There’s an interesting piece by Dante Chinni in the Christian Science Monitor that ponders the increase in circulation for both in-depth news magazines and celebrity-driven gossip rags. Pointing out that the space in the middle — the mass audience newsmagazines such as Times and Newsweek — seems to be shrinking, Chinni writes:
…if the mainstream news media edge toward one of these paths of coverage – serious or light – the easiest and cheapest path is the one that leads to the late Anna Nicole Smith’s trial or Britney Spears’s rehab trips.
Serious news gathering, reporting, and writing is not easy. It takes correspondents and bureaus, time and money. Covering celebrity news, frankly, is easier. What’s more, rather than make complicated and significant issues interesting, one need only piggyback on the built-in fame of the celebrity.
Chinni worries for the state of public knowledge and engagement in important issues in the face of that.
This isn’t new, of course. There’s been a long debate about the media space given to trivial “news,” with the critics lambasting the media for abandoning real news, and the media firing back that it’s only giving the people what they want.
I come down somewhere in the middle: I don’t mind the fluff as long as I can ignore it. But I’m distressed that the only piece of “breaking news” that raced through any of my classes this semester was the death of Anna Nicole Smith. And these are journalism students.
(I do mind the type of inbred media hypocrisy represented by what I saw last week on a national TV newscast. The news reader, after the airing of the footage from the courtroom where the disposing of Smith’s remains was decided, rolled his eyes in apparent disgust. If you don’t consider it newsworthy, don’t cover it. And, if I read one more media piece decrying the famous-for-being-famous syndrome without acknowledgement of the media’s major role in that, I may scream.)
Chinni’s point that the fluff is easy to cover, I think, is a part of the media story that is often overlooked, buried ‘neath the it’s-what-the-readers-want apologia. While we are busy reinventing journalism, that’s something I think we need to give much more attention and thought to.
For a start, there’s this: given that the internet gives us multiple sources for almost all information, why bother wasting local resources to replicate the fluff, even if it is easier?
TAGS: JOURNALISM, ENTERTAINMENT
