Comments on: Democracy Comes for the Journalists

By: Todd

Todd — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 13:32:33 +0000

“The problem is, people have begun evaluating “news” according to whether it entertains …”

Not quite. The evaluation, where is counts, is whether news will sell.

By: Blake

Blake — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 21:20:54 +0000

The problem is, people have begun evaluating “news” according to whether it entertains, rather than whether is information that is important to know, or important for an informed citizenry.

The value judgment here is “what is important for an informed citizenry to know?”

The answer is “nothing, really – there’s no value in an informed citizenry.”

By: Santiago

Santiago — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 19:41:32 +0000

Brian, I concede that new forms of media can help higher quality content to find its path to people who want it. But the ideal of a television station is not the same as that of a private website. A TV station is aiming to do something for a wide audience from a quasi-universal perspective. So we need different ways to look at it. CNN is trying to incorporate new media attitudes for an old media form. It should instead reform the old media form.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 18:36:18 +0000

Changing to Brits may have given the anchors a presumed air of authority to everyone but Americans and Germans, but it also meant that the anchors have worse teeth and no taste buds.

But hell, it impresses the Belgians.

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 18:12:37 +0000

Is CNN the channel that recently changed most of its anchors and journalists to Brits? Presumably the higher class english accent gives them the air of authority?

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 17:02:28 +0000

CNN has absolutely nothing to do with “our airwaves.”

And I don’t much care about their quality or that of Fox News, since I already said that I don’t have cable. Nor do most people much care, since the average viewership of Fox is a couple million people, or less than 1% of the population.

The fact is that “the centripetal force of an ever more democratized culture” is brilliant for the media consumer, since I can now find any commentator or journalist who wants to put their stuff out there, and find quality that may not be backed up by conventional credentials. So I can read Michael Totten, say, who blows away 99.99% of MSM commentators on Middle East issues. And I can read The Anchoress, for example, ditto on religious issues. And I can read Iowahawk eviscerating Paul Krugman. Etc. Etc. Etc. So there’s a lot of junk out there–so what? There’s tons of worthless garbage claiming to be “news” printed in newspapers and broadcast on TV. There’s also tons of good stuff, and with contemporary search engines based on links the good stuff isn’t that hard to find.

By: DBP

DBP — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 16:55:00 +0000

And being a better selling product does not NOT make it a superior product as well. You’re right that ratings alone do not effectively measure this sense of overall quality, but improving overall quality is obviously not the point of “you choose the news” and other interactive stunts. As these obvious (and clumsy) attempts are aimed at higher ratings and not higher quality, it seems to me that Brian’s comment is still quite apt: why not emulate the dominant market leader?

By: Santiago

Santiago — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 16:29:04 +0000

If Fox News is beating CNN in “every possible way,” that does not make it a superior product. It just makes it a better selling product. A superior product would be measured by a different criteria than ratings or number of hits. This is the point that Mr. Corbin is making: that we need consider more than the desires of the crowd when we steward our airwaves.

By: J.W. Cox

J.W. Cox — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 16:15:07 +0000

Come on.

I write for a technology news Website. The IP-based Internet has over-turned the stable, well-known models of publishing and journalism, and of broadcasting. Everyone in those three areas is trying to figure out what comes next. (The best evidence for this is the rise of an entirely new industry of futurists, pundits, authors, bloggers, and consultants who earn a living telling people like me that things are changing and to do X, Y, and Z.)

So do these CNN experiments look silly? Sure. And it’s easy to make them look and sound silly. That’s what satire and satirists like Stewart do. And the pretensions, delusions, not to mention simple bafflement of today’s news media give him an endless supply of material.

But at one level, the CNN experiment is nothing more than experimenting with a technology that introduces something really new into News: interactivity. CNN simply said to its viewers: of these three things, what are YOU most interested in?

That’s not “democratization,” or “dumbing down,” or the dawn of the Nietzschean apocalypse.

If anything, it seems to me like the possible start of another new thing in news: humility.

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 16:01:13 +0000

There’s nothing “taut” or “astute” about CNN and hasn’t been for more than a decade.

Why are they trying to make their broadcast channel some strange parody of their website? On the web I can pick what link to click (not have some sort of vote determine it for me) and have way more than 3 choices. So what’s the appeal of watching their TV feed? (I note that I stopped getting cable years ago, so I’m not really of interest to them anyway.)

If CNN wants to see what works in cable news, can’t they just flip the channel to their competitor who is pulverizing them in every possible way? Why do they refuse to do this? In what other industry do failing brands absolutely refuse to emulate the dominant company? It’s all so very odd…