[THE MEDIA] Edward R. Murrow and the Modern Day News

Good post.

I have faith that if the nukes were in the air the networks would tell us about it, but if one of them had an exclusive interview with Sandy Bullock telling us how betrayed she felt with Jessie James cheating they would air that first.

 

Before there was Edward R. Murrow, there was Walter Winchell who would probably be right at home hosting a show on "E!" if he only learned how to sound properly ironic, sarcastic, and postmodern.

http://www.radiohof.org/news/walterwinchell.html

The problem is that people actually care about fluff more than they care about news.

Also, I have newspapers from the Span/Am war of 1898 that, when compared with the run up to the Iraq war, make that rabble rousing yellow journalism seem like unbiased news.

The fallacy of how great "the good old days" were is mostly the purview of conservatives on the basis of selective memory. The good old days sucked.

 

People in the 'old days' had a backbone. Corporate owned media will not attack its own, and therefore is inherently flawed. The Murrows are extinct from mainstream journalism.

 

I'm posting this from my iPhone while taking a dump because the OP is so good I couldn't wait to get back on my computer to say how good it is.

 

This is interesting. Care to scan or link some?

It seemed like that period of Herst and Pulitzer were among the worst in muckraking and partisanship. I guess despite a higher literacy rate, the science of fast food journalism is increasingly improving. With instant poling and communication, one can gather numbers and results pretty fast.

Incidentally, despite the era of the shareholder, most media companies (Fox/WSJ, CBS/Viacom, Disney, NYTimes, Bloomberg) are still family controlled, either through majority stakes in class B stock or a web of proxy companies that owns a majority stake. Unlike Herst and Pulitzer, they aren't going to rip each other's guts out anytime soon. There's money to print...


Anyone else thought how it was odd the Acorn hoax tapes has been woefully underreported? No mea culpa for their vetting processes eh?

 

Here is one. I'll do a few more examples later if I have the time. I spoilered it because it is really large and I only did part of the paper - the newspaper is full journal size, and it would take several scans to get even a single full page. The paper is the Rochester Herald, so it isn't the biggest newspaper, but the halfhearted attempt at innuendo behind "Does Money Make McKinley Wink at Murder?" sounds straight out of Glen Beck.

Spoiler

There is a whole lot more like this. There is no separation whatsoever in any of the paper between editorial and news - I don't believe they think the difference is relevant. By example, there are several editions where the first thing directly below the masthead on the front page of the Newspaper is an editorial cartoon. They have no problem inserting very prejudicial adverbs and adjectives where they don't belong - tons of 'cowardly' and 'dasterdly' etc. There's more, but hopefully this gives you a taste.

 

I usually refrain from posting in the D&D but will make an exception for an excellent thread.

Unfortunately, as much as I would like to agree with Morrow, I don't think he is correct. I hope I am wrong. But if you search for it, there is good, informative programming on tv that is like a needle in the haystack amongst the mountain of crap that passes for programming today. But only in rare instances does it attract much of an audience. I don't think corporate America underestimates the intelligence of its audience. Just look at what the top rated programs are. It's embarrassing. Again, I would love for someone to point out some reliable statistics that prove that I am just a cranky old cynic.

In another tangent, I find the issue of media bias interesting. The landscape has certainly changed over the years, when it used to be accepted that the media was liberally biased. Now its seems to be Balkanized ... newsprint is still mostly liberal, tv all over the place but with Fox as the 800 pound gorilla, talk radio being overwhelmingly conservative, and the internet I am not sure you can label one way or another. I would be interested in other posters takes on how media bias has changed over the years and whether they see the divisions by types of media that I do. Why should talk radio be so overwhelmingly conservative ... don't liberals drive? Haven't some liberal talk radio stations outside the PBS purview failed? I don't get it.

Hope I don't regret participating .... I usually do.

 

Corporate America will follow the money. If it isn't profitable to rock the unspoken agreement not to air each other's laundry, why bother?

Accountability has to be profitable in order for the mainstream media rise to better standards.

Sounds like that Bachmann-like Congressman was a subscriber.

With college programs for aspiring journalists to train under, I'd expect there'd be less sensationalism. Seems like "internet rumors" gives some programs a window to break standards and pounce on the meat that drove those papers a hundred years ago.

 

I am so honored, especially given praise from the thadeus. This is almost better than winning $52.50 for 3rd place in my NCAA bracket pool this year.

People have pointed out the issue of ratings (Pipe) and the history of crappy media (Ottomaton), and both points make sense. It can't be said that modern media "underestimates" its audience when said media just target what sells. (EDIT: The Onion has done a great job parodying the "good old days" of print media, in such wonderful books as "Our Dumb Century." It's true that it's always had suckage, and I've seen some of the things Ottomaton is relaying.)

But let me ask a question a different way.

I recall being a newshound in my earliest days, from 1975 onward. The news enterprise is different now, within my lifetime. So I'm talking about 35 years, though I was very, very young in 1975. So my question is: would one claim there has been so substantial change to the nature and content of journalism in that span? Perhaps you would say it's just that B-Bob has become more worldly, etc, and it's more of an aging perspective than a real change. But I think the world of journalism has changed incredibly.

If there is still great journalism, fine. You have T.R. Reid writing a great book like The Healing of America, where he investigates healthcare systems at home and abroad. Truly, that's as close to bias-less reporting as you get. But how many people know who Reid is? How many people knew who Murrow was? I think good journalism, where it exists, is increasingly marginalized. I would argue, especially with consolidations and ever stronger corporate ties with media, there will be ever fewer niches in which a real journalist can earn a living.

Comments?

 

There is no doubt that a real journalist cannot make a living in today's news world. No major news outlet is interested in honest, unbiased reporting. You have to sell the company's ideas or you're out on your ass, simple as that. Fox News was really where the dam broke. Until Fox, there were at least some noticeable lines between "news" and "commentary", now those borders have all but evaporated. Other companies followed suit, because if one news source isn't playing by the rules, then no one else can either (and expect to survive).

The contamination of news media with corporate and political influence has poisoned the well, so to speak. Only thing to do is quarantine it and start over. Sadly, the darkest days are yet to come. The enlightenment won't come until this country has some kind of major meltdown/revolution (if not a complete fracturing).

We are spoiled with the amount of information at our disposal. So much so to the point where we have become lazy and complacent and do not think to be judicious and discerning when choosing who we listen to, watch, read, and believe. Our forefathers would've killed for the tools and privledges we have today, but yet we've squandered this gift and are sadly slowly drowning under a massive cable-news entertainment dung-heap of misinformation and outright silliness.

Case in point:

Spoiler

Question: Can news organizations operate for profit and still be honest and effective? Are these ideas compatible? Should the government step in to protect "non-profit" news orgs? Should we have laws limiting the "for-profit" news orgs in their partnerships and scope?

 

In short, excellent journalism is costly. It takes time, great contacts, and a culture of independent reporters who are allowed to fail. Combine that with international reporting, and it makes sense that more and more groups are pooling together resources for packaged pieces. The military and other government agencies keyed in on this with their own wire services for local stations to use and sometimes edit.

Somewhere, editors in chiefs lost that balance of reporting and presentation. It's not entirely their fault. They have to juggle shareholder/owner interest with the viewer's declining attention spans. Get too bogged into detail, too depressing, or too long and they change the channel.

I mentioned corporate interest before, but our culture of "time is money", "boil it down to me in hard hitting soundbytes", and "make it entertaining or conclusive" plays just as big a role in fast food journalism.

 

There seem to be two issues from the original post that people are confusing.

A) What do people want to spend their free time pursuing on a day to day basis.

B)What is real journalism

When Murrow talks about the prime time line up, this contains obviously more than news. Last night I found myself watching 3 straight hours of new drama on TNT, flipping between the Astros and the Rockets. Does that make me an uninformed American, or just a guy trying to a break from the realities of life.

Most people who post on this forum have a lot more free time than a lot of people with full time familes. The average american with a family probably doesn't want to deal with real political issues after wondering if junior is hanging out with unsavory friends and if little susie is becoming sexually active.

 

That graphic has been making the internet rounds. The thing is, half a day later, after actually trying to run down comments from the military, CNN had it on their front page too. Al Jazeera just took it straight from Wikileaks and put it on their homepage without doing any additional journalism.

Is CNN really at fault for waiting a few hours until they could try and get comments and check with sources?

 

It's an anecdote, if it's a bad example, fine. But do you disagree with the premise?

 

I think there are a very limited number of people in this country who actually care about real news. I think one of the ways these news corporations have expanded their viewership is to mix non-news in.

I'm not sure that the news stations are a negative influence. I think there is a limit to the amount of real news that people will consume, and that saturation point was met long ago.

 

I agree news outlets are a reflection of society, and not the other way around.

But, I think that the more fluff news we get, the harder it becomes to even find the real stuff among the noise... especially for the lay consumer.

 

I can't believe such a stellar thread sank like a rock.

 

Isn't that kind of the way with everything, though? If you like good dramatic movies, back in the day when one of the networks had "Movie of the Week" you could be pretty sure that any movie you watched was going to be pretty damn good - either a big box office flick, or a critically aclaimed one. Now? Well they have 36 different movie channels and they have to fill them 24 hours a day. There aren't enough good movies to do that, so you have crappy "direct to video" releases to fill in the gaps.

If you like sports, it used to be that you could turn on whatever sports were on the networks, whenever they showed it, and you could be pretty sure you were going to see something interesting. Now, if your flipping channels, and you find a basketball game, you need to double check to make sure it isn't NAIA, D-League, or the WNBA, each of which probably gets more air in a year than the entirety of all the good NBA and NCAA basketball games carefully chosen by the networks 30 years ago.

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/hPv-X1GGPVY&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/hPv-X1GGPVY&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

With volume of available air slots, there simply isn't enough good general programing to fill it all. So the gaps are filled by niche markets. Thirty years ago, if you were a game show nut, you could subscribe to some crappy magazine run off some guys mimeograph machine in their basement, and once a year you'd go to some meeting at a nearby HoJo, and trade fourth and fifth hand copies of videotapes. Now you have a basic cable channel showing game shows 24 hours a day, and if you don't find what you want, go to NetFlix or eBay and satisfy whatever super-specific game show fetish you have.

Welcome to the era of media "choice" and proliferation. One of my favorite phrases of all time is "banality of evil", used to describe exactly how nebbish and boring the truly evil can be in person, contrary to expectation - much more Bill Lumbergh than Darth Vader. What we have here, contrary to the great hopes that were projected on the future, is the banality of choice in the media age.

 

So, Otto, humor me for a second, because you may think this is obvious.

You'd argue that the dominant change in the last 35 years of media is the expansion of choice and overall viewership numbers. So the same amount of "good news" is there, and the same number of truly "news interested" people are in the audience (more or less.)

It's interesting and compelling, but I'm not sure I'm on board yet.