the three or four hours per day the four local channels devote to news each day.

     Information is clearly a commodity that people are willing to pay for. There exists, however, a sense that journalism should be above anything so base as trying to turn a profit. Ironically, it is those working in the industry who are often the most outraged that the publishers and owners run it like a business rather than a public service.

     The notion that providing news was a duty owed to the public originated with the FCC at the onset of the television age. The FCC required broadcasters to include news shows among their programming. This is considered the golden era of TV news with anchors like Edward R. Murrow setting the standards by which all successors are to be judged.

     What is forgotten however, is that those post-war, FCC-mandated news programs were only 15 minutes long. The broadcasters, like any business owners confronted with an irksome federal regulation imposed upon them, complied with it in the cheapest and most desultory manner they could get away with.

     It wasn’t until CBS scored a ratings hit with its gamble on a Sunday news show called 60 Minutes that the networks saw news as anything but a grim onus that siphoned off profits. There has since been the explosion of network news magazines like 20/20, Dateline and Primetime.

     Industry competition is supposed to benefit the consumer, but has the diversity of the media marketplace actually created a better informed citizenry? Poll after poll conducted on Americans’ knowledge of current events suggest not.

     The ideological polarization of two particular T.V. news networks is often cited as the nadir of modern media but peddling slanted stories is hardly new.

     A more widespread and insidious trend is the appeal to the public’s bloodlust in the quest for a share of the increasingly fragmented audience. Crime has come to dominate the news. The stranger and gorier the better.

     In a nation that has been involved in a two-front war for a decade, that is teetering on the brink of a severe depression if not collapse, a woman accused killing her child dominated all the major news outlets for months.

     Is the media to blame for their lurid crime coverage or is the public to blame for their consumption of it? Should newsrooms be run as businesses? Does the pursuit of profit inhibit reporting?

     These are some of the issues I hope to explore in this blog. In the coming weeks I will examine topics such as: the conglomeration of the media, the increasingly cozy relationship between police agencies and news organizations, the use of staged news events and photo-ops, pack journalism, and the influence of media scrutiny on the criminal justice system.