Invitation to a Dialogue: Our Meager News Diet

I disagree with the premises of this piece. It assumes that more thorough news coverage would better inform those who vote, and that without more thorough news coverage in the daily media, we are bereft of it. Recent Times articles and TV focus groups show that many of our voters are completely ideological. Their position is based on the Word of God, or a prejudice in favor of self-interest, or fear. Information does not shape their views; it's the other way around. So better news coverage won't affect those people; Fox News and Limbaugh satisfy them. As to the eligible voters who don't bother to vote, if even our news flashes don't move them, why would tomes and essays? And for those who take a genuine interest in the news, the appropriate sources are--in addition to the excellent long pieces in the major newspapers--magazines, journals, books, and internet discussion sites.

When Ted Turner founded CNN 35 years ago, he failed to acknowledge two phenomena: First, the more news is fed to a consuming public, the less of it we can digest and process. Second, even he, brilliant as he was and remains, did not foresee the power of retail communication, the product of so-called social media combined with phenomenal technological innovation. It spawned citizen journalism which served to blanket the globe with instant "reports" of events from every corner of the world.

Let's be realistic: The complexity of geopolitics, the cultural background to conflicts in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis, the need for revisions to our gun protocols, climate change, and several dozen other issues that should engage any citizen - it's clear we don't have the tools to prioritize what we should be concerned with. The news providers attempt to do that for us and are necessarily forced to do it in 20-second increments, resulting in a catalog of current events, which is dumped daily while we are trying to parse the impact of Fiorina, Carson and Trump altering the nature of domestic politics as we thought we knew it. And all that is happening while we are raising families, working for a living and maintaining a household.

Perhaps we ought to define the issues that affect our lives, and invest time and attention to stay informed on those. If that reeks of personal isolationism, so be it. Obviously, the status quo isn't working.

With the advent of wholly corporate-owned media, and he said/she said "reporting", we are left to flounder in rough seas of spin and ginned-up hysteria. We who are starved for non-partisan, factual, in-depth reporting troll the web some semblance of reality. Who has time to adequately do this?

I do not know when reporting degenerated into the he said/she said model, but "fair and balanced" this is not. The relative handful of reporters who can be trusted, not to mention funded if they're independent, continues to contract.

There's a reason the U.S. ranked 46th in '14 in national freedom of the press. There's a reason our political system has imploded.

The news media seems to be lost somewhere. The media I grew up watching (Cronkite, Huntley-Brinkley, Severide) would be disgusted with today's coverage.

Some examples:

Everything "breaking news" Laughable. MSNBC's/NBC's Andrea Mitchell interrupting a senator with Bieber news stunned me.

Most of the networks giving equal time to climate change & evolution deniers! Why not leave these folks to Fox News & not CNN. Also using anti gay nut cases to comment on gay subjects (like Perkins, Huckabee) is not cool. Looking @ you CNN. Anderson should speak up here. BBC has the right idea in not giving obvious fools & bigots air time The dumbing down of America.

Odom's OD in a cathouse & Cosby's behavior are newsworthy----for TMZ & People Magazine. Neither has any effect on my life or the lives of most Americas. Thanx OJ, since all of the "celebrity centered " news began with him. I miss the gossip columns of the 50's (Parsons, Hopper, Winchell) & Dorothy Killgallen, who could also cover real news. Celebrity gossip had a separate place in the "old days" which in that respect, weren't so bad

Most of the media drank the Cheney Kool aid during the countdown to the Iraq illegal war. Looking at you NY TImes (by the way, what do you have against Hillary?).

I think the popularity of a show like John Oliver's shows that there is in fact a desire to understand subjects more deeply and a willingness to listen to segments 15-20 minutes long on a single topic. Yes, he uses humor, but it is brilliant satire, which in ways can inform more deeply than a pedagogic discourse. Good satire makes the news more comprehensible and more bearable (key word being "good"). Fox "news" on the other promotes ignorance and the erosion of basic decency and civility in the public debate.

The media has always been a business. In the age of the Internet print media are fighting for their lives and are having to make some unwholesome compromises, which is why I decided to become a PAID SUBSCRIBER to the NYT. Americans love free stuff, and...we are getting what we are paying for by getting our "news" exclusively from network TV and free Internet sites -- shallow, biased reporting and stories you can hardly find amid all the ads. When Americans demand quality news reporting and are willing to pay even a little for it, we will get it. In the meantime, there is the BBC and Al-Jazeera.

"thorough, investigative, nonpartisan watchdog journalism" would have such a liberal bias.

I no longer watch the news; nor do I read the newspaper any longer. I am tired of sensationalism - where everything is "breaking news" and nothing is important. If I want to know the truth about something, I go to various different news publications on the web and view each of them, then do my own mental math to decide which is the closer truth versus the "breaking news" truth.... When newscasters at major news channels are booted from their job because they lied, why would I ever believe that they were the only one who lied.... Humans want to get ahead (in their career, their finances, their life) and they will lie to get what they want - that is a horrible truth that no one wants to believe, but it's true - we are a global community of liars. In fact, I am lying to you right now..... Bet you didn't even guess. ;)

I gave up TV in 2010 when one of the last things that made sense to me - news - had come to be about just 2 things; pulling the audiences emotional strings, and getting ratings. CNN is a case in point. Under Ted Turner it was a hard news organization and when Turner left it was gutted to broadcast gossip and to chase ratings.

All that are left in the way of quality news are NPR's news programs and some newspapers. A sad state indeed.

Someone gave me a bumper sticker years ago and which I display in my car. "I get my news from Comedy Central and my comedy from Fox News'. I do not watch the news on the major networks or on cable. Al Jazeera America provides actual news coverage. I also look forward to watching John Oliver, Rachel, Lawrence and Chris Hayes on MSNBC and of course Trevor Noah and Larry Wilmore. I read my local newspaper and also subscribe to the NYT's. Occasionally, I watch "The News Hour" on PBS. I can't stomach the drivel that
is supposed to pass as news.

SOME of us would choose "more,deeper and better journalism" if it were available. Our local newspaper focuses entirely on local news and I rely on digital sources for the most part because TV has abandoned news. I would support using tax dollars to underwrite nonpartisan watchdog journalism

The decline in quality of America's conversations about reality, and of our politicians' attempts to help voters understand the world they would lead us through, both perfectly parallel the decline of America's broadcast and print news media.

Our refusal to deal with the complexity of the challenges we face, whether the issue be global or regional migration, sometimes spurred by immigrants' economic ambitions, but more often by their need to escape random gang violence or directed political oppression; or the ever-growing separations of society caused by radical inequalities of outcome and opportunity, has been ratified by news media bent on speeding up their meaningless news cycles and shortening their customers' attention spans.

All this reflects the falsest of choices foisted on me by a news consultant when I first became a television news anchor in 1973 at WCBS-TV, Channel 2 in NYC: "You have to decide, are you going to educate or entertain?" His smug smile told me he knew his right answer was the latter.

My reply: "Either you never went to school or you slept through all your classes. Because otherwise you would have known, education is entertaining." How I wish I saw evidence in today's television news that anyone believed this.

Dave Marash

DAVE MARASH CONVERSES M-TH FOR 50 MIN WITH A JOURNALIST ANALYST OR WITNESS WITH TIMELY IN-DEPTH INSIGHTS INTO MAJOR NEWS STORIES FOR KSFR-FM 101.1 PUBLIC RADIO IN SANTA FE, NM
http://hereandtherewithdavemarash.libsyn.com/

I collect magazines from friends, neighbors and church groups for distribution to homeless shelters. You would be hard-put to name a single magazine of large or small circulation that I don't see on a regular basis. The people at the shelter tell me that gossip magazines
-- the kind they sell at grocery stores --
are far-and-away the most popular. I also get a lot of requests for wrestling magazines, but those are pretty hard to come by. Gun magazines are easy to get, but I never distribute those. There is not a lot of call for news, tech, science or financial magazines. Magazines with pictures of the Kardashians on the cover always go quickly.

The greatest problem with "news" media today is its failure to question demonstrably false assertions as fact in an absurd quest for "fairness" and "balance." Explain to me how it is in any way balanced to counter a fact with a falsehood? Why does a statement of fact need a rebuttal?

The question is are the public as stupid as we appear because of the 4th estate or is the 4th estate as vague because of the stupidity of the public?

Fox hires propagandists and creates their own facts and they are popular because they play to sensation, not substance

Ed Schultz at MSNBC did delve deeply into matters and even changed his won mind when he did. He went out to the people and got informed opinions based on reality. It was not acceptable. Outside of fox the only coverage allowed ia a balanced view where neither side is challenged. Both sides are given equal weight no matter how false one side is. Corporations are running the world and they don't was in depth reality presented. They like ignorance and the republican party has fully embraced it.

The problem with our news isn't just the constant need for stories or their sound bit quality. News media has simply stopped being the essential voice within our democracy. We the people don't really have access to candidates. We get to ask questions at press conferences. We rely on the media to act on our behalf. But instead of diligently and professionally playing this role, we instead get the go along to get along approach to many of the pressing issues of our day.

News has simply become one feature of multi-facited entertainment platforms. It's been reduced to the smiling face and the two minute forty second sound bit, with no background, no depth and no context. As a result politicians simply say what the want with no fear that they will be asked to justify or really explain themselves.

Any good reporter knows that if a politician won't go beyond the canned speech they are free to test what was said against other reputable sources, such as people who are really knowledgeable about the issues. Instead we get Trump spending twenty minutes live on CNN reading his polling data and telling everyone how great he is. And the reporters? They went right along with the script telling viewers about the Trump phenomena.

The real story was how can an empty suit who has has few if any substantive ideas continue to project himself as a potential president? There are reasons why this is happening, but those real stories go untold. Shame on the media and shame on us.

A republic that prefers to be amused more than informed and engaged on the issues that touch its national life, its future, and its role in the world is not only "amusing itself to death,"as Neil Postman once put it, but forfeiting its place of leadership among the community of nations. Our candidates for high office tweet sophomoric insults at one another and yuk it up on late night talk shows while Syria burns, thousands of refugees pour into Europe, students are gunned down on our campuses, and the economy continues to stagnate. Ours is a culture in crisis, yet the Fourth Estate is more committed to its corporate profitability than to its civic responsibility. The news media did not create the current crisis, but they have failed for too long to cover it seriously and chosen instead to profit from the culture of shallow amusement. We have the media and the political leadership we deserve.

I am in the process of re-reading the Federalist Papers. I marvel at a time in our history when we had leaders willing and able to write quality exegesis and a public willing and able to read and discuss them.

How does one get around the problem described in this piece? My solution is to avoid television news and rely on a variety of printed sources, especially pieces by writers with long experience with the issues.

"And even if we concede that most Americans care more about food, fashion, fame and football than about anything political or international . . ."

I don't agree. If news reporting was factual, not gossip, such as Candidate X "intends" to put forward a foreign policy strategy and here's what it "might" say, reading the news would provide readers with accurate, useful information. As it is, with many articles being either pure speculation, opinion, or constantly updated "drafts," why should anyone waste their time reading such idle chatter?

I beg to differ--we have far too much coverage of the campaign, for far too long. Two years out, there really is nothing of any import to report, but the media insist we be bombarded with every inane comment (and candidate) they can unearth to drive eyeballs. We need a total embargo on presidential politics until perhaps Memorial Day of 2016, with a compact schedule of primaries by Labor Day, leaving a more than adequate two months of campaigning and reporting. Bread and circuses serve no serious purpose, and breed contempt for the entire process.

Imagine a news environment where candidacies like Trump's are treated as mere sideshows amidst in-depth coverage of the serious campaigns. Would current polls look a bit different?

Maybe it's time to abandon the founders’ unfulfilled vision of a press completely separate from government, and devote a portion of our tax dollars, as the British do, to underwriting thorough, investigative, nonpartisan watchdog journalism.

No, it is time for the press to self correct and get back to its job of enabling the public to be properly informed.

Stop blaming the public when it is media that has trained society toward dumber and dumber.

The irony is that Rupert Murdoch's race to the top depends on his news organizations race to the bottom.

Ignorance of the masses is bliss for the rich.

There is ample content out there. The greater problem is politicized media ownership which favors its agenda over its role of informing the public. I do not know of a popular media outlet that gets beyond a couple of sentences before communicating its provincial political view. As a result, even the most informative accounts are muddled with the biases of media owners. The British do it better. And I am not opposed to government trying to do it better here. It may wreak of 1984 in theory. But the British have proven that it can work.

American media is doing the public a grave disservice by focusing on only the outrageous & inflammatory during the presidential campaign. We have serious problems that will not be solved in a 10 second sound bite, yet candidates who offer in depth commentary on these issues are ignored in favor of the latest diatribe from Trump et al.

The attention span and intelligence of the TV watching public is on a steep decline and the media are a part, a large part, of the problem.

What better an example than right now? Hillary Clinton is about to appear before The House Select Committee on Benghazi and where is there any mention of Dana Millbanks fine overall reporting on the Benghazi Hearings, especially as he outlined how the House Republican's cut President Obama's Embassy Security Budget before and during the Benghazi Attack. This cogent piece can be viewed at www.thinkprogress.org/security/2012.

Watching major news stations cover Donald Trump's twitters as breaking news; seems to exemplify the degree to which our national news media has shirked their responsibilities. When you add to that networks who give 5 minute coverage in a daily half hour worldly news cast to the latest animal cuteness video sensation on you tube; you begin to grasp the shallowness pervasive in the whole industry. And then of course the media's and public's obsession with the latest polling results. Perhaps before these polls are even taken respondents should be questioned to determined if they have the most basic knowledge on the topics being polled. One enterprising outfit in candidate polling first inquired what the most important issues were to respondents and what positioned the respondents held on these issues. They then compared that information with the candidate the respondent supported and the candidate's positions on the same topic. And wonders of wonders the public were supporting the wrong candidates. Pretty hopeless stuff.

You are so right. This is a very important issue that could bring us to ruin.

Watch John Oliver every Sunday on HBO.

I find one or two issues, covered with actual research and in required depth, in a 10+ minute piece, every week.

No one does this anymore. Everyone is angling for 10-second blurbs.

Real news people, and consumers, should be proud of John Oliver.

I watch AL Jazeera America for news and read the NY Times. Most of our U.S. news programming is horrible and a disservice to U.S. citizens.

Thank you for your cogent essay, but haven't you noticed that all American TV news, with the exception of PBS and C-Span, now largely consists of useless, anecdotal claptrap sandwiched in between five minutes of advertising (in 5, 10, 15, 20 and 30 second packages)? Sometimes in the morning I turn to Al Jazeera, which reports real international news and in-depth reporting about the developing world. Then I remember that the station's owner, Qatar, employs slave labor to build sports venues and goodness knows what else.