Thursday, June 23, 2005
Just Say Noruba
Source: Huffington Post Arianna Huffington writes:I was thinking a lot over the weekend about the news and about how the news becomes the news, and then I read Jay Rosen’s brilliant take on the Downing Street Memo coverage -- or lack thereof. Rosen elaborates on Josh Marshall’s assertion that "news stories have a 24 hour audition on the news stage, and if they don't catch fire in that 24 hours, there's no second chance." Rosen’s theory is that blogs have become the news cycle’s appeals court, and that the Downing Street Memo story is still alive because it won on appeal. And thank God.
But, unlike a traditional court, the Blog Circuit Court of Appeals lacks an enforcement arm. The only way its decisions can be enforced is by constant reiteration of the decision.
Which brings me back to this weekend. If you were to get your news only from television, you’d think the top issue facing our country right now is an 18-year-old girl named Natalee who went missing in Aruba. Every time one of these stories comes up, like, say, Michael Jackson, when it’s finally over I think, what a relief, now we can get back to real news. But we never do. When one of these big league nonstories ends, they just call up a new one from the minors... and off they go with another round of breathless reporting. Anything to not have to actually report actual news.
When defending these choices, news execs inevitably fall back on the old "we're just giving the people what they want." But are they? Fox News averages around two and a quarter million viewers in primetime; CNN hovers just under a million; MSNBC pulls in a quarter million. We have 280 million people in the country. That means that tens of millions of people actually don't want what they're being given -- and that there are huge slices of audience a real news operation could go after.
The mainstream media regularly confuse interesting with important. What's more, they don't even do the former very well, and they largely ignore the latter. MORE
# posted by ATN @ 10:58 AM 
