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"It's a safe assumption that if people
are reading less and/or watching less news, they're less informed."
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Connie Hicks '71, a former
longtime reporter and anchor at the ABC station in Miami, Fla.,
who is now a professor of communications at Barry University in
Miami:
The media are trying to find themselves. And in the process, they're
sending mixed signals, meeting with mixed success and trying to
needlessly reinvent themselves. The public doesn't like the floundering,
nor does the staff.
The difficulty today is trying to sustain the industry as a business
while trying to provide news. For example, in the early 1980s roughly
92 percent of the population watched the early evening national
news; now that number is about 17 percent. That's a severe hit in
the profit and loss column. So television and newspapers are increasingly
trying to attract more viewers/readers while at the same time trimming
jobs. The combination often backfires.
With staff reductions (and usually it's the higher paid, more
experienced people who are "reduced"), the quality of
writing suffers and there's less investigative and enterprise journalism,
which is the sort of news that often gets people interested.
The media are perceived as not only biased, but biased towards
the left (I answer critics that any bias is wrong, whether it's
Fox with its so-called conservative edge or the allegedly liberal
Washington Post). And, also obviously, cheats like Kelley,
Glass and Blair reflect poorly on all journalists. But I think that
perception is also a bit of a cover-up; fewer people are reading
or watching the news, and the easy explanation is that it's a "waste
of time," "inaccurate," "too depressing"--the
list goes on and on.
It's a safe assumption that if people are reading less and/or
watching less news, they're less informed. The explanation I hear
constantly is, "It's too liberal," or "it has an
agenda," so why waste the time? There's also "it's too
depressing." Yet, how would they know, if they're not reading
the news, catching the newscasts? How often do people vote along
ethnic or racial or party lines? That's certainly easier than having
to discover whether the candidate is the person they think would
do best in office.
Certainly, we need closer scrutiny by management of reporters:
there's no way some of the bad apples should have gotten away with
what they did. Frankly, they weren't even clever or especially devious.
The problem with the younger or less experienced reporter goes
again to the issue of staffing. Ideally editors would look over
their shoulder, but in reality, and this is especially true for
television, that editor is overseeing the early evening newscasts,
checking on a satellite feed, ordering some graphics, all at the
same time. If it's breaking news, there's no way an editor can coach
or correct what a reporter says, or fails to say, in the live shot.
The larger the staff, the more time there is to prepare a story.
But in this cost-conscious business, that news monster must be fed
on a daily basis, so spending a day or two, or even weeks, on a
story is rare.
With few exceptions, television reporters are general assignment.
My recommendation is allowing the inexperienced to learn the trade
the old-fashioned way--in a smaller market, where there's more time
and less pressure to do the job right, to make mistakes that hopefully
aren't critical.
Source: The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press: Survey
Released June 8, 2004
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