The Chris Moeller Archives

News consumers strike back

If you've seen news directors, producers, and anchors on television defending their editorial decisions in recent years, you know there's nothing they'd rather do than be able to devote their professional careers to covering important stories. It seems they've only been focusing on tabloid, celebrity, and human interest guttertripe because that's what strengthens circulation and ratings. You're the problem, it turns out, because you'll choose the evening or cable news program that gives you the most information on Britney's flipout, the death of the People's Princess, Anna Nicole, and the stranded skiers in the Rockies that no one has ever heard of or who directly influence our lives, but who are the upper-middle-class white families television viewers all aspire to be, envy, and resent.

The problem with this consultant-driven corporate strategy is that pandering to an ever-shrinking radio, television, or newspaper audience might help you compete short-term, and on paper, against your closest network competitors, but it dismisses entirely all of the "news consumers" who have abandoned the corporate pissing contests entirely in favor of more trustworthy and vigilant journalism.

It was bad enough when the Viacoms, GE's, Time Warners, and Clear Channels took over America's largest and most trusted news departments, and transformed them from trustees of the public-owned airwaves into profit-driven network engines, but it's now degenerated to such a point that their high-salaried talking heads can no longer stifle the giggles when attempting to convince the public that they exist for any purpose other than to get that quarterly stock bump selling our fears and prejudices back to us under the heading of news-gathering, and protecting the new generation of robber-barons who cut the checks.

The privately-owned broadcasting behemoths are fortunate that they're still allowed to occupy the public airwaves rent-free, because, otherwise, the audiences that remain wouldn't be enough to fund the year-end company parties. Having worked in corporate radio for nine years, I can attest that it's rarely, if ever, about the message, unless that message is propping up the political gatekeepers who guard the broadcast licenses. The deregulating Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed into law by the original Arkansas razorback hog, was the death knell. At WHO Radio in Des Moines, it's all quite out in the open at staff meetings-- it's too cost- and resource-prohibitive to win back the listeners who have already left, so the focus becomes getting the "true believers" and nutjobs that haven't left to listen for longer periods of time. The near-decade I worked there, a poster in the hallway promoted the claim that Clear Channel was the "most advertiser-focused" sales option in Des Moines. They're broadcasting for ad-buyers, not their listeners-- and definitely not for the larger general public that owns their AM broadcast frequency.

The good news is that the American people are abandoning these short-sided nitwits, and the communication industries are wobbling towards collapse. Combined annual 6am-midnight cable news ratings on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News are down 21 percent in the last five years, according to the Nielsen ratings company, while the routinely-focused "Newshour" on PBS typically enjoys a 10 to 70 percent ratings advantage over its cable news counterparts, according to the show's host, Jim Lehrer. Content-driven National Public Radio has experienced 24 percent growth during the same half-decade period of cable news decline. The linked article above also draws attention to the fact that The New Yorker magazine, which employs perhaps America's top investigative journalist, Seymour Hirsch, has seen a 21 percent circulation increase since 2002, as Time Warner's Newsweek and right-wing financier Mort Zuckerman's U.S. News and World Report have had no growth.

And this says nothing even of the extraordinary mushrooming of independent journalists online, who are propelling this media revolution forward. Americans, in fact, may be more attuned than ever to the political and socio-economic world in which they live. The pursuit of the facts is alive and well, thanks, as always, to the most enlightened and vitally-engaged percentage of the citizenry, and not to the greedy but so-called "industrious" motives of Wall Street. I shall weep not for the dinosaurs.

posted by CM @ 2:29 PM