Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media

Everyone from President Obama to Ted Koppel is bemoaning a decline in journalistic substance, seriousness, and sense of proportion. But the author, a longtime advocate of these values, takes a journey through the digital-media world and concludes there isn’t any point in defending the old ways. Consumer-obsessed, sensationalist, and passionate about their work, digital upstarts are undermining the old media—and they may also be pointing the way to a brighter future.

By James Fallows
The Atlantic

Just after last fall’s midterm elections, Ted Koppel, for 25 years the face of Nightline on ABC, wrote in The Washington Post about journalism’s modern decline. “Much of the American public used to gather before the electronic hearth every evening,” Koppel wrote, referring to an era that ran through roughly the 1980s,

while Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Frank Reynolds and Howard K. Smith offered relatively unbiased accounts of information that their respective news organizations believed the public needed to know … It was an imperfect, untidy little Eden of journalism where reporters were motivated to gather facts about important issues. We didn’t know that we could become profit centers. No one had bitten into that apple yet.

The column was called “The Case Against News We Can Choose,” and it said that the shift toward a more market-minded, profit-driven journalism was both irreversible and destructive. “The need for clear, objective reporting in a world of rising religious fundamentalism, economic interdependence and global ecological problems is probably greater than it has ever been,” Koppel said. But we were less likely than before to get the fair, steady view we need, because “we are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful of trusted gatekeepers; we’re now a million or more clusters of consumers, harvesting information from like-minded providers.”

Anyone who has read, watched, or listened to the news has an idea of what Koppel is worried about. The election cycle just behind us was dominated by very bitter views and accusations, on issues likely to matter very little in the long run. Candidates denounced “the deficit” without seriously proposing to do anything about it. “The question of how the US should tackle its mounting national debt has been relegated to a bunch of Punch and Judy bumper stickers that bear as little relation to its fiscal reality as astrology does to astronomy,” a Financial Times analyst wrote on the day before the election. “The same applies to infrastructure, education, immigration—pretty much anything that touches on America’s future competitiveness.” The same as well for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; nuclear threats from North Korea or Iran; world trends in food and energy. Elections are how we face big issues, except when we can’t.

(Original here.)