Journalism sucks

journalism

If you ask the founder of the conservative Media Research Center what he thinks of the media, L. Brent Bozell III will say that news coverage has an overt liberal bias. If you ask me, that’s bunk, the reason journalism sucks has nothing to do with political ideology, but just plain old incompetence.

The root of the problem is corporate consolidation of the media. The bean-counters expect 20 percent profit from an industry that in a good year can turn out 5 percent, maybe ten.

The only way to get those huge profits is to track the least expensive and most outrageous “news” story. Last month’s town hall meeting coverage provides a perfect example.

Certainly there was plenty of reasonable debate taking place in town hall meetings everywhere, but that’s boring. The cheap thrills were found in taping the wackos representing a small percentage of the population, giving the impression that there’s widespread outrage over health care reform. There isn’t.

Bozell’s argument for a liberal bias in the media holds no water. Leading to the war with Iraq, the “liberal” media duckwalked in lockstep with the Bush administration and did nothing to challenge the president, in fact, they paved the path to war by not providing a valuable check on the Executive. The New York Times and the Washington Post issued apologies for their failure after-the-fact.

But none of these anecdotal examples of conservative bias proves the media has any particular bias at all. What it means is that the news media is grotesquely incompetent. Sure there are overtly biased “news” organizations on cable TV. Fox is obviously a right-wing propaganda machine and MSNBC is now unabashedly liberal (it’s worth noting that back in 2003 MSNBC was clearly ideologically right-of-center).

If the responsibility of a journalist is to provide all sides to a story (yes, sometimes there are more than two), there can be no doubt that the news media, particularly broadcast news, is utterly failing. It’s failing because telling all sides of a particular story is difficult, expensive and not always the most exciting to watch on TV.

So to get viewers or readers – to make lots of money – journalists are in a race to the bottom and our supposedly representative form of government is failing. Extremists, liberal and conservative, know that if they scream loud enough and burn enough people in effigy, someone will point a camera at them and they’ll dominate the news cycle – creating the illusion of widespread outrage.

It is interesting that conservatives are far more effective at changing policy with this strategy than liberals. My guess is that while most journalists are politically left of center, most executives that run these corporate media conglomerates are not. So we’re left with a corporate-controlled incompetent news media that is failing as the unelected fourth branch of government. To solve this problem, the FCC must reinstate rules about media ownership to break up media conglomerates and put the power of the press back in the hands of the people rather than the MBAs.