The media is in serious trouble. Something new has to emerge, but we have to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water.
Once upon a time, every town had a newspaper that was independent and published the news it felt would interest its local base. Each paper had its own reporters, researchers, editors and investigative journalists. Then bit by bit, corporate consolidation cut away at the independent press. Now, there are only a handful of companies that own the media. They are all massive multinational corporations with an agenda that has absolutely nothing to do with the local populous their various outlets serve, or even the national interests of any one nation state. To maximize profits, they have sacked local staffs and replaced them with a small, corporate pool that feeds releases to all their outlets. Those releases are the news the media moguls want you to hear.
We are watching dead-tree media die. Newspapers and magazines used to be the truth police. Their independent investigative journalistic staffs could quickly debunk and beat down false stories. They’re going, going, gone. Now, phony stories can be planted on blogs, circulated by email to a few million people with some fringe agenda, and thereby driven straight into the 24 hour news cycle. By the time some sane folks get around to tracking down the big lie and shooting it, it’s become a zombie. So many people have heard it and believed it that it rises up again and again no matter how often it gets shot down.
Is this the world we want? Can we become sophisticated enough as consumers of the new media to be able to sort out the wheat from the chaff? I don’t know. I haven’t seen it happen yet. Right now, it takes hard work and time to gather all the news that’s fit to print. Most Americans don’t want to invest the time and energy required.
I can only hope that some standards of truth and responsibility will emerge in the new media, and that true investigative journalism will be resurrected in the new formats.