Suicide Isn’t Painless
Newspapers are dying, with rare exception, all over the place. They’ve been owned by elitist families or unbending chains. They blame the Internet, younger demographics, and shorter attentions spans. In other words, everyone but themselves.
The problem is that the First Amendment is not some Holy Grail that excuses stupid and sloppy management, poor reporting, biased coverage, and outright fraud. You can’t try to police everyone except yourself.
The major network news shows are also losing viewers. They blame it on competition from cable, social networking, lower overall television use, ad nauseam. They’ve been unchanged in basic format since I was a kid, and Katy Couric does not a revolution make.
The problem as I see it is that the major media are irredeemably negative. They seek to tear down, to undermine, to tarnish. Sooner or later, every public figure whose besmirching might sell a newspaper to the lowest common denominator will be besmirched. President-elect Obama will probably have a very short honeymoon period before they are on him about his appointments, his diet, his action or inaction in the Middle East, his choice of a puppy, and his smoking.
The media seem to blame the readers and viewers as being “dumbed down” and wanting sensationalism. But it’s the press that has dumbed down. Anchors are merely reading TelePrompTers®, and not so well, often parroting the grammatical havoc created by some writer whose editor can’t offer much help. Newspapers make errors in their headlines. Every time I read a “moving” story in the New York Times these days, I wonder if the reporter has made up the interviews and quotes.
And no matter what your affiliations, the coverage, you’ll have to admit, is quite biased. I’m not talking about the people who are columnists or talk show hosts whom you expect to have a point of view and bias, I’m talking about Chris Mathews claiming it’s his job to make sure that Obama is successful! I’m talking about such crazy bias in the New York Times that you have to wonder if the story is factual or simply an opinion. Remember “right-wing zealot Charlton Heston and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell”? Adjectives are wonderful things.
TV’s “Mash” had a wonderful theme song, “Suicide Is Painless.” Well, it’s not painless for the media business. It’s painful to watch once-great institutions, where Edward R. Murrow and Ben Bradlee once held sway, fade into the shadows of their past. The Providence Journal, a skeleton of a once healthy, Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper, has recently put its own buildings up for sale (it’s owned these days by Belo, in Texas) and I’m sure it will disappear in a few more years.
It’s one thing to say that people get their news faster through other means. But it’s another to realize that the real problem is that the news is less biased, more balanced, and frequently more positive in other places. Right now, the major news outlets are trying to scare everyone about the economy, which prolongs the economic slump, if they’re successful. But I think they’re acting that way because they are so scared.
To paraphrase Santayana, they’ve lost sight of their goal, so they’re redoubling their efforts to get there.
© Alan Weiss 2-009. All rights reserved.
