Posted on 07/21/2005 6:18:53 PM PDT by bitt
Note: This essay will appear in the Book Review dated July 31.
THE conventional news media are embattled. Attacked by both left and right in book after book, rocked by scandals, challenged by upstart bloggers, they have become a focus of controversy and concern. Their audience is in decline, their credibility with the public in shreds. In a recent poll conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, 65 percent of the respondents thought that most news organizations, if they discover they've made a mistake, try to ignore it or cover it up, and 79 percent opined that a media company would hesitate to carry negative stories about a corporation from which it received substantial advertising revenues.
The industry's critics agree that the function of the news is to inform people about social, political, cultural, ethical and economic issues so that they can vote and otherwise express themselves as responsible citizens. They agree on the related point that journalism is a profession rather than just a trade and therefore that journalists and their employers must not allow profit considerations to dominate, but must acknowledge an ethical duty to report the news accurately, soberly, without bias, reserving the expression of political preferences for the editorial page and its radio and television counterparts. The critics further agree, as they must, that 30 years ago news reporting was dominated by newspapers and by television network news and that the audiences for these media have declined with the rise of competing sources, notably cable television and the Web.
The audience decline is potentially fatal for newspapers. Not only has their daily readership dropped from 52.6 percent of adults in 1990 to 37.5 percent in 2000, but the drop is much steeper in the 20-to-49-year-old cohort, a generation that is, and as it ages ..
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
God Speed, Scotty. Rest in Peace.
Scotty said that? I've been using it as a pick up line for centuries... And it works!
I take issue with that postulation. Quite the contrary, the media has tried to taylor the audience by being proactive with a particular political slant and agenda.
public intellectuals and deans of journalism schools
Now there's a font of real world knowledge.
I predict that someday, major newspapers like the NT Times and the Washington Post will be nothing more than glorified trade journals and idea feeders for other "journalists", much like individual departments at universities today have academic journals for their individual ice-cube tray departments. May the readerships of such papers become glaringly insular and myopic.
Thanks for the kind compliment.
BUMP!
The conventional media has turned into toilet paper.
Let the flushing begin.
Like anybody in the MSM even bothered to report anything at all the Swift Boat Vets said--except in some vicious ad hominem attack on them.
Exactly. Saying the MSM reported the Swifties as news is such BS (Barbara Streisand). They can't even be honest when they're 'trying' to critique themselves. The MSM is so easy to see through and are so predictable. They still think that we are to stupid to notice.
Too bad, so sad.
hee-hee!!!!
And why shouldn't they? They see the media acting like a pack of jackles in the press conferences with President Bush. The dictators probably think it's a perfectly acceptable way of treating rude and belligerant people.
The New York Times can read the hand writing on the wall. They understand what "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" means.
Specifically, they hear advertisers telling them your readership figures are shrinking, your audience demographics and future look grim - - - and the CEO thinks ad expenditures with you are showing a negative cost value analysis.
Outstanding post !
One of the chapters in that book, "De-Massifying the Media," stated that when communications technologies improve the hammerlock control of information dissemination by large companies will decline rapidly. With the rise of multi-channel cable and satellite TV, talk radio and the public Internet since 1979, the de-massification of the media has become 2005 reality.
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