Rambling threads of thoughts from clear thinking writers about the media, blogs, law and the bottom line.
Kevin Whited on blogHouston has yet another take on journalists talking about objectivity in journalism.
Even the most highly trained "objective" journalists can't help but do so, because they are humans, not robots. As journalism evolves to catch up with technology (and catch back with human nature), I suspect we're going to see more openness about perspectives and experiences of journalists, and less insistence on "objective" journalism. Right now, news consumers are beginning to turn to multiple news sources and perspectives. In the future, we'll see even more of that, I believe, as the traditional print newspaper as "single source of news" becomes a quaint artifact of the 19th and 20th centuries. We'll perhaps learn to trust journalists again, based on their reporting (as O'Connor wishes) but also based on what we come to know about their perspectives.
Whited's comment on the print newspaper as "a quaint artifact of the 19th and 20th centuries" certainly fans the flames of the "death of everything" argument we have been hearing lately.
Eric Alterman writes in "Think Again: Missing in Action" about how the media frenzy over Terri Schiavo and Pope John Paul II has blown many important stories off the radar scope of American consciousness.
The past several weeks have seen a near television blackout of any story not related the passing of either Terri Schiavo or Pope John Paul II. These stories are, of course, important ones, but because of so much of the mainstream media's inability to focus on more than one narrative at once, important ought-to-be front pages stories are buried inside newspapers and ignored entirely in the broadcast media.
Jack Shafer's commentary on "Talk Television" on Slate does a nice job writing about how Fox News Channel has mastered the talk-radio format for television.
To be sure, most of the journalism that answers to the first name of "Quality" contains measurable doses of entertainment. Likewise, quality journalism can't survive very long if it lacks a commercial component to attract audiences and advertisers—or a generous benefactor. What distinguishes talk radio, and by extension the evening talkers on Fox (O'Reilly and Hannity, and to a lesser degree tabloid newscaster Shepard Smith and Greta Van Susteren), from conventional journalism are the emotional extremes to which they go to draw audiences.
Paul Milo's "Blogs and the Law" should get people talking and thinking or even raise a few eyebrows for some. Milo's $64,000 question is a whopper, "Can independent, online news-gatherers invoke
shield-law protections, thereby obtaining the status of “journalists”
under the law?"
There is an interesting thread of reality running through these
commentaries. Defining what is news and what it is not gets really
complex and confusing in a media-rich environment that tries to balance
the bottom line with public interest and welfare.
If this sounds like a conflict of interests... you bet'ya.