It's not like the old days.
As someone who keeps up on the news about the news, I have to say I'm bored comatose by the whole debate on whether new media and blogging are destroying journalism and sinking the print industry, or merely changing the way people experience media. You know, the way the introduction of television was expected to destroy the film industry. Technological trends happen. The world continues to spin.So you won't hear me waxing nostalgic for the glory days when journalists had to be trained professionals instead of anonymous internet hacks. Don't get me wrong: I would love it if it was still a viable option to hire full-time staff writers instead of relegating us writers to freelance bit work with no benefits and hardly any pay. Love. It. But my real beef with the state of media today stems from its content. We're better informed on the whereabouts of Lindsay Lohan than those of our military.
The perfect example that things have gone overboard: the photographer who won the Pulitzer for that famous shot of the Vietnamese girl covered in napalm in 1972 is now a common paparazzo. That photo of Paris Hilton crying in the police car? He shot it.
I have a question for anyone who was old enough to watch the news back when the former photo was taken. Was news coverage of Watergate and the Vietnam War ever eclipsed by pointless entertainment blitzes? Given a choice between serious news and fluff, did people tend to opt out like they do now? Would you catch more people reading People or the Times?
This month's Harper's says that the worldwide demand for newsprint has increased 18% since 1990, while the North American demand has decreased 27%. Something tells me that we aren't all merely switching to reading CNN online. If that was the cause of the change, then it would be a worldwide trend, not a North American one. Those castles and whatnot across the Atlantic are definitely wired for DSL.
So. What's in the headlines? Do you feel informed?
Labels: entertainment, politics
posted by Leah @ 1:16 PM
3 Comments:
i can hardly breathe after reading this.I am shocked that the girl in Viet Nam and Paris were caught in the same photographer's lens with probably the same degree of interest.Maybe the world would have been a little better served if those Hiltons had said "Paris darling you don't get the 50 million until you go to college". i like the news according to Leah.
I'm not sure if the news as a whole is crappier-- I tend to think that the news in the past was as approximately as professional as it is today, cf. "Dewey Defeats Truman" and all that. It's that there's just so much more "news", and that for various reasons, people tend to choose that which is lurid, escapist or trivial. The quality of past journalism isn't lost, it's just harder to find, so it's not that the generation of our grandparents had Murrow and Cronkite and the New York Times and we don't, it's that they didn't have Access Hollywood, the Drudge Report, Fox News and the RedEye.
True. I know they had gossip papers a hundred years ago, but the dominance of print media must have kept it from being nearly as overwhelming as it is now. It's easier to ignore a photo of a celebrity DUI when you're not confronted by one on every website you click on.
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