When News does Investigative Journalism, People Watch

For too long this myth that the American Public just wants celebrity gossip and trite fluff news has been used by the media to excuse its horrible news reporting. Well the Columbia Journalism Review has put that to rest: The decade-long collaboration between the Project for Excellence in Journalism and several academics led by Wellesley College political scientist Marion Just concludes that the more local TV invests in quality reporting, the bigger its audience tends to be. Crime news and celebrity news, contrary to all popular and professional wisdom, they say, aren’t as appealing to TV viewers. ….Rosenstiel and Just, on the other hand, insist that it is newsroom misperceptions about public taste that defeat quality, that newsrooms erroneously believe that the public wants sensation and gossip rather than substance. Rosenstiel and Just’s extensive national data indicate that newscasts with quality news have bigger and demographically more desirable audiences. The truth is that we are not watching this crap. More and more Americans are turning off their TV’s during the news or turning the channel. More Americans are putting down their Newspapers and going online. Not because they don’t want the news, but because we know the news we are getting is shit. The Daily Show and Colbert have an ever increasing audience because they do a better job of covering the news than anyone on TV. And they have real experts on to talk about the days issues. The reason the news sucks is not because they don’t know this. They know that playing their constitution role of challenging power and digging for the truth sells papers. What it doesn’t sell is advertising dollars. Even more importantly, why would a company that is getting rich making Apache Helicopters for the war in Iraq do an investigative peace on the coast of the war in Iraq? It just isn’t good business sense. News creation is owned by a dwindling few, with only 6 companies controlling nearly everything we read, see, and hear throughout the day. They have no interest in investing in the sort of investigative journalism that would actually sell papers or get people to watch. But NEVER LET THEM TELL YOU JUNK NEWS IS WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT, it is what the corporate owners want. RSS