The perfect epitaph for establishment journalism

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/independent-epitaph-establishment-journalism

by mcphilip • 13 years ago

86 26 13 years ago

VLM2• 13 years ago

Establishment journalism has long slipped entirely into infotainment.

I would imagine having to report on actual non-infotainment news must infuriate those self-selected and heavily hyper optimized to report pure infotainment.

This is the root of establishment journalist anger toward Snowden etc... They're sitting there fuming that they could be making money doing their business as usual showing Kardashian bikini pictures, talking about Apples new iPhone, cross promoting their networks primetime sitcom offerings tonight, celebrity guest interviews about lasagna recipes, all the "greats" of infotainment, but this bastard is forcing them to talk about non-profitable non-infotainment topics, so he makes them mad. Just like forcing me to write about ladies fashion would make me mad.

selmnoo• 13 years ago

A big portion of establishment journalism is now infotainment, but it's unclear if it's the infotainment corporations that are to be blamed here. I know many journalists who work for these 'infotainment' businesses who hate the work they're doing but keep doing it anyway because the demand for real news has severely diminished in recent time. If you're a journalist and you want to make money to pay the rent, you probably have to settle on working for an infotainment company. Right now the economic incentive is to get as many eyeballs as possible to show ads to... and the way to do that is to provide infotainment, not real news.

I think what this really underscores is another folly of capitalism, or at least the need for government funded or government owned media a la BBC or PBS.

mturmon• 13 years ago

"Establishment journalism has long slipped entirely into infotainment."

This remark, and your whole comment, is not well-informed.

When you talk about "establishment journalism" (in the U.S.), you're talking about NYT, WaPo, WSJ, and a handful of other outlets like this. Each of these papers has its strengths and weaknesses, but "infotainment" is not the main weakness. (Take a look at the NYT front page today, for example.)

In other words, your gripe about "infotainment" may be the case, but that's happening in a different segment of the media, not the one the OP was targeting.

It's too bad, because the original post did have a good point, and was heading in the right direction. Probably the main problem with the NYT (I'm a subscriber, and I at least look at its front page every day) is that it does not like to rock the boat. It's an establishment paper. Some ideas, even if having merit, are simply out of bounds. ("Everything from A to C" is what Christopher Hitchens, in his pre-9/11 days, used to say.)

This "not rock the boat" tendency explains why the (ostensibly liberal) NYT had on board Judy Miller, a largely-discredited cheerleader for the Iraq war. She had access to top Bush administration sources, and she seemed to know what was happening and going to happen. Thus, she became a mouthpiece. The NYT, in this case, was willing to sacrifice being correct for merely being abreast of the establishment narrative.

That's the real problem with the high end of establishment journalism.

VLM2• 13 years ago

You make some good points.

One interesting thing to contemplate is how would an establishment journalism organization do infotainment... we'll, videos of Kardashians in bikinis are not going to work in ink on paper physical newspapers. Maybe the way they would entertain while sorta informing would be to allow discredited cheerleaders a propaganda mouthpiece for entertainment of the readers (in addition to your valid point about just keeping up to date with current events). Some topics are out of bounds because rocking the boat usually isn't entertainment. And everyone else in their industry is in a race toward the fluff, and there's at least some interaction between those different lines of business, maybe not a lot, but some. If they intentionally went for pure infotainment, the wouldn't have to go too far off course, just a little further along the path they're apparently already on.

I'm too young to do physical papers. I checked out nytimes.com and "Upworthy’s Viral Content Is Taking Off" apparently about youtube marketing. "The new albums of Pusha T and Cam’ron show they have..." "Mr. Gunn, a recent Emmy Award recipient, has emerged as a breakout star of “Project Runway.”" "William Wegman lives with his family and oft-depicted dogs in a pair of connected buildings in Chelsea." To be fair I admit they keep real news at the top and push the fluff downpage, but its looking perhaps 1/3 to 1/2 fluffy on their web front page. What they need are some lasagna recipes, add some young women posing in bikinis, tone down the editorializing, cut the hard news by about half, that would make them yellow journalism infotainment with the best. The point isn't that it could be turned into yellow journalism, which is obvious, but that its not far to go. They're about a new editor and one page redesign away, not really all that far.

devx• 13 years ago

Ironic that it's coming from the "Independent". They probably don't even realize the irony themselves.

clarkmoody3• 13 years ago

It's quite a striking evolution, going from the truth-to-power press of Vietnam-era America to the Democrat mouthpiece lapdog media we see today.

Rather ironic that the Obama campaign actively opposed "warrantless wiretapping," and now the press isn't holding him accountable at all. We won't visit the other equally-ironic points where his policy doesn't quite match up with his campaign.

pekk2• 13 years ago

You lose all credibility when you assert that the entire (US) media is beholden to the Democrats.

clarkmoody3• 13 years ago

Well it's a comment on an article about the establishment media, so let's assume I'm talking about ABC, NBC, CBS, NYT, etc.

Now, think back to the Bush 43 administration and contrast those media outlets' treatment of his presidency with their reporting today.

pekk2• 13 years ago

I'm afraid the need to actually investigate and analyze has not been obsoleted by the occasional leak or espionage.

It should trouble us when all our news about a subject is coming from one source which we have no way of checking up on.

droopybuns• 13 years ago

I get the impression that their job is to take the press releases verbatum directly from the government. And then, because they are people persons, they deliver them directly to the public, because they are super good with people, which is awesome.

skidoo2• 13 years ago

To be more clear, the Fairness Doctrine was dismantled by the Reagan administration and permanently shelved by Obama himself, meaning that for the press in America to be held accountable for its own actions is now somehow contrary to their constitutional rights to free speech. I think the full implications are just barely being seen publicly, but essentially, non-biased media is absolutely a thing of the past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine

And while citizen journalism can allow for unbiased reporting, with no editorial guidelines or presence then it also opens the floodgates for citizen journalism to be even less restrained than commercial media in terms of lunacy.

icebraining• 13 years ago

You do realize we're discussing the Independent, a UK newspaper, not subject to the Fairness Doctrine or the lack thereof, right?

skidoo2• 13 years ago

I'm implying what's happening in the UK is not a new or uncommon thing. Real freedom of the press is on its way out the door in general, which I think should suggest that any ideal of a healthy democracy is a pipedream, particularly when the freest nations are increasingly convoluted.

protomyth• 13 years ago

"while citizen journalism can allow for unbiased reporting"

I would say that's really not true. I am trying to think of a time when we didn't have biased media or citizenry. Newspapers have picked candidates forever and its pretty easy to see their leanings. Humans believe things and it shows in the reporting.

Part of this stems from people's weird belief that politics was more polite in the early days, which is just so much trash from "a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse-swapper and the nightman."

The demise of the Fairness Doctrine was an acknowledgement of reality and a 1st amendment win. The government has no place holding anyone accountable for speech other than as an action of an aggrieved party in the courts.

Our problem these days, is that we really don't have news networks. News networks don't make money. We have pundit networks. No one is doing an actual news broadcast. They all have their political point of view.

Karunamon• 13 years ago

The problem with the Fairness Doctrine is that it requires you to devote equal time to the other "side" without regard to how reasonable it is. Equal time for rabidly political anti-vaxxers? Oh joy.

Giving equal time to absolute nutters only serves to legitimize them.

And I also take issue with this: non-biased media is absolutely a thing of the past.

Depends on what you mean by non-biased. It's impossible to have a complete lack of bias for a couple of reasons. First because there's inherent bias in the stories you choose to cover, and second because a dry reporting of facts absent any kind of analysis is terrifically boring and less informative than the alternative.

The best thing you could do as a journalism group in such a case would be to remove yourself from commercial influence, and take an objective a stance as possible on the stories you choose to publish and how you analyze them. Being permanently vigilant of the inherent bias goes a long way towards correcting it, IMHO.

DanBC3• 13 years ago

In theory the DA Notice[1] system is, in context of UK publishing, a reasonable solution. In practice government has abused it, and the oversight mechanisms are not working, so we have to rely on whistleblowers and journalists and FOI requests.

The UK MP's expenses scandal was scooped by an American journalist working in England who was surprised by the lack of actual investigation, so she made a bunch of FOI requests for expenses.

Circulation figures for UK press is depressing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unit...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DA-Notice

Weird that a story about two English newspapers has Americans commenting about American newspapers.

gadders4• 13 years ago

The UK expenses scandal was publicised by the Daily Telegraph after a "whistle blower" gave them a CD with details of the claims on them.

DanBC3• 13 years ago

The leak happened because there were FoI requests being contested by parliament.

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

A February 2008 Freedom of Information Act request for the release of details of MPs' expenses claims was allowed by an Information Tribunal. The House of Commons Authorities challenged the decision on the grounds that it was "unlawfully intrusive".[6] In May 2008, the High Court (England and Wales) ruled in favour of releasing the details of MPs' expenses claims.[7][8] In April 2009 the House of Commons authorities announced that publication of expenses, with certain information deemed "sensitive" removed,[9] would be made in July 2009.[10]
However before this could take place, a full uncensored copy of the expenses records and documentation was leaked to the Daily Telegraph, which began publishing details in daily instalments from 8 May 2009.

gadders4• 13 years ago

It's a fine line. I can see where Greenwald is coming from, but I don't think that gives journalists carte blanche to just release whatever they feel like without concern for national security.

The perfect epitaph for establishment journalism

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