Thursday, March 10, 2011

Maybe I've been wrong

This month's issue of The Atlantic has a long and counter-intuitive piece by James Fallows, a well-known journalist and commentator on the media. Fallows argues that, contrary to the accepted wisdom that I've been echoing this semester, the media isn't doing such a bad job in its primary tasks. Moreover, he states that although change is inevitable, it doesn't have to mean an inevitable slide down.

He starts off by showing that in every generation journalists look back in the belief that the past was always better, a mythical golden age that can never be recaptured. But we can't fight changes caused by shifting cultural trends and technological advancements. Fallows spends a lot of time discussing Gawker, which until recently has had the reputation of nothing more than a scandal-mongering platform. Now, as Fallows points out, it's become the source of revelations about candidate's personal lives and the newest scandals. This may seem tawdry, but it's the kind of news that sells and that people demand.

So, rather than fight this trend, perhaps we should embrace it. Accept that media is a business, accept that people's tastes have changed, and let the media evolve to fit what people want. There will always be a market for high-end publications, like The Atlantic or Harper's or even the New York Times, but maybe not everything has to meet this standard of elite-defined excellence.

8 comments:

  1. I can accept that, but does that mean our definition of watchdog journalism needs to change? The press now needs to be watchdogs on the public's behalf, looking out not for what's best for them, but what they want?

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  2. Well, perhaps we can have both. Some will be watchdogs, and others won't.

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  3. Instead of accepting this trend, couldn't we pursue an alternative method such as attempting to educate the public about the need for actual news? Or, could we attempt to use the media to change people's attitudes and make them more interested in the facts? After all, it seems to me as though the growing interest in soft news and scandals has been at the very least helped along by the media and its' choices of what to report and how.

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  4. David: you may be correct that some within the media are "dumbing down" the news to appeal to what they think the audience wants. See this clip of Jon Stewart skewering CNN: http://www.mediaite.com/tv/jon-stewart-mocks-cnn-for-allegedly-airing-youtube-clips-instead-of-hard-news/. But there's an extent to which people want this kind of nonsense, and if media companies make money doing it, it's hard to stop them.

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  5. About the fact that we tend to "look back in the belief that the past was always better, a mythical golden age that can never be recaptured" I just want to quote Michael Schudson from George Mason University, who wrote in his article "Political Observatories, databases and news in the emerging ecology of public information" that "today [...] in the digital area, [...] (we are) not to be misled by a nostalgic belief in past glories: they were ever the exception". I think that we tend to either look at the past or an idealistic future in order to affirm that the present in only a transition but most of the things we condemn have always existed and will always exist. We should maybe stop thinking of everything in terms of black and white - medias as watchdogs or as treators to the truth, the present being awful versus the past being glorious, and understand that the flaws we are discussing may be inherent to the subject.

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  6. To the watchdog journalism pieces, is it possible that watchdog journalism no longer needs traditional institutionalized media as an outlet? I mean aren't there plenty of other institutions able to make us aware of what needs to be done through newer and easier to access form of communication such as Facebook, you tube, blog posts etc. and if these other news outlets are able to be responsible for this, then the traditional media has not been neglecting its job because others were already brought in to replace them.

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  7. In some ways I believe that Fallows is right. Times change, and those that do not change fall behind. What we sometimes fail to see is that while we might be seeing change in some areas, at the same time there are areas that remain stagnant, such as the example pointed out of the NYTimes and Atlantic. Moreover, when there is a gap in news coverage that needs filling, particularly in the area of watchdog journalism and scholarly coverage of issues, eventually that gap is filled, many times by some means we do not expect. Blogs, according to Antoinette Pole, fill such a gap. Change comes, and blogs are one such change which refills the coffers of intelligent watchdog journalism. It was a blog that picked up on Sen. Lotts comments at Strom Therman's 100th b-day, and eventually led to his resignation. Let the business of journalism be, and be consoled by the fact that while those outlets of media which in our youth held the torch of watchdog journalism now no longer bear it, they have not let it out, but simply passed it along to new outlets.

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  8. my appologies, I wrote Therman, when I should have spelled it Thurmond.

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