Have you heard “the news”?
In The Assault on Reason Al Gore writes,
Consider the rules by which our present public forum now operates and how different they are from the norms our Founders knew during the age of print. Today’s massive flows of information are largely in only one direction. The world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation.
Individuals receive, but they cannot send. The absorb, but they cannot share. They hear, but they do not speak. The see constant motion, but they do not move themselves. The “well-informed citizenry” is in danger of becoming the “well-assumed audience.”
The Internet is supposed to change all that, by allowing individuals to send as well as receive, to share as well as absorb. One wonders, though, if it isn’t more like cable TV or talk radio, a medium in which a thousand flowers bloom, vast fields of entertainment speckled with monocultured patches where those of a different breed or color are excluded or treated as weeds.
Meanwhile, on the traditional media front, the most recent edition of Ad Age headlines these stories.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — By now you know the story: The business of newspapers is in decline. It’s a terminal decline, if you believe experts such as Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California at Annenberg. His research suggests traditional media in general must learn to shrink but newspapers in particular are a special case. “When an offline reader of a paper dies, he or she is not being replaced by a new reader,” he said. “How much time do they have? We think they have 20 to 25 years.”Â
The End of Network News as We Know It
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The big three TV network newscasts lost about 1.2 million viewers last year, and advertising on their three big morning news shows fell to an estimated $1.03 billion. The average viewer is 60 years old, and the demographic marketers most want to reach is more likely to be facing a computer screen than a TV screen when the evening news comes on.
How soon will it be before the Beloit College Mindset List  reminds professors that their students have never heard the phrase “the news”?
Posted: April 28th, 2008 under Aargh, Ain't That America, We Are the Enemy.
Comments: 3
Comments
Comment from Josh Hammond
Time: April 29, 2008, 8:17 am
Al Gore should stick to the environment. This quote makes no sense to me. First of all the “Founders” did not live in the age of print. In fact there are more books and magazines being printed today than there were ten years ago or in the history of print. What newspapers or magazine existed in the 18th Century where not vehicles of “national conversation”. Town hall meetings filled that purpose.
Today’s news media is more interactive than it was five or ten years ago. Blogs are two-way conversations, actually multiple-way conversations. Yes there is a lot of talking to the choir, as the saying goes, but there is conversation. Talk radio is part of this broader conversation. Again, I don’t listen or call Rush Limbaugh, but millions do. Yes, more listen than talk, but there is with Limbaugh and his left and right colleagues, a national conversation going on.
And advertising is not what it used to be and the business model for old media is in jeopardy. The new business model is all about social media and social marketing, what I see as the new medium for national “conversation”.
Comment from timr
Time: April 29, 2008, 10:20 am
John, I stopped watching the network news programs when I discovered that they have become very restricted in what they cover, and what they think of as news. Maybe they tell you the national news in the first 10 min-or until the first commercial-but even that is mostly trivial gossip or BS about the presidential candidates, what about what is happening in Iraq? nary a mention, Afghanistan? nothing, terrorism worldwide? nada, accidents, earthquakes, or weather events around the world? zip. Whether or not the rev Wright can disrupt the Obama campaign? 2 or 3 stories nightly, all at the top of the news cast. Tonados in Va that injure over 400? did they cover it at all, or were they to busy obsessing about the triva and gossip between Obama and clinton. The networks are being censored, not by the usual suspects, but by their corporate owners
Comment from Pat
Time: April 30, 2008, 9:31 am
Timr, I watch C-Span and C-Span 2. That way I get the news as it happens without some newscaster telling me what I should think. Rev. Wright’s entire speech plus the question and answer session was live on C-Span2, and General Petraeus’ entire hearing was also televised live. It amazes me what the media chooses to use as sound bites, and what they choose to leave out. Even the Jim Lehrer report on PBS is starting to piss me off. Their coverage of the Obama/Wright thing is starting to sound like CNN. One of my favorite shows on C-Span is on every morning until 10:00A.M., Washington Journal. They have a variety of guests who talk about subjects that are important to the country, and ordinary people get to call in and ask the guests whatever questions they want without being censored.
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