Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 6:53 PM by Gene

Our media cri-TIC was so busy typing 4,306 WORDS he obscured a few pointed points (and do pardon the verbiage):

[S]ure, an average newspaper did print some serious journalism. But is that most of what they did, or even anything more than a tiny part? Did newspapers crusade from early in the morning to late at night to right wrongs? Did the typical reporter spend the majority of her or her time ferreting out information that the local powers-that-be kept hidden? Did their critics focus a gimlet eye on all manner or art and pop culture, shoot from the hip, provoke dialogs about its meaning and import? Did the papers really afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted? Did each department, each day, have at least one story that took an extra step to find out some information that others didn’t want public, that didn’t come from a press release or a government official, that didn’t merely repeat warmed-over developments that had happened the day before?

No on all counts. My experience lies more with arts and features; I’d guess that the average paper’s coverage of arts and entertainment, for example, runs at least 80-plus percent promotional (meaning that it was “coverage” tied to the release of some product), with the remainder split between the rare other-than-upbeat critical review and some fairly minuscule percentage of actual original reporting.

I once analyzed two weeks of the arts and features sections of a well-known American newspaper and found exactly one feature published over that period that contained original reporting. Even good papers’ arts coverage is largely promotional; look at the cute little features that dot the inside of The Wall Street Journal’s Friday feature section; it offers pages of fluff, each bit of it pegged to some product release. Even a top-tier critic like Joe Morgenstern will fill out his columns with random little plugs for new DVDs—with no information about special features, say, or the quality of the restoration of a classic film. Whose interest, other than that of the home video departments of the movie studios, do those squibs serve? [Emphasis added]

He says newspapers are an ad-delivery device where the news is mere filler and they're failing because the advertisers don't want to pay to cushion the filler. Obviously he hasn't seen papers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But with technology newspapers were bound to devolve, until they have become ad-delivery devices in more ways than one, and that is why (for an example) the newly resurgent MNI at $2.00 is still at least $1.99 too much.

(Via the usual Romy)