Is it the Messenger or the Audience ?

Local News Sucks!  And this has left me totally conflicted as I try to figure out if local news sucks because the people broadcasting it suck or because the audience who watches it sucks ?

Normally, I would just lay down till the conflicted feeling goes away, but I can’t because I work for a major media outlet in the second largest media market in the United States.  Yes… Television Stations.  So I am surrounded by local news and the people who make it all the time!

See, we broadcast live, local news shows for about 11 hours each weekday.   I assume that producing news is cheaper than creating real content and it is all about making money after all…

But I am actually old enough to remember when news was a loss leader designed to provide real, unbiased information to the American public as repayment for the use of the public airwaves.  News was independent of it’s sponsorship so they didn’t influence editorial content.  Those who delivered the news understood the subtleties of the issues because they were the writers and reporters as well as the on-air personality.

Then along came the “New Magazine”, specifically,  ”60 Minutes” on CBS, which always has been and still continues to be one of the best of the breed.   “60 Minutes” committed the ultimate crime that any news organization could…  It scored entertainment style ratings and made a whole heck of a lot of money!

Now the media executives found a new potential profit center.  News was no longer just a device to bring a greater air of legitimacy the broader operation, you could also make money at it.  So it became the target of the marketing machine where audience demographics and ratings are more important than substance and integrity.  When news decided to compete for ratings instead of important information, the quality fell into the toilet!

Did the populace revolt against this trend towards dumbing down our information flow ?  No, instead the audience eats it up !  So much so, that there are half a dozen twenty-four hour cable news channels and local broadcast outlets do live news for as much as 11 hours each day.  While news competes more and more in the space of entertainment, the Journalists become the “Talent” and the reporter on the street needs to fit into a demographic that boosts ratings and is appealing to the sponsor. 

So here we are in 2008 with an audience that has lost an ability to distinguish the difference between a news story and a music video.  We package information into 5 minute slices and fill those 11 hours a day with stories that belong in the gossip columns and claim them to be hard news.  It must pay because it costs a lot of money to fuel the helicopter that hovers for hours over Brittany’s house to catch a glimpse of her nervous breakdown live on the nine O’Clock|

As I said, I live in the middle of this conundrum, so I ask the question to the folks in the newsroom why they do it and they tell me that the audience wants it and will tune out if we don’t give it to them in those five minute chunks.  

Yet I watch the culture around me and I see the decisions we make in choosing our leaders and our public policy and I see a people growing more and more ignorant of their past as well as uninformed and unprepared for their future and I am left confused (along with depressed and discouraged) as I try and figure out what do we do to fix this ?  

So help me out dear reader…  Do we continue to allow the nationwide media pool to provide us with the cultural junk food that provides no nutritional value or do we (to paraphrase the words of Howard Beale (actually Paddy Chayefsky the author) of the film “Network” from 1976) get “Mad as Hell and Not Take It Anymore!”  Should we insist on greater responsibility and information from those we trust to speak truth to power and are we willing as a society to put down the candy for the plate of spinach ?

How does a Democracy like ours survive with an uninformed electorate ?