Two themes emerge from the report: fragmentation and convergence. Sounds contradictory, but let's look at a bit of detail:

• Increasing complexity
  • At this point, there is a better available quality of news available to more people than ever before. But, there is also a great deal more substandard reporting going on. As well as more deception--how can this be? There's a proliferation of news outlets--some are very good, others are at best mouthpieces for advertisers, owners, or powerful political and economic interests. This suggests that media consumers have more choices than ever before, and there are three general observable 'trends' in media consumption that the report highlights:
• Three identifiable trends in media consumption:
  • Some media consumers are better informed--they go online, they watch public TV, stay away from corporate sources of news, go international, etc.
  • Some consumers become even more distracted--there are certainly plenty of distractions in the news--celebrity gossip (Michael Jackson, Ben n' J Lo, Natalee Holloway, etc.), cross-advertising (Fox using news to advertise its programs, for instance), even political coverage tends to focus on the 'horse race'--that is, who's ahead, rather than the substance of the candidates' campaigns--it's easy reporting and doesn't require much analysis.
  • Some consumer patterns reflect a 'journalism of affirmation'-people may read or listen to or watch what they agree with. For instance, Rush Limbaugh has a radio audience of some 20 million. His show is mostly entertainment--there isn't much there in the way of unbiased news or even verifiable fact, but people watch it and believe it. We've also discussed the recent swarm of books, some pro-Bush and some anti-Bush. This graphic shows that most people read what they agree with--there are very few crossover readers who are conservative but read books critical of the Bush White House. Conversely there are very few Bush critics who read Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly. There are a few books that populate the middle ground, but not very many. In other words, many people seek news media that re-affirms their views--not media that challenge those views.

Some other key findings:

• Growing number of news outlets chasing static/shrinking audience for news.
  • Without investing in new audiences, the long-term outlook for traditional news media isn't good.
  • Online, ethnic and alternative media audiences are growing--that's not such a bad thing. But consider the first point--network news media audience is shrinking. What does this mean for advertising? What would you expect these media outlets would have to do to continue to compete for the shrinking-yet-precious advertising dollars? Cut costs?? Perish the thought . . .
  • Tailored content on demand--more specialized media outlets (this seems more related to the 'journalism of affirmation'--people finding what they like to read/hear about. For instance, the Weekly Standard is predictably neoconservative; Commondreams predictably progressive and anti-Bush. As Abraham Lincoln once said, 'it's the sort of thing that people who like that sort of thing will like.'
• Much of the new investment in journalism is in disseminating news, not collecting it.
  • Cuts in the newsroom--now we get back to the shrinking audience part (and shrinking advertising dollars). Competition is still fierce, and research suggests what most commercial outlets are doing to stay competitive--broadcasting news, but taking shortcuts to collecting it.
  • Reduction in quality of output--the result of this cost-cutting is a reduction in the quality of news from commercial outlets. Less investigative reporting, less checking on sources, greater reliance on easily-accessible sources (e.g., from the conservative think tanks), shorter, less in-depth stories, less reporters, greater reliance on newswires (like Associated Press or Reuters), etc. Remember back to the PR part of the class: a good deal of what is sold as 'news' is actually a canned PR product. It's cheaper, and in a competitive, profit-making environment, quality is often the loser (how does WalMart keep their everyday prices so low??).
• Increasingly getting raw elements of news as end product
  • For instance, we now have 24 hour news media outlets--CNN, FNN, MSNBC, Fox Cable News Network, CNN headline news. News headlines fast and furious, with lots of running headers, fancy graphics and running footers. Analysis? Did someone say analysis? That's what the 'experts' from Cato, Heritage, AEI and other think tanks are for.
  • We get more partial reports--there is little or no context to the news. For instance, here's an example--the Abu Ghraib prison torture. Here is some of the context unseen on commercial news:
    • The Bush Administration pulled out of the International Criminal Court 3 years ago.
    • There had been reports that Guantanamo detainees subject to torture had been sent to third party countries with 'friendly' (to the US) governments where that sort of thing is routine, and where 'black prisons' administered by the CIA exist.
    • In addition, the man who was running Guantanamo's detention facility was brought to Baghdad to 'consult' on Abu Ghraib. This was uncritically reported by commercial media as a sign that the Pentagon took rumors of abuse seriously, not that they weren't being systematic enough in their torture and extraction of information.
    • Iraq's U.S. ambassador was John Negroponte, who was ambassador of Honduras in the 1980s when the CIA was backing right-wing death squads in Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Recently he was appointed director of U.S. National Intelligence.
    • No high-level civilian officials have been punished or even investigated, even though the memo allegedly 'authorizing' torture came from the White House. More recently a second memo on torture has been secured through a Freedom of Information Act.
    • Abuse has been reportedly far more widespread than either Abu Ghraib or the Gitmo Facility in Guantanamo.
    • World opinion on torture is decidedly different that what Americans are seeing on their screens--you would think that there was disagreement about whether this was a good thing or a bad thing--there is no disagreement in other parts of the world (except maybe from those 'torture friendly' U.S. allies).
    • Remember also, even if we began the war under the yet to be proved premise that Saddam posed an imminent threat with WMDs, excuse number three (two was 'Saddam's a tyrant') was we were exporting democracy and freedom. How consistent is torture with that? You know, due process and all that complicated constitution stuff?
    • The President claimed the U.S. would seek to eliminate torture worldwide, yet when presented with a legislative bill he added a statement saying that the White House was exempt from the McCain torture amendment.
  • That is some of the context of this story that is rarely presented by the commercial press. Why? It isn't necessary to claim conspiracies--that sort of reporting requires well-informed journalists, who can't crank out as many stories, who have to confirm sources, etc.--all of the things that seem to be running counter to current trends in a cost-cutting industry. Even simple patently false allegations by the Bush Administration have gone unchallenged--the president tried to claim before the war that Saddam had refused to let weapons inspectors into the country. They were in fact in the country and left when a unilaterally declared war seemed imminent. The Center for American Progress has an entire database of false statements made by the Bush White House and its neoconservative supporters (here's a more recent and well-documented report that received little if any coverage in mainstream news media). This isn't an indictment of the Bush White House--all administrations lie to some extent. But it is an abject failure on the part of corporate journalism to call leaders for lying. Why? You should have some pretty good ideas by this point in the term.
  • Less and less follow-up to selected stories--in addition, when news outlets do get it wrong, they often print or state retractions or corrections that are buried in the news, not front page. For instance, the story on the 'heightened terrorism altert' for the summer was front page news. The subsequent follow-up that questioned the timing of the announcement, the lack of coordination with other agencies and the Department of Homeland Security, and the lack of any evidence short of 'trust us' were not front page stories. The commercial media also seem to have a shorter and shorter attention span. Not convinced? Here are some stories that came and went unresolved: Paul O'Neill's exposé as an insider in the Bush White House. Richard Clarke's indictment that the White House ignored pre-9/11 warnings (yet has waged the campaign as competent fighters of terrorism). Bob Woodward's book on the events leading up to the war, suggesting as O'Neill and Clarke did that the decision to find a way to wage war with Iraq was made during the first weeks of the new administration. Bribery (by former House whip Tom DeLay) of a Michigan republican to get him to vote for the Medicare bill last winter. The deliberate cover-up of the true cost of the Medicare bill (the price tage was understated by $150 billion dollars). George Bush's military service--there hasn't yet been any evidence that he actually served in the Air National Guard in Alabama for one year in the 1970s. The theft of the 2000 election in Florida by Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris has never been reported in the commercial media.

  All of these stories have come and gone, without resolution, in the commercial media. Yes, the public may have short attention spans, but the media do reinforce this.

• journalistic standards vary
  • talk shows vs news--they are all mixed in together. Fox News is the best example of this, but it happens on all the networks. Jon Stewart almost singlehandedly took down CNN's Crossfire.
  • blurring the line between information and entertainment--Rush Limbaugh is entertainment. Bill O'Reilly is entertainment.
  • infotainment--this is the most blatant marrying of information and entertainment. Shows like 'Hard Copy,' The morning news shows, local network affiliate news, talk shows masquerading as news, infomercials masquerading as talk shows, etc

The slow death of print journalism?

According to the most recent report, stock prices of print-based outlets are down 20%. But they're still profitable, and circulation is down maybe 3% in the last year. Time claims it will move from 'magazines' to a 'multiplatform media company.' People are still consuming news, just in different forms (obviously many are electronic). As the Project for Excellence in Journalism states: "The worry is not the wondrous addition of citizen media, but the decline of fulltime,
professional monitoring of powerful institutions." The most endangered species, says the report, is the classic, big city metro newspaper. Remember our discussions of narrowcasting? We've discussed how newspapers consolidated, largly because of circulation pressures and differential advertising rates. But publications are reaching out to narrower markets (the 'journalism of affirmation'). Ethnic presses and alternative weeklies are on the rise.

As for content, here's what the study reported (pp 5-6, emphases are mine):

• "What people learn depends heavily on where they go for news. The medium may not be the message, but it no doubt influences it. In print, online and on the network evening newscasts this day, violence in Iraq, a false alarm in Washington, and protests in Afghanistan were the top stories. On cable and morning news, the trial of Michael Jackson and the Illinois murder case were played higher. On local TV and radio, weather, traffic and local crime dominated — and that was an altogether different definition of local than one finds in print. As the media fragments nowadays, consumers must choose strategically to get a complete diet. The notion of relying on a single or primary source for news — one-stop shopping — may no longer make sense.
• When audiences did encounter the same story in different places, often they heard from a surprisingly small number of sources. Every network morning show and cable program covered the story about a security scare
  involving President Bush by interviewing the same lone person, a security expert from Citibank.2 (A grenade, which did not explode, had been found near the site where Bush made a speech in Tbilisi, Georgia.) The murder
  in Illinois was similarly covered in national broadcast news mainly by interviewing the local prosecutor. More coverage, in other words, does not always mean greater diversity of voices. (The newswire effect?)
• The incremental and even ephemeral nature of what the media define as news is striking. Few of what would emerge as the top stories this day would be remembered months later — or even, a search of data bases
  reveals, get much coverage within a day or two. And the efforts to add context to some ongoing stories were inhibited by speed, space and journalistic formula, especially on television. Journalism has always leaned toward the transitory and incremental over the systemic — news that breaks rather than news that bends. The older part of the 24-hournews system — cable news — seems to have exaggerated this with a fixation on immediacy. It is less clear which way the Internet leans. Some online sites, particularly the Web aggregators, seem to be moving toward the ephemeral. Yet others, including some TV sites, may move the other way, toward collecting deeper reports than they offer now. And the arrival of citizens into the mix seems to push further toward more significant or longer-term issues. The blogosphere may have been the platform least focused on the immediate of any that we monitored.
• While the news is always on, there is not a constant flow of new events. The level of repetition in the 24-hour news cycle is one of the most striking features one finds in examining a day of news. Google News, for instance,
  offers consumers access to some 14,000 stories from its front page, yet on this day they were actually accounts of the same 24 news events. On cable, just half of the stories monitored across the 12 hours were new. The concept of news cycle is not really obsolete, and the notion of news 24-7 is something of an exaggeration."

So what's happening to the commercial news media? One could argue that the reasons the audience is shrinking are because people are dissatisfied with them. However, if people are so critical, why is it that after a year and a half and countless opportunities to inform themselves, over half the population still believes either that Iraq was behind 9/11, Saddam and al Qaeda worked closely together, or we found the WMDs? This report is a nice complement to the propaganda filter. Can you see how?

A recent Pew public opinion survey suggests more Americans (75%)think commercial media are more interested in 'attracting the biggest audience' than in 'informing the public' (a whopping 19%). On the other hand, more of the public believes that criticisms of the military weaken the U.S. Defense forces. (a 50% increase in 20 years, to almost 50% of respondents). But then, 60% see the press as effective watchdogs over politicians (are you catching some contradictions here? How could we go about trying to explain them??). Does this remind you of anything Noam Chomsky said, about the New York Times? If the Times can be considered as far left as is reasonable for mass media to venture, then anything left of there is off-base. The Times, as we've discussed in class, is slightly left-of-center at best, in terms of how it reports, and which powerful entities or individuals it is willing to challenge or confront.