Why Does the American Media Get Big Stories Wrong?

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/why-does-the-american-media-get-big-stories-wrong/276454/

by mlla • 13 years ago

45 43 13 years ago

eksith• 13 years ago

"American Media" is only a label for the most prominent examples, I.E. the "Mainstream" we all keep hearing about. Elsewhere, many of these stories were picked up early, however these days, The Media has an "over-the-shoulder" syndrome in which they keep looking at what others are doing and try to beat them at the ratings.

There's also a prevailing trend to crowdsource journalism E.G. CNN's iReport. And we can see the results of the unfiltered variety with that Reddit misidentified bomber debacle. Lesser controversies easily slip through without much backlash.

This is nothing new, of course. The soapboxes are now digital and the speaking trumpets are in geosynchronous orbit.

kaoD2• 13 years ago

It's not "American Media". It's "Media". The issue is worlwide.

chalst2• 13 years ago

I think the US faces some distinctive problems - in particular, the rest of the world has not seen the same kind of collapse of quality local reporting that lies behind the Bell, CA example he gives.

knowtheory• 13 years ago

And incidentally, that's one of the primary findings of the FCC's Information Needs of Communities report: http://www.fcc.gov/info-needs-communities

National media is more or less fine. Local and state reporting has all but disappeared.

kaoD2• 13 years ago

(citation needed)

Reporting is awful everywhere and at any scale.

Media's job is no longer to spread information, but to create opinion. They're not mass informative media, they're mass propaganda tools.

That's why they lack quality: their goal is fulfilled even if their quality as informative media is very low.

angelgcuartero• 13 years ago

Quite right, it happens all around. It sometimes makes me think if the ultimate mission of media is disinformation.

DanBC• 13 years ago

Yes. But I guess if they had missed out the "American" we'd have people saying "The world is bigger than America".

I live in England. We have the BBC. BBC Radio Four news coverage is excellent, but even that is lousy when it comes to a lot of international news. The BBC World Service is better, for obvious reasons, and domestic BBC does make extensive use of their foreign correspondents. Just not so much in news bulletin coverage.

UK print media, especially newspapers, especially the lower end, is a cesspit of vile idiocy. I'm surprised there's no movie about it. It's disturbing how often the Daily Mail gets posted to HN.

arethuza• 13 years ago

To be fair to the Daily Mail, I don't think it's all "vile idiocy" - just about 98% of it (especially the "sidebar of shame").

waxjar2• 13 years ago

That headline makes me cringe. Media is the plural of medium, they do things, they don't does things.

icesoldier• 13 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun

waxjar2• 13 years ago

"Media" isn't a collective noun, in the same way that "apples" isn't a collective noun. It's the plural form of "medium".

kmasters• 13 years ago

I dont think the media "gets it wrong", although they do endemically, I think that media is reflective of ourselves.

If we dont see a threat, we dont react. If we dont see a threat the media wont react to it either.

This can operate in reverse, if we see a threat but the govt tells us its not a threat, the media will try to soothe our anxiety.

Maybe what the media fears is being drowned out by the mill of a thousand voices, none of which have any credibility, and so they follow the "dont throw pearls to swine" rule of not getting in the way and wasting their breath.

In the world of Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Jesse Ventura, Rand Paul, who wants to hear facts?

The "media" as we call it, is adjusting to the ability of our collective digestive tract to consume what they have to say.

And their adjustment is to say screw it. Its just (expletive ommitted)

Vivtek3• 13 years ago

the American people, who want the media to rally around officials in times of crisis

Bah. Speak for yourself, Atlantic Magazine. (Especially during manufactured crises...)

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

Of course he doesn't mean every single American - he's making a generalization. But kindly note that in the weeks after 9/11, fully three quarters of Americans supported a military engagement against countries that harbored terrorists - even, explicitly, if thousands of innocent civilians of those countries would be killed.

mercurial3• 13 years ago

"Think of the children" and "think of the terrorists" are the twin udders of "the end justifies the means" policies.

VLM2• 13 years ago

"Of course he doesn't mean every single American"

Oh he was so close and yet so far. He means almost no Americans on a percentage basis of the total, not all of them. The linked article was an excellent study of the trees but missed the forest. The root of the problem is narrowcasting aka local maxima seeking.

Example. Lets say the country initially boots up with 10 million news consumers. Consumers, you know, like saprophytes, but I digress. Your individual media co. gets 10% of the consumers. Boss decides to boost his quarterly executive bonus by tabloid-ing it up a bit. So the "older" woman anchor gets fired and replaced by a perky college cheerleader, if it bleeds it leads, maybe some top ten lists (the equivalent of internet link bait). Hurray the exec got his bonus because your share increased to 20%. The bad news is the population, repelled by repulsive infotainment, shrunk to 5 million total.

Well, no problem, you've got 20% of the consumers, outta 5 million consumers. Well, gotta get a bonus somehow. We can blame the drop in total consumers on the internet or facebook or just guilt trip people or whatever... but we've gotta boost that 20% impact to a higher percentage. Maybe some B-list celebrity interviews, some lasagna recipes, some onsite "news" reporting about the state fair... Woooo Hoooo we're owning the market we went up to 25% of consumers hurray huge bonuses and backslapping for all... well, except for the repellant effect dropping total industry wide audience to only 2 million now.

Repeat this cycle a couple times and you end up with worthless American news media that almost no one watches. 95% of the population, literally, won't watch "the news" on TV for free, its such garbage.

The other "saw the trees, missed the forest" moment in the article is mass media is huge corporations owned by huge corporations. Total lack of diversity. Only five men in charge of five companies control about 99% of what Americans watch on TV. What a surprise that a big business propaganda conduit is boring and uninformative.

DougWebb• 13 years ago

...fully three quarters of Americans supported a military engagement against countries that harbored terrorists...

The problem is that Iraq wasn't one of those countries, but the media mostly supported President Cheney's^h^h^h^h Bush's desire to invade anyway.

The American media is also hugely biased when it comes to reporting casualties too... every American soldier's death was and continues to be noted, but the huge number of soldiers with severe injuries is rarely counted, and the enormous number of local civilians and soldiers killed and injured are hardly mentioned at all. Aside from military families who know what's really going on, American warfare is presented to Americans as if it was just another one of our action movies. That's why we seem so ignorant about our impact on the world.

Vivtek3• 13 years ago

Don't even get me started. It was a manufactured crisis and the manufactured media response was yellow journalism at its best. There were hundreds of thousands of people out in the streets protesting that travesty of a fake war - which we're still hemorrhaging blood and money for - and yet the media drumbeat was always that the "American people" "want" the "media" to "rally around" authority.

Ten years later, I'm still experiencing a spike in blood pressure thinking about it. F*ing American Reichstag.

lazyjones3• 13 years ago

I don't know how relevant this is to the american media, but here in small european countries, media corruption is rampant: government agencies (in particular ministries) bribe newspapers and magazines with expensive ads in order to avoid the (rightfully) bad press and possibly investigative journalism.

mercurial3• 13 years ago

I live in a small European country (Denmark) and I'm not aware of this behaviour. Do you have more specifics?

johnchristopher• 13 years ago

I would guess (based on wild and unsubstantiated assertions on my part) that parent is referring to eastward European countries such as the Balkans.

epo• 13 years ago

Citation required.

lazyjones3• 13 years ago

here you are: http://www.viennareview.net/news/austria-briefs (just one of many similar cases)

crimsonzagar3• 13 years ago

Media is wrong? No. Perhaps the following lines put it succinctly.

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth." - Steve Jobs

Guess, we have to do away with "when you're young" part now. Internet keeps us young.

bryanlarsen• 13 years ago

You're both right. That's a great explanation for why media is wrong.

But the article is not titled well: the article gives reasons why the media misses many important stories. To oversimplify, not enough resources, and resources in the wrong places. The OP also gives reasons why those resources aren't allocated well, but that overlaps quite well with your Jobs quote.

duedl0r3• 13 years ago

"We do X, because people want X" is the stupidest argument I've ever heard. The funny thing is, those arguments are always coming from CEOs making X.

How about we were made to like that, because CEOs of X can optimize their profits? But ok, everybody can tell me now that people can make their own choice. In fact, they can't.

IT'S THE TRUTH.

(btw ending a thought with "it's the truth" is yet another incredible stupid thing...oh boy)

crimsonzagar3• 13 years ago

hmm it does feel stupid to ground oneself to absoluteness when everything around is relative.

Ntrails• 13 years ago

They didn't create a group of people who wanted unbalanced press coverage of events in line with their own viewpoints.

In British print media there is a whole range of right wing, middle and left wing newspapers. They all have a readership, and they all serve that readerships requirements. None of them created their readers thirst for leftist spin, or right wing shock - it exists and so they sell to it.

Often times the left and right wing extremes are owned by the same parent company. They don't care what we want, as long as we buy it from them.

6d0debc071• 13 years ago

I start a company. You start a news company and report on me. Over time, I notice that a lot of people are reporting on me and I don't really control my image that well, so I start a press office. And the press office is mostly honest with you, because so many people are reporting on me and no-one would listen to what I had to say if I wasn't mostly honest.

So, there's no advantage in investigative journalism, which is relatively expensive. So, your media company hires less people to report on me and more people to just redistribute my press releases.

Now, at some point, I'm going to notice no-one's really reporting on me any more. And what do you think is going to happen then, once I've got you all over that barrel - you think I'm going to keep talking about myself honestly? Even if I will, someone won't, and that someone will have an advantage over me in the marketplace so, over time, she'll win.

That wouldn't be a conspiracy, at least not in the classical sense. You can get there with everyone starting off reasonably honest and if you shoot all the conspirators, then you'll just be right back where you started with the same underlying problem: Investigative reporting has to give you an edge in the marketplace that can't be eroded by the person you're investigating.

I'm not saying that's the only factor at work - though many news companies do seem to be more about second and third order content aggregation than they are about investigative reporting, especially when it comes to their relationship with organisations like the police. But - it's not necessarily about giving people what they want, or about a conspiracy, the news agencies can evolve into situations where they're going to be wrong. No-one needs to conspire, and no-one, at least on the news agency's part or the consumer's part - and very few initially on the part of the initial provider - needs to want it to be that way.

rumcajz• 13 years ago

American conservatives adopting chomskian media analysis? What's going on here?

brown9-2• 13 years ago

Surveying stories as diverse as the Soviet spies that infiltrated the U.S. government during the Cold War, the bankruptcy of Enron, the anthrax attacks of 2001, the run-up to the Iraq War, and the Vioxx scandal, he points out that major news organizations have repeatedly missed or inexplicably ignored newsworthy facts and events of the utmost significance.

It will always be possible to pick certain stories or facts that "the media" have missed - because the world of "facts" is so large and no organization could always be either right about everything or omniscient. The world we live in is large and many things happen in it, and most of them are not easily (or even possibly) discoverable.

This sort of critique seems like it would ignore the fact that there are some stories that "the media" would have gotten "right", whatever that means.

You will always be able to find things that were missed.

squozzer• 13 years ago

Here's my hypothesis -- The US Media gets things wrong because the news really isn't relevant. So errors of either commission or omission don't really matter -- sure, the occasional journalist resigns (e.g. Dan Rather after W's National Guard story) or someone goes to jail. Certainly the story is relevant to them, but not to the rest of us.

In most cases, when the story breaks, it's already over. And when a lesson can be drawn from it, it's usually the wrong one (e.g. "they hate us for our freedoms") but that's decided by the propagandists.

You might rightfully ask, "what about stories whose outcomes remain undecided, e.g. Syria? I doubt the outcome, or at least how the US will act, is undecided. But we're not likely to learn about such decisions until after they've been implemented, unless someone really needs to stick their finger in the wind before acting.

graycat• 13 years ago

(1) The 'news' is bait for the ad hook. (2) Good bait needs to get attention. (3) The ancient Greeks discovered that a sure-fire way to get and hold the attention of an audience was to use the techniques we now call 'formula fiction'. (4) The news is staffed heavily by humanities majors well acquainted with formula fiction. (5) The news, in order to get attention, is really mostly just light entertainment based on the techniques of formula fiction. (6) The old idea that a free press was to help create an "informed citizenry" as needed for a good democracy rarely competes with the approach of light entertainment. (7) There is more information available, but long "the medium is the message" held true -- that is, when have just a few major news outlets, those outlets go for the mass audience and omit special interests, the long tail, details, etc. and just stick with their light entertainment. (8) With the Internet, there are millions of 'outlets' so that we can be on the way to much more information beyond just light entertainment.

For the OP, for the light entertainment based on the techniques of formula fiction, getting details, facts, etc. correct was not very important. This is not new: There is an Andy Hardy movie from the 1930s that has Andy laughing at the poor accuracy of the news. The audiences for that movie in the 1930s were quite prepared to laugh at newspapers. For anyone with the discipline of a good STEM background, news is outrageously bad and irresponsible junk.

Why Does the American Media Get Big Stories Wrong?

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