Having spent a good part of my life in the newspaper business, I’m increasingly taken by the remarkable range of presentations of the news these days.
More so than when I was in the business, two decades plus ago, it seems that people are far more interested in virtually everything that’s going these days and they learn what’s going on, I suspect, more from the Internet than newspapers or television.
And therein lies the problem. I think Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes did a piece on this recently and had the same conclusion as I (Okay, I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination as witty or insightful as Mr. Rooney, but he’d agree, I’m sure, that my opinion counts).
When I was growing up we were a Cronkite family. We never missed him. Others were Huntley and Brinkley (sp?). Today, network news, to me, is far to filled with features. I mean NBC, CBS and ABC have less than 30 minutes to tell us what happened and all to frequently five or six of those minutes are features. Sure they’re interesting, but for me, they’re mostly a “who cares?”
I leave out Fox, not only because I find it overtly slanted to the right and that’s simply wrong when it comes to news. MSNBC’s talking heads go the other way, of course, and I don’t watch them much at all.
I read The New York Times online and soon I suppose I’ll paying for that privilege. That’s alright for me. Newspapers should get paid and with all the trouble they’re having these days, clearly the Internet with paid subscriptions is the way to go.
The disturbing issue to me, however, is that there are so many venues on the Internet that claim to be presenting “news” and are simply fabricators or extraordinarily biased, yet readers believe what’s posted. Great newpapers and news venues have editors to sort things out and rein in reporters. These sites that are full of innuendo, if not base canards do not and people read them.
But, as they say, at the end of the day, people believe what they want to believe.
And so ends my post for the day. Obviously, I’ve little to say.
