Alterman: What the news business doesn't get: Public doesn't want tabloid, or right-wing

[DeepModem Mom]

The Nation: August 23, 2007 (September 10, 2007 issue)
It Ain't Necessarily So...
Eric Alterman

.... The vast majority of Americans profess little interest in tabloid trash and right-wing reaction. The Pew Research Center recently synthesized two decades of American news preferences and discovered, personal finance stories aside, that they haven't much changed. When it comes to American attention spans, disaster stories rule, while insider-Washington and foreign stories languish. Barely a quarter of Americans say they pay "very close attention" to anything. Nothing new there.

What is most shocking, particularly when considering the steady diet of dirt we're constantly force-fed, is how little people care about celebrity scandals....

***

According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Index for the first week in June of this year, for instance, the fifth biggest story of the week was the on-again, off-again incarceration of Paris Hilton. On cable, Paris ranked number three and on radio, four. Still, her story was a piker compared with the death of the no-less-famous-for-no-good-reason Anna Nicole Smith. According to PEJ, during February 8 and 9, coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death made up roughly 60 percent of the morning news shows. To say nothing of the wall-to-wall cable coverage it received. And yet, according to Pew, viewer interest in Smith's death ranked in the bottom third of stories covered that quarter, not only way below the number of people who claim to follow closely the news about Iraq but also below those who continue to maintain a deep interest in global warming. (Cable's attention to the Iraq War ranged from a mere 8 percent of coverage on Fox News to 18 percent on CNN during the second quarter of 2007.)

No less misguided is the news business's pursuit of a public it believes has shifted rightward. While it may be a staple of punditry to assume Americans have grown more conservative in recent decades, the data disagree. As political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson observe, "It is striking that across all of the major left-right issues, one is hard pressed to find any evidence that Americans are markedly more conservative today than they were in the recent (and even relatively distant) past." No doubt the political system has moved rightward. Careful calculations by political economists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal demonstrate that the average Republican member of Congress was 73 percent more conservative in 2003 than his 1973 counterpart, and his Senate colleague was approximately twice as right-wing. While the Poole/Rosenthal calculations find the average 2003 Democratic member of Congress to be 28 percent more liberal than his early 1970s counterpart, this is almost entirely due to the sudden political extinction of the party's conservative Southern wing. Non-Southern Democrats have actually traveled a bit to the right. Meanwhile, on most issues, the majority of Americans have actually moved slightly leftward--leaving the center of gravity of the political system well to the right of the public on issue after issue.

What appears to be going on here is not a rise in the size of the audience that prizes Fox News-style nonsense. Rather, it's that the proportion of people who get their news from traditional sources has sunk significantly. Given their relative paucity of production values, talk-radio and cable news programs can be profitably sustained with audiences that are a fraction of those required by broadcast and entertainment programs. The fact that most Americans find themselves increasingly alienated from the system that Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh have pioneered has not led their competitors to rethink the content of their broadcasts, only to focus more intensely on what remains of their diminishing audiences. Given the tendency of so many reporters to follow the herd news of the day--Edwards's haircut, Hillary's cleavage--the net result is a perversion of our political process in pursuit of an understandably alienated American public.

Can you imagine a worse way to run a democracy?

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070910/alterman

[fasttense]

1. No one trusts the traditional corporate news outlets anymore.

Most people believe these traditional sources of information are manipulating the facts or downright lying. The general population has turned away from traditional news sources and have gone looking on the internet and other places for the truth. That is why circulations of major newspapers and news magazines have dropped, and viewership of TV news programs is shrinking.

Instead of giving the people the information they want which is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, traditional news outlets are becoming more and more radical right political megaphones. Monopolies of news sources help ensure this focus on the radical right and the downward spiral of numbers of viewers, listeners and readers continues.

[WinkyDink]

7. Exactly what Bushco has wanted: Mistrust of the MSM. All "Truth" must come from THEM, in people's

eyes.

Why ELSE corrupt the NYT?

[NRaleighLiberal]

2. Two views, and I don't know the answer. #1 - if people didn't watch it, they wouldn't push it.

View #2 - the media conglomerates are so wealthy that they don't care if people watch it or not. So, which is true? If #1, then the answer is to do what we did - cancel cable and turn off the TV. If the answer is #2, it has to be a political change.

[acmavm]

3. Who does watch it? Most people I know are avid internet

newshounds. I am. I mean, I have kids. If I want to be lied to I have them. And pResident Chimpy, of course.

[annabanana]

4. The true purpose of celebWallpaper is to DISTRACT not amuse,

or inform. They don't really care if you're interested. They have to fill the time with something that doesn't make you think or encourage you to get involved, or even really make an impression.

It is a hypnotism machine.. a veneer of "everything is the same as it always was...everything is ok...If there was something to know you'd see it here.. .bloop...gnarf..."

[Bitwit1234]

5. I have said for the last seven years

the reason the newspapers are going bust is....people don't read that trash anymore. They want news. Not celeb mis doings, not the republican talking points. So they go to the internet to get what's happening.

Perfect example...Lindsey Lindsey.....they were having a flood in Minnesota and 7 people died. FOUR days later they reported it on CNN as if it was just happening.

[bdamomma]

6. I only get my news from the internet and BBC.

the dumbing down of Americans continue, so sad, we have reached this point.