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There are, every day, dozens of things that make me despair of humanity, western civilization, and the American national news media. Far more than anything that happens in politics, the news media in this country makes me despair.
We sink huge quantities of attention into things that don't matter (balloon boy, Levi Johnson, State Dinner Crashers, and the like). We get married to narratives that have no basis in reality (Iraq had WMDs, the February 2009 economic stimulus didn't work, and yes, I do feel comfortable equating the factuality of those two assertions), to the point where anyone who points out the facts is decried as being "fringe" and "not serious." Because shouting louder lends credibility or something.
Then there are the Extremely Important Events that get completely ignored.
The United Arab Emirates has, over the past few days, been teetering on the brink of some major debt default. (Okay, that's an oversimplification and factually incorrect in the nuances, but we're talking about a very real possibility of financial meltdown in the financial center of the Arab world. The implications here are not small.) Basically, a very big government-owned (and therefore implicitly backed) corporation is in danger of defaulting on its debt.
But I only know about this because I read economics blogs. I would also know about it if I were British and read the Financial Times regularly, in fairness to that quality publication. But would I have noticed it as a casual reader of the New York Times and the Washington Post? Not bloody likely. There is nothing about Dubai on the homepage of either publication. There are stories if you click through to the World News pages, but they are wire stories, not features.
The New York Times spent the morning chewing up space with Serena Williams (why on Earth are we rewarding her behavior with more press?), a blacklisted elevator operator, a Nazi trial in Europe, and Obama's Afghanistan strategy. (I grant you that the latter two of those are in fact newsworthy, and the last one does belong on the front page--and maybe the second to last one too, since I keep forgetting about the nutcases who still attempt to deny the Holocaust.) The homepage of the Washington Post is dedicated to Afghanistan, health care reform, and internal Republican Party politics. News, but most of the reporting not particularly informative if you already know something about the subject, and nothing earth-shattering.
Why does this piss me off so much?
The whole point of having news media is that they find out what is important for us and prioritize the news. News media has the function of determining what is news. At least in theory. The press are intended to be gatekeepers. To achieve that end, they have (or had, since it's been almost completely dismantled in pursuit of profit) the news apparatus: fact checkers, beat reporters who know their subjects, and connections that allow journalists access to information, in turn keeping citizens informed.
Except there are many days that I can't for the life of me see how newspapers are fulfilling that function. And the newspapers are saints, compared to TV news.
So how are people in this country getting and staying informed? By and large, it seems to me that they aren't. That is the crux of our problem.
We sink huge quantities of attention into things that don't matter (balloon boy, Levi Johnson, State Dinner Crashers, and the like). We get married to narratives that have no basis in reality (Iraq had WMDs, the February 2009 economic stimulus didn't work, and yes, I do feel comfortable equating the factuality of those two assertions), to the point where anyone who points out the facts is decried as being "fringe" and "not serious." Because shouting louder lends credibility or something.
Then there are the Extremely Important Events that get completely ignored.
The United Arab Emirates has, over the past few days, been teetering on the brink of some major debt default. (Okay, that's an oversimplification and factually incorrect in the nuances, but we're talking about a very real possibility of financial meltdown in the financial center of the Arab world. The implications here are not small.) Basically, a very big government-owned (and therefore implicitly backed) corporation is in danger of defaulting on its debt.
But I only know about this because I read economics blogs. I would also know about it if I were British and read the Financial Times regularly, in fairness to that quality publication. But would I have noticed it as a casual reader of the New York Times and the Washington Post? Not bloody likely. There is nothing about Dubai on the homepage of either publication. There are stories if you click through to the World News pages, but they are wire stories, not features.
The New York Times spent the morning chewing up space with Serena Williams (why on Earth are we rewarding her behavior with more press?), a blacklisted elevator operator, a Nazi trial in Europe, and Obama's Afghanistan strategy. (I grant you that the latter two of those are in fact newsworthy, and the last one does belong on the front page--and maybe the second to last one too, since I keep forgetting about the nutcases who still attempt to deny the Holocaust.) The homepage of the Washington Post is dedicated to Afghanistan, health care reform, and internal Republican Party politics. News, but most of the reporting not particularly informative if you already know something about the subject, and nothing earth-shattering.
Why does this piss me off so much?
The whole point of having news media is that they find out what is important for us and prioritize the news. News media has the function of determining what is news. At least in theory. The press are intended to be gatekeepers. To achieve that end, they have (or had, since it's been almost completely dismantled in pursuit of profit) the news apparatus: fact checkers, beat reporters who know their subjects, and connections that allow journalists access to information, in turn keeping citizens informed.
Except there are many days that I can't for the life of me see how newspapers are fulfilling that function. And the newspapers are saints, compared to TV news.
So how are people in this country getting and staying informed? By and large, it seems to me that they aren't. That is the crux of our problem.