As a result, there is a growing void in American news media. Fewer Americans watch the once-dominant outlets. More are turning to the internet to find news but sometimes find the veracity of the reporting easily questioned and sometimes flat wrong, either forcing people, already short on time and patience, to become detectives if they want to know the truth, or casually reinforcing destructive stereotypes in a willing audience. For many news consumers, the internet has become nothing more than isolated cliques in separate echo chambers competing to reach the highest levels of invective and indignation. And apart from short bursts of relevance on a scattering of outlets, returning to broadcast media doesn’t improve the situation much. And no matter how hard we might wish it not to be so, American print media is on a rapid decline that may only reach bottom with the closing of the last presses. The final bastion of consumer-financed journalism is on its last legs, the corporate model is fatally flawed and the only public-financed TV outlet with any credibility is the BBC and even they make mistakes, but at least they apologize. The appetite for hard, unvarnished, viewer-first video journalism with skepticism at its core is real and growing even as news media collapses into a void.
The rapid consolidation of media outlets coupled with the explosion of the internet-as-amplifier, has produced an adversarial media landscape that is losing its ability to report real news through the clamor. Pick an issue, any issue, and most Americans can tell you without looking which side a given media outlet will appear to take on the matter. Even if the vast majority of those people are wrong, at what point will the truth seep into their consciousness? On what medium, listening to what personality will things suddenly click for them, enabling them to discriminate between a shocking but false accusation and a stunning but true investigation? Will it be the sixteenth time they see the “Shocking Developments” fly-in graphic or the seventeenth? When are Tea Partiers going to start trusting Rachel Maddow? How about Brit Hume, will the progressives on Twitter give him the benefit of the doubt? Or vice versa? We all doubt it.
Most news outlets still suffer from the traditional news affliction of seeking the lone, white, homeless mother with kids in another State instead of spotlighting the sea of homeless minorities sleeping under glass towers in their own backyard. Regional biases like this exist everywhere and only serve to reinforce stereotypes. U.S. media caters to nearly every type of bias America has imported over the years. But the more the media fragments into increasingly narrower categories, the harder it is to finance the entire model without a non-stop spectacle of commercialism. And the lower the ratings go, the more susceptible to sponsor influence media outlets become. And while much attention has been paid, of late, to rejuvenating local news and introducing concepts like “hyper-local” news and “crowd-funding,” all worthy projects, the business models they employ increasingly rely almost exclusively on solo operators, stringers and part-time staff. These operations are great for exposés on street life, interesting new stuff and some provocative long-form documentary film, but unless these journalists are backed by a courageous news organization, they’re unlikely to uncover the next Watergate. They might get lucky with the next Monica Lewinsky or they might get tricky with hidden cameras, they might even have a cell-cam that captures a random occurrence of actual news value, but if they can’t trust their employers to back them up when all hell breaks loose, how can we expect them to take that risk? How can we expect journalism to operate in the most dangerous arenas if they know that ruffling the wrong set of feathers is increasingly likely to end their careers, or at least get them fired? If most of the suffering and conflicts of the world arise out of disagreements over misconceptions, and one of the tasks of journalism is to clear away misconceptions, can we not measure the efficacy of journalism along scales of regional, national and global suffering and conflict, at least a little bit? Imagine the impact if CNN had been ruthless in pursuit of truth during the great American debates of our time, from the war in Iraq to health care reform.
Will people, tired of hearing their friends debate the same sound bites over and over again, be willing to try a new model? Are people ready to set aside right versus left and embrace truth versus falsehood, integrity versus corruption, and relevant versus irrelevant as the paradigms of journalistic credibility? Would the promise of fair, hard, real, skeptical journalism resonate in a world over-saturated with noise and unable to distinguish a signal? Changes in the market show that the entire world seems to be ready for an information source they can trust, that they don’t have to defend to anyone. But is the world ready to pay for it? Is the world coming to understand that the corporate model is corrupt, that the public model is mistrusted, and that the print subscription model is going broke? Do the world’s Democracies know how important journalism is to the perpetuation of their species? In a world devoid of all but the profit motive, will citizens be willing to pay for the news they need to make informed decisions in an increasingly crowded and fast-paced society? If you can answer these questions for yourself, please take another moment to take this survey. Thank you.
