Tim Dunlop watches the self-parody edition of the Today Show, and then bangs his head against the wall:
Posted by DeLong at June 25, 2004 07:34 AM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postthe road to surfdom: The breathtaking stupidity of the mainstream media. Argghh. Just watched an entire segment on the Today show discussing why John Kerry wasn't currently getting much media coverage. Yes, folks. Apparently serious journalists spent an entire segment talking about why apparently serious journalists aren't talking about John Kerry. The idea that they might do a story on, say, John Kerry's health policy instead of spending their time talking about how no-one is talking about John Kerry's health policy (or whatever) doesn't seem to have occured to them. And of course, they knew who to blame for this peculiar state of affairs. Why, it was the media, who are too busy covering Reagan's death and Clinton's book. Well, at least they cleared that up. Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
more self-parody
Posted by: bakho on June 25, 2004 08:09 AMI caught the tail end of that report and saw only a title at the bottom of the screen: "Where is John Kerry?"
They run pusillanimous stories like that, after Michael Moore told Katie Couric point-blank that his film was a silent plea to the media to ask hard questions.
Have they no shame? TV journalism doesn't have to be this way. It wasn't in the 70s.
Posted by: Redbeard on June 25, 2004 08:30 AMRedbeard, the difference today is that you can make very, very good money being an empty talking head who doesn't actually bother to learn much about the issues and merely repeats the same babble that he or she hears at georgetown dinner tables.
So why rock the boat? Because once there were people like Edward R. Murrow and I.F. Stone in the same profession that you supposedly practice?
Posted by: howard on June 25, 2004 09:00 AMThis is the ultimate, saddest, irony: media is considered to be so important and so "interesting" that it is more interested in reporting on itself and its trends than real life. Have you ever noticed how much tv, cable tv inparticular, is self-referential?
Posted by: Barbara on June 25, 2004 09:23 AMBarbara: this is making me think of some of the excesses of modern art. The difference is that big media needs an ad-watching or paying audience just to be able to produce (as opposed to modern art which can produce $million worth pieces with stuff that decency prohibits me from mentionning). If big media keep broadcasting this kind of intellectual masturbation, many news people are going to have to find themselves spending more time with their family than they had previously wished for. If I am not wrong, isn't TV audience down lately? Could there be a causal realtionship? Maybe their audience is actually more thirsty for actual information than the mainstream media corp seem to believe? Personally, I still find myself sporadically turning on the TV set, but only to check up on how irrelevant and biased it's becoming. 5 mins a week suffice to answer my question.
Posted by: Jean-Philippe Stijns on June 25, 2004 10:51 AMJ-P Stijns,
Now, now. You said "decency prohibits me from mentioning" and then went ahead and said it.
Posted by: kharris on June 25, 2004 12:10 PMSee, the tragic thing about American mass media is that because it must constantly compete for ratings, it feels the need to entertain us.
PBS and the BBC, on the other hand, are dull and highly informative.
We need more people who are willing to be bored for the sake of being educated.
Posted by: Brad Reed on June 25, 2004 01:26 PM> PBS and the BBC, on the other hand, are dull and highly informative.
Ah, I disagree. As a British expat, I notice a big difference between PBS and NPR and the BBC's television and radio current-affairs coverage. The former do tend towards 'worthy and dull', but the BBC, since it has the advantage of being the pre-eminent domestic broadcaster in the UK, doesn't have the inferiority complex that I believe drives the overweening worthiness of PBS/NPR.
Perhaps I benefit from experience of the news output that the BBC produces for UK audiences, but I certainly think there's more spark and 'voice' than PBS and NPR, even in the World Service. Plus, there's no begging for money.
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