all questions about news media

Honestly the media has themselves to blame for a lot of this.  The move to Op-Ed shows in primetime and less straight-forward news gives people something to point out.  I can;t stand the spin the MSNBCs and Fox News shows put on.  It drives me nuts that they always ignore anything that doesn't fit their agenda.  And once you do that on a bunch of OP-ed shows over time....people start thinking you are always doing it.  

Now - we could blame the American public as this is what has been getting ratings.

Go Beavers said:

fife said:

tbergs said:

brianlux said:

tempo_n_groove said:

Print media is going away unfortunately.  Everyone wants short, quick stories.  I for one hate a dragged out story.  Give me the Who, where, how, why and When.  I don't need the back story or tangent of things irrelevant other than to fill up space.

Something else I dislike is people whom really know nothing about the subject but feel the need to push their agenda on the situation.  I think that's a turn off in any form of news media.

I also don't mind either form of medium as long as it's articulate, not biased and researched correctly.

If anything needs fixing it's the op-ed pieces that pass for news.  Hanity is not always news.  Matt Taibbi is not always news.

Do more reporting and less rabble rousing.

Rabble rousing is what it's all about these days, tempo.  And sensationalism, of course.  But we're fed what we eat, and we eat what we want.  Most "news" today is McDonald's Road Kill for the brain.

Also why our country's obsession with celebrity reality TV stars created President Trump.

maybe its just me but I understand the obsession of reality TV.  reality TV makes every day people stars and being a star is great (atleast thats what many people believe)  you don't need to have any talent, you just need personality and many people look at that as that can be them. 

I wonder about the distinction between a documantary and a reality show. Like the King of Kong documentary. While it was interesting, it's basically about two goobers trying to best the others high score in Donkey Kong. Or the Grey Gardens one. It's just filming two people with interesting personalities

This is a solid question I hadn;t really thought about.  

I think of documentaries taking a look at an issue.  But there are others that really don't get into that.  

I think Op-eds are great, except that they require the viewers to watch many of them in order to get a well-rounded view of the subject. I don't think that people who are just one-offing these kinds of shows benefit from them at all. On the contrary. I think they are only valuable to people who are really engaged in politics and who go out of their way to watch several of them on a regular basis to get the whole picture. As it is, too many people might, for example, only watch Sean Hannity or Alex Jones or someone, and that's it. That is a real problem for obvious reasons. I think it's a bigger problem for Conservatives, just because the right has way more radical, crazy-ass shows like this out there - I mean, there is not really any left equivalent of Alex Jones or Rush Limbaugh types.

fife said:

Go Beavers said:

fife said:

tbergs said:

brianlux said:

tempo_n_groove said:

Print media is going away unfortunately.  Everyone wants short, quick stories.  I for one hate a dragged out story.  Give me the Who, where, how, why and When.  I don't need the back story or tangent of things irrelevant other than to fill up space.

Something else I dislike is people whom really know nothing about the subject but feel the need to push their agenda on the situation.  I think that's a turn off in any form of news media.

I also don't mind either form of medium as long as it's articulate, not biased and researched correctly.

If anything needs fixing it's the op-ed pieces that pass for news.  Hanity is not always news.  Matt Taibbi is not always news.

Do more reporting and less rabble rousing.

Rabble rousing is what it's all about these days, tempo.  And sensationalism, of course.  But we're fed what we eat, and we eat what we want.  Most "news" today is McDonald's Road Kill for the brain.

Also why our country's obsession with celebrity reality TV stars created President Trump.

maybe its just me but I understand the obsession of reality TV.  reality TV makes every day people stars and being a star is great (atleast thats what many people believe)  you don't need to have any talent, you just need personality and many people look at that as that can be them. 

I wonder about the distinction between a documantary and a reality show. Like the King of Kong documentary. While it was interesting, it's basically about two goobers trying to best the others high score in Donkey Kong. Or the Grey Gardens one. It's just filming two people with interesting personalities

while I might get slammed for this, I don't see that much of a difference between many documentary and reality shows. 

I think I get what you mean. Both can be informative, but most times it's the outrageous or over the top ones that get noticed the most, therefore prompting others to follow suit. My problem comes more from reality shows like the Kardashians and Docs that have no grounding in truth or are sensationalized. Its ok to tell a story from one point of view, but unfortunately some take that as fact. Propaganda at its best.

fife said:

tempo_n_groove said:

Print media is going away unfortunately.  Everyone wants short, quick stories.  I for one hate a dragged out story.  Give me the Who, where, how, why and When.  I don't need the back story or tangent of things irrelevant other than to fill up space.

Something else I dislike is people whom really know nothing about the subject but feel the need to push their agenda on the situation.  I think that's a turn off in any form of news media.

I also don't mind either form of medium as long as it's articulate, not biased and researched correctly.

If anything needs fixing it's the op-ed pieces that pass for news.  Hanity is not always news.  Matt Taibbi is not always news.

Do more reporting and less rabble rousing.

Hey Tempo, I understand what you are saying here but I do have some questions.  it seems to me that you are kindof wanting different things at the same time.  if as people we want the 3 W of the WHO, THE WHAT, THE WHERE then stories have to be long sometimes. 

I don't like the 10 page articles that include filler.That type of info should be in sidebars.  Y'all remember sidebars right?

Absolutely right on summation of U.S. news media in Kunstler's blog yesterday.  Spot on:

http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/spanking-the-monkey/

The metamorphosis of the news business from a dignified and necessary component of the public interest to a gong and geek show is now complete. Some of you may remember that it used to be the task of news organizations to actually gather the news from far and wide. When Walter Cronkite came over the airways on CBS news, he “anchored” the revolving team of reporters in the field: we go to Marvin Kalb in Moscow… Fred Graham in Atlanta… Peter Kalischer in Paris… Lesley Stahl in New York…. Do you know what those people were doing? They were reporting the news on site, because it was important to actually be in the places where events were happening and talking to the people involved in them. And, by the way, do you think Marvin Kalb made contact with Russians? Or perhaps reported on other fellow Americans in contact with Russians? (And that was back in the Cold War, when Russia was run by the wicked Boris and Natasha).

Turn on Anderson Cooper on CNN these days and what do you get: “And now lets turn to our panel for analysis.” Our panel? Analysis? A gang of moonlighting kibitzers with an opinion about what might have actually happened in the world that day, which none of them have been busy actually reporting on. The transformation on the cable networks especially has been insidious. Not so distantly as the days of the Iraq War, CNN checked in every night with Christiane Amanpour, the last of the great foreign correspondents, roving about the Middle East. Do these so-called news organizations even employ any reporters anymore?

I don’t think so. Perhaps the most important story of the decade is the developing meltdown of governance and authority in Saudi Arabia and a Defcon Red level of potential for major war breaking out between them and Iran. How many reporters do the cable networks have in Riyadh today? What’s on CNN’s home page this morning? Boy dies after eating grilled cheese; Why men use masturbation to harass women; and the lead under their “Top Stories” banner: ‘Magnum, P.I.’ actor John Hillerman dies. Maybe you can find a clue in here why the USA has become a reality-optional society. Maybe it’s the American news media that actually has its dick in its hand.

Last night, I watched Saturday Night Live.  It had been a while since I've watched SNL.  When the two news guys came on and did their always funny thing I thought, man, it's pretty bad when you start to wonder if maybe SNL news is more informative than the other usual suspects. 

I almost started a new thread about the American administration's current war against journalism, but I'll try here first and see if it sticks.
As many of you know, I consider the Trump administration's anti-news media/pro-admin media propaganda by far the most disturbing and dangerous thing about the current administration. Such purposeful attacks on the news media as we're seeing can only be a deliberate effort to fuck with the citizenry on a level that they are largely incapable of combatting over time. This kind of thing is like worms in the brain. This kind of thing was Goebbel's wet dream, and it worked like a charm in Germany, along with a bunch of other dictatorships and other totalitarian governments around the world up until today, including Putin's Russia, and in Communist China. Eventually, this kind of thing leads to a failure of whatever level democracy any country can manage to claim... and the impact of it can have lasting negative consequences within a population, separate from the evils of a hated leader. So I thought this message from the journalists of Sinclair media would be a good place to reignite this topic, which I think is largely ignored in relative terms.

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/first-person/2018/4/5/17202336/sinclair-broadcasting-promo-deadspin