Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All

Much of the News on TV is not "News" at all. It is entertainment and/or opinion. The political News is mostly strong highly-biased opinion. Most of the "News" available is sensational reporting that has no impact on the lives of ordinary Americans. Ordinary Americans need real News about important issues that truly effect their lives. However, most of these real issues are not sensational and sexy. Therefore, they can not sell enough product for advertisers. Advertisers almost always reach for the most sensational of issues to bring to the public. The bottom line is that there is a dumbing down of information that is provided to most TV viewers. What is called "News" is usually not News at all, but really some type of exploitive reporting designed to "capture" the viewer at an emotional & visceral level and "glue" that viewer to the TV for tens and hundreds of hours so that the TV source can pour out commercials that are in themselves often exploitive. Media (351/1)

... to Tom Fenton on his comprehensive book as well as to the guts to finally say what needed to be said. Mr. Fenton points at "wasted air time", "lost trust", and a "disillusioned audience". I would add, that the on-going trial reporting was "new" - a decade ago. Since then the American audience has figured out that time stands still in court rooms. In the meantime, "real", newsworthy history is developing like 9-1-1, which was planned and worked on - for years! Americans do not trust TV news because too often these reports focus on "sensationalized" news as a way out of what is happening. Whether Scott Peterson did blink or not or Martha Stewart slept well in jail is NOT news. I am hoping that Mr. Fenton will soon analyze how U.S. domestic news reporting (though cheaper) isn't any better. Every day, our media misses a chance to be the watch dog, who announces developing catastrophes, foreign and domestic. E.g. In 12/04, instead of reporting that US students' math skills dropped below OECD average, something so dramatic that it might cost U.S. kids the chance for a decent paying job in the future, TV reported about Scott Peterson's case day-in-and-out. Eventually the American public might awaken to the news that US kids' math scores are so low, respectively that other countries' children have improved their skills so much, that IT corporations don't have any other option than hiring foreign workers with better math/computer programming skills. And, like Mr. Fenton points out so eloquently, then, again the American public might wonder "how this could happen - so suddenly"? Mr. Fenton's book is a relief to those of us who have waited for this book and an eye opener to those who are suspecting... It is a must-read book.

I think that the problem with the news as being broadcast by television, both national and local is that we consider it to be the news. If we think of it as just another form of entertainment show featuring a small team of bubble heads with puffed up hair and the ability to giggle at each other then it all makes sense. Last night a featured local story was that diesel fuel prices were higher here than a few hundred miles away so truckers were just buying enough fuel to get to where it was cheaper. So what. Every day or so we hear another American has been killed in Iraq. Every week or so a thousand Americans are killed in car crashes. Not a mention. Every month 10,000 or so people die from AIDS -- old news, no one cares. Tom Fenton's book is quite interesting from an international news point of view. It joins with a bunch of other books lamenting the dumbing down, spin controlled, if it bleeds, it leads attitude of the media. I wish I could say that I felt it would do some good. Have a good retirement Tom.

Thank you, Tom Fenton, for giving our generation a public voice. All the MBA's, CPA's and LLB's have brought boardroom boredom to the small screen by confusing reporting with entertainment and bottom line statistics and you get criticized for being critical of the blunder bosses, with the publication of Bad News. They were born too late. They will never understand the intellectual and social advantage of entering this world during the Great Depression when heroic men and women inspired great hope in what should have been the worst of times; and then, moving into the adolescent years, a part of the total commitment of the Greatest Generation of World War II. Meatless meals and ration coupons were no sacrifice while GI's we knew were dying for a proud country and twenty-one dollars a month. We had stable, supportive neighborhoods; extended families, and dependable, imaginative, friends. Additional encouragement was surely provided by the poorly paid nobility of superbly dedicated teachers. All of it grew us. There was no bottom line, no money issue beyond survival. The issue was posterity. Tom, do you know of a front office exec that has used - or even understood - that word? It was the selfless platform that our founding fathers built a nation on. Too, the early newsmen at CBS knew they were builders for the future, not grasping bottom-liners. What a world of giants you followed, Tom, with those paragons of intellect and elocution, Edward R. Murrow's "boys" at CBS News: Eric Severeid, Charles Collingwood, William L. Shirer, Robert Trout, Ed Bliss, Bill Downs, Richard C. Hottelet, Howard K. Smith, Larry LeSueur, Winston Burdett, and Murrow's producer, Fred W. Friendly? All of patrician mien if not patrician birth, they were mesmerizers and rarely, if ever, spoke a word in error. That you aspired to follow them does you credit, Tom, a courageous recognition of personal worth....and you certainly fit that CBS mold, now discarded in some musty attic of fading memory, an artifact that wouldn't find a buyer on eBay or a price on the Antiques Road Show. The inspirations are long gone now, Tom, remembered and commemorated only in the minds of the elderly among us mourning the lost legacy of the great issues your words speak of in Bad News. Today's power elite believe in narrowing down the salable, simplistic, "big story" and rehashing it over and over to the exclusion of all else, even as tens of thousands dying in the darker, obscured-to-the public regions of the world are ignored. And that is as much the fault of an increasingly crass Fourth Estate, the erstwhile custodians of public conscience, as it is uncaring governments not urged into action. "It's the competition stupid!" So what if more than half the public can't find Sweden on a map. Who ever heard of Scandinavia anyway, huh! Compare those legends of the past to today's anchors and correspondents, particularly on the cable news networks that are now threatening the very existence of networ

As a former local television news producer I have been dismayed at the lack of news to be found on network television. Foreign news may not seem interesting to many, but I never thought a news show was aired to entertain us. There are plenty of other shows that do that. I agree with the author on this point. We would never have learned much at school is all we were taught had to be entertaining as well. I don't think that adding another 1/2 hour to the evening news is too much to ask for. How else are we going to find out what is going on in the world around us. Fenton's book is well written and easy to read and gives clear concise reasons why it matters.