I’m sure most everyone is now privy to the Huffington Post debacle. In short, the Post made a less-than-wise decision when it passed a phony video of a Fox news segment as true, ostensibly in an attempt to discredit the commentators at Fox News. It was a political cheap shot that backfired once it became apparent that the video had indeed been doctored. More information is available here.
What does this say about the state of the news media?
In the United States, the news media is charged with the responsibility of acting as the supervisors of the political establishment. Accountability is an important check on political power; politicians know that informed voters can throw them out of office. And good journalism is the means by which such necessary information is disseminated. That would-be tyrants, conspirators, and abusers of power work behind closed doors is a powerful testament to this fact.
Most Americans become aware of political issues via the media. Because of this, reporters seem especially well-placed to guard against political gambits that depart from citizens’s wishes. If the media’s role as the palladium of good government is as crucial to contemporary society as many in the news business believe, then politicians who want to head off-center should be checking their rearview mirrors often.
Yet, as we witness time and again, many news organizations have failed to fulfill this role. Political elites continue to refine their techniques with dealing with voters and managing the media. In the political battles waged through news outlets, news organizations frequently transform from watchdogs into lapdogs.
So is the problem that plagues the news media today partisan bias? Most journalists would describe their political views as centrist, although I would imagine they tend to vote Democratic. And while journalists tend to the left, publishers and editorial pages tend to the right. Maybe there isn’t so much of a “liberal media bias” after all.
Perhaps the issue is not partisan bias, but other biases that the news media is involved with. One such bias is that the news media is more focused on entertaining than informing (Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, in my opinion, should never be considered “breaking news”, much less “news” at all). It was at a lecture at Princeton that I learned that “what bleeds, reads.” The news media has put a premium on drama and brevity. Consider this: the print edition of the New York Times contains, on average, 100,000 words. Nightly news on stations such as NBC averages 3600 words. I suppose that’s why television is a medium; it isn’t well-done.
TV news stories must catch the viewer’s eye, and must to do immediately. To do otherwise is to face the vengeance of the remote control. Because of this, stories have become shorter and more dramatic. More and more news stories cover crime, celebrities, and disasters. To compensate, less airtime is devoted to the more complex political issues that are of interest to the citizen who wishes to be informed.
What of the print media? It performs slightly better. But fewer Americans get their information from the daily paper as more get their information from Web and TV sources. Newspaper companies have been cutting back operations for some time now, and as consolidation becomes more commonplace, news conglomerates shift their focus on turning a profit. This renders newspapers as yet another ordinary commodity. Few papers give their readers enough news to make them informed citizens of domestic and international affairs. Clearly, the majority of Americans don’t get their news from the New York Times, much less the Financial Times.
For all these reasons, the American media has decomposed into a delivery system for “news”, commentary, talking points, jargon, and spin. Biases such as the media’s attraction towards hyperbole, among other biases, impede its effectiveness far more than any left-or-right-leaning political bias. Only once we identify and understand these biases can we begin to take steps to reform this defunct machine.
Glad to see that somebody else appreciates the Financial Times for what it is: a first-tier news source.
If I were forced to read two news sources for the rest of my life, I’d go with The Economist and Financial Times.