“I think it would be
fun to run a newspaper.”
- Charles Foster Kane in “Citizen Kane”
Nobody is having much fun running a newspaper today. We all
have heard the stories of small newspapers folding, bigger newspapers being
consolidated, and the largest newspapers struggling for readership in this day
of electronic media. But is there a much
larger death to consider: that of the craft of journalism, itself?
Journalism has always included an element of interpretation;
of adding the experience and background – plus the research – of a journalist
to the mere facts of a news story. But,
with 24-hour news, the viewer is being asked to do the interpretation – without
benefit of any of these.
The first time this really came to my attention was,
of all things, during the 1989 World Series. Shortly before game 3 was to begin
in San Francisco, the area was hit by a magnitude 6.9 earthquake. The
play-by-play announcers were suddenly thrown into the role of reporting
breaking news. When a fire broke out on the horizon, one commentator speculated
on the location. He was wrong – by miles. But the word went out on national
television, and panicked relatives flooded phone lines to find out if loved
ones in that area were okay. By the time the error had been corrected, the
damage was already done.
Since that time, there has been live coverage of car chases,
SWAT operations, terrorist attacks, and may other such events, where the
announcers and the viewing public were put in the position of trying to figure
out the who, what, when, where, and why together. This is not journalism. It’s
really not even reporting.
We are talking about a profession that has been forced to
change with the times; a profession that is having a very hard time doing it. Newsroom
staffs are being decimated. Time is the master, and quality suffers. In 2012,
the Pew
Research Center (at that time known as the Project for Excellence in
Journalism) estimated that the median length of a local TV news story
was 41 seconds. And that was for stories with video. The median “reader” was 22 seconds!
Today, obituaries for journalism come from all political sides, conservative
and liberal,
alike.
And I’m not talking about honesty and objectivity. Not yet.
(I’ll get to that next week.)
No comments:
Post a Comment