North. East. West. South.
Jan. 20th, 2012 04:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogThat's probably the oldest bit of folk false etymology I remember learning: Mrs. Somebody-or-Other, an early-elementary teacher, solemnly told her charges, "Children, 'news' is an abbreviation for North, East, West, South, because it comes from ALL OVER!"
She was wrong, of course, but what "news" has degenerated into is even wronger.
Back then, news came in far fewer forms and with much bigger built-in delays. Newsboys brought it in print to your doorstep a day after it happened (if that), and three, and only three, network news machines churned it out at (within my lifetime) a mere 15 minutes a night, ultimately expanded to a whopping 30. To a lesser extent, there was radio, and there was the telephone, on which News, if delivered, was almost always Bad. Yet it all made money for those newsboys and their up-the-chain masters, and for the three networks, and it did it with senses of obligation and integrity to Truth that transcended balance sheets.
When I got in the game as a journalist, after brief teenage dabbles at the newsboy stage, these truths about Truth were presented as self-evident and immutable. News was news, opinion was opinion, and business was business. We didn't know the people in advertising and circulation and as a matter of principle, we were virtually instructed not to seek them out. An advertiser seeking to influence coverage would quickly become an ex-advertiser- if not of its own volition, then of ours. And even in those nascent days of cable and the gestation of some weird thing known then as ARPANET, we made money, and held those truths firm.
Today, though? They're both in critical condition. Linotype yielded to Compugraphic typesetting and then to Mac-ish forms of physical publishing, and finally into 1's and 0's that put so much of the news online. And just as the papers stopped printing physical pages, little by little they stopped printing money, as their virtual monopolies waned. Yet even as recently as a few years ago, you could still read with pride and with trust, that editorial and business sides were still walled away from each other.
As I get led to more and more so-called news-sites nowadays, many with long-trusted names as the newspapers of record in their communities, I see they've given in to the capitalist cry to Tear Down This Wall- and they have. All of the Gannett sites, and many other respected ones, now pollute their pages, not with carefully crafted editorial content, but with shameless whoring. At the end of just about any Gannett-outlet story (itself, USUALLY, a respectable piece of journalism), will be two lists, side by side. Their onetime flagship's story yesterday about the bankruptcy of its hometown's signature company is as good an example as any. On the left, the list of stories "you might be interested in"- completely botted, based on search algorithms, little rhyme or reason to why they're selected. Even worse, though, is the list of shill sites next to it under "sponsored links"- giving the likes of Newsmax and HaircolorForWomen the imprimatur of journalistic recognition. To a generation of citizens who have been raised on infomericals and advertiser-purchased "news" programs like our local "AM Buffalo," where the same reporters peddle and promote wares before doing hard news on the 6 and 11:00 newscasts, I honestly doubt a majority of viewers can even tell the difference anymore. So for them, it's really a matter of who gets to BUY their attention, their loyalty, and in this post-Citizens United political world, their votes.
And that scares the shit out of me.
----
If you have a LOT of free time to get into it, you can read a sad chronicle of this sort of thing in this thread at the local alt-weekly. It began as a critique of a puff-piece restaurant review in Buffalo's "newspaper of record," which proved to be full of factual errors; led to the errors being completely scrubbed out of the online edition of the review; and has since generated a Peyton Place, North Tonawanda chronicle of comments from and about the restaurant's principals, full of intrigue, he-said/she-said, and more involvement with the criminal justice system than you ever expect to have served up with your red sauce.
She was wrong, of course, but what "news" has degenerated into is even wronger.
Back then, news came in far fewer forms and with much bigger built-in delays. Newsboys brought it in print to your doorstep a day after it happened (if that), and three, and only three, network news machines churned it out at (within my lifetime) a mere 15 minutes a night, ultimately expanded to a whopping 30. To a lesser extent, there was radio, and there was the telephone, on which News, if delivered, was almost always Bad. Yet it all made money for those newsboys and their up-the-chain masters, and for the three networks, and it did it with senses of obligation and integrity to Truth that transcended balance sheets.
When I got in the game as a journalist, after brief teenage dabbles at the newsboy stage, these truths about Truth were presented as self-evident and immutable. News was news, opinion was opinion, and business was business. We didn't know the people in advertising and circulation and as a matter of principle, we were virtually instructed not to seek them out. An advertiser seeking to influence coverage would quickly become an ex-advertiser- if not of its own volition, then of ours. And even in those nascent days of cable and the gestation of some weird thing known then as ARPANET, we made money, and held those truths firm.
Today, though? They're both in critical condition. Linotype yielded to Compugraphic typesetting and then to Mac-ish forms of physical publishing, and finally into 1's and 0's that put so much of the news online. And just as the papers stopped printing physical pages, little by little they stopped printing money, as their virtual monopolies waned. Yet even as recently as a few years ago, you could still read with pride and with trust, that editorial and business sides were still walled away from each other.
As I get led to more and more so-called news-sites nowadays, many with long-trusted names as the newspapers of record in their communities, I see they've given in to the capitalist cry to Tear Down This Wall- and they have. All of the Gannett sites, and many other respected ones, now pollute their pages, not with carefully crafted editorial content, but with shameless whoring. At the end of just about any Gannett-outlet story (itself, USUALLY, a respectable piece of journalism), will be two lists, side by side. Their onetime flagship's story yesterday about the bankruptcy of its hometown's signature company is as good an example as any. On the left, the list of stories "you might be interested in"- completely botted, based on search algorithms, little rhyme or reason to why they're selected. Even worse, though, is the list of shill sites next to it under "sponsored links"- giving the likes of Newsmax and HaircolorForWomen the imprimatur of journalistic recognition. To a generation of citizens who have been raised on infomericals and advertiser-purchased "news" programs like our local "AM Buffalo," where the same reporters peddle and promote wares before doing hard news on the 6 and 11:00 newscasts, I honestly doubt a majority of viewers can even tell the difference anymore. So for them, it's really a matter of who gets to BUY their attention, their loyalty, and in this post-Citizens United political world, their votes.
And that scares the shit out of me.
----
If you have a LOT of free time to get into it, you can read a sad chronicle of this sort of thing in this thread at the local alt-weekly. It began as a critique of a puff-piece restaurant review in Buffalo's "newspaper of record," which proved to be full of factual errors; led to the errors being completely scrubbed out of the online edition of the review; and has since generated a Peyton Place, North Tonawanda chronicle of comments from and about the restaurant's principals, full of intrigue, he-said/she-said, and more involvement with the criminal justice system than you ever expect to have served up with your red sauce.