Why Do You Think that 'Hard Hitting Journalism' has Died in the US?...

???

and the fear of losing it, combined with shrinking payroll for actual reporters.

just a hunch....

for fear of impacting the bottom line of their sponsors.

Originally news was a loss leader...an image maker for a network. Those days are long gone...with the 24/7 cable era it's attracting eyes and ratings and turning a profit. It means bubbleheaded bleached blondes and obsession with titilation or outrage...get the emotions and suck in the ratings.

Sadly, 60 minutes may have been the beginning of the end. When news became profitable, the end was near.

and followed by the increase in inexpensive news programs that eventually developed into the 24/7 news cycle, followed by the need to scoop the other "news" programs and fill the air with the latest lost blonde girl who was taken from her Midwestern home during a shark attack during the War on Christmas.

that's the real answer.

Fox News is a political propaganda organization that has debased the entire profession of journalism. I stopped watching cable news b/c it's such a race to the bottom.

Who's money do you think put it into being?

...as I noted, a "political propaganda organ" would have the money and desire to bring this into being.

did you bother to read my post?

Journalism is an odd profession,. Its elevated in the eyes of some, but poorly defined at best. There are no tests and no real professional standards. Whatever rules there are they get violated with impunity. There is certainly no formal certifications. For every Murrow or Cronkite there is a Pegler or Hopper. It has some enhanced legal protections, but not for all participants and not at all levels of government. Those recognized or at least employed in it seem to look down at new entrants, both people and venues.

Not sure its even really a profession and certainly the few good ones are history.

There was a lot more than there is now.

Should not the msm really dig into and expose corruption within our midst?

-- at least how it's been portrayed in popular culture -- is to go after the overprivileged big shot and bring him down a peg or two. To stand up for the little guy, f'rinstance.

And that used to work better than it does now, in ages past when such journalistic undertakings actually engaged the audience. Edward R. Murrow was something of a rock star (in a tight-assed 50s sort of way); Woodward and Bernstein were goddam heroes.

But such exploits don't seem to thrill the audience anymore. And consequently they don't get funded. What gets funded is news about violent or skeevy crime, celebrity fornication and drug use, political freakshows, and "regular people" placed in extraordinary circumstances (wholly phony, of course) that reveal some millimeter-deep truth about human nature.

It's called "dumbing down" and it's what will make you a zillionaire in the 21st Century.

Much of which is discussed in various parts above.

• Cable news has robbed the traditional networks of their exclusive ownership of broadcast news while simultaneously fragmenting it. It's also eliminated the argument for making broadcasters maintain robust "real news" since there's so much content (dubious though it might be) out there. Hence "infotainment."
• The Internet has stressed print journalism almost to death; newspapers are flailing about looking for a relevant business model, and are trending toward pure sensationalism and celebrity pap.
• Concentration of ownership has imposed a grey sameness across the whole of the news business, which also tends to drive people away, making desperate new executive pursue the sensationalism route, which drives people away . . .
• Political operatives, mostly on the right, have taken control (see "Concentration of ownership" above) of news outlets and directed them to their ends. Since "reality has a well-known liberal bias," this argues agains "hard-hitting journalism."

Niche news because there are so many cable channels, web sites, and other sources of news now that it no longer is profitable to go after the lion's share of the market. Instead, channels fixate on pleasing a certain niche market, like political ideology, business, sports, etc. So many channels mean there is less money to spend gathering and reporting the news. Stations instead focus on pleasing their audience rather than being objective. That was always a part of the news, even in the mythologized times of Murrow and Kronkite, but it's even more important now since there is so much competition. Now people expect their news to be an infomercial for their own perspective. Jim Kramer only reports news to make his business viewers happy, Bill O'Reilly and Keith Obermann only report news the way their partisan audiences want it.

Second, deregulation allows one corporation to own multiple media outlets even in the same market, whereas that used to be forbidden. Such a regulation was a check and balance on the industry--if one market continually reported news that was out of step with the rest, they would be ridiculed and ignored (the way the National Enquirer was). Now, a few individuals control enough of the "media" to make sure that their message is spread far enough that it doesn't strike people as false.

None of this would matter if the audiences didn't encourage it. FOX news viewers don't want objectivity or truth, they want to be told they are pretty--just like the Reagan voters they descended from. Same goes for Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on our side, although those are individual opinion shows and not entire networks purporting to report the news. People don't want the truth anymore, they want to be told they are right, so there is a market out there to tell everyone they are right, and the facts get displayed by the different networks and outlets in a way the audience wants them to be.

Nowadays if a Woodward-and-Bernstein uncovered a major scandal affecting the nation, the majority of the people would listen to a news channel that spun it the way they wanted to hear it rather than one that objectively reported it. Fans of the affected people would defend them, enemies would attack them, and ultimately the whole thing would be spun until it disappeared. Whereas we used to have some objectivity that allowed us to view objective details from a distance, and a sense of outrage that would cause us to demand justice even against one of our own for violating our trust, now it's just a rugby match, and fans are begging the obliging media to spin it in a way that prevents us having to admit our side was fooled.

If the desire of the people changes, there are still good journalists out there who could rise up and give us an honest assessment. But who knows what it will take to change it?

This isn't overly different than the era of "Yellow Journalism" at the end of the 19th century, where the media rallied behind an empty president against an imaginary foe and went to war over it. That time, though, we won and profited from our dastardly crimes. This time we are falling off a cliff and the media is describing the cliff as our friend.

Your post should be required reading for a course in "Real Journalism 101."

The question remains (following the money) who comprises the oligarchy of entities that bought our media?

Your second point is especially important -- The public has long underestimated the devastating effect of ownership deregulation after the '96 Telecom Act

ridiculously dumbed down population that is more interested in the results of American Idol than they are in what happened in the world today. oh, and apartment fires...those are still immensely popular news topics...

sP

???

Everybody is biased with their own opinions and ideas. That becomes a problem when they spin the facts to represent the way they would like the story to be, even if it's an outright lie.

It requires a lot of time and work...
and money to do a really good hard-hitting story

And the RW media owners drove out all the rest and replaced them with automatons who do their bidding.

Too big to inform.

1) Short attention span/apathy on the part of readers and viewers.

2) 24/7 news operations that need to have **something** to cover/talk about 24/7, thus the advent of sensationalism.

3) Along with 1) and 2), the emergence of cults of celebrity, where stars' marriages, drug problems, police busts outweigh and get more credibility/coverage than the stories that really matter, because it will take time and effort on the part of news organizations to show the attention-spanned deficient/apathetic why they need to care about complex, hard-to-understand issues, and it's just easier to talk about Britney Spears, Tiger Woods, and Lindsey Lohan.

4) Pressure on news divisions to perform financially, and what better ensures that than "Entertainment Tonight" on a 24/7 basis? (So 1), 2), and 3) are all corrollaries of the other.)

5) Lack of training (dare I say education??) and experience on the part of journalists, especially broadcast journalists.

6) "USA Today" influence. I was in print journalism right before its decline and I trace that decline directly to the advent of "USA Today," which at the start stressed flash over substance. When "USA Today" took off, many newspapers, mine included, felt they were quickly being made irrelevant and dropped most sound, journalistic practices as in-depth investigative pieces in favor of splashy colors; graphics that really didn't say/prove anything; and stories that didn't move beyond the front page (i.e., "jump"). As a result, we get bite-size news and bare-bones coverage because news outlets don't want to go beyond that. As a result, both the print medium and readership lose. And newspapers -- again, like the one I worked for -- are constantly reinventing themselves, as they have their fingers to the collective wind looking for the latest hot readership trend. No wonder most are only Web-based now.

Disney, "New" Viacom (and its former parent CBS Corporation, the former "Old" Viacom), TimeWarner, News Corporation, and General Electric together own more than 90% of the media holdings in the United States.

* Among other assets, Disney owns ABC, Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group, ESPN, and Miramax Films.

* CBS Corporation owns CBS, CBS Radio (formerly Infinity Broadcasting), Simon & Schuster editing group, a 50% ownership stake in The CW, etc. Though technically separate companies, CBS and Viacom (owners of MTV Networks and several mostly cable television stations) have a large portion of common ownership through Sumner Redstone's National Amusements.

* NBC Universal is owned by General Electric (80%) and Vivendi SA (20%). In December 2009, General Electric and the media conglomerate Comcast announced a buyout agreement for NBC Universal. After the pending transaction, Comcast will own 51% of NBC Universal while GE will own 49%. As a part of the deal, GE will buy out Vivendi's 20% stake in the company.

* Time Warner owns CNN, Time, AOL, a 50% ownership stake in The CW, etc.


* Rupert Murdoch, the media magnate, apart of News Corp., also owns British News of the World, The Sun, The Times, and The Sunday Times, as well as the Sky Television network, which merged with British Satellite Broadcasting to form BSkyB, and SKY Italia; in the US, he owns the Fox Networks and the New York Post. Since 2003, he also owns 34% of DirecTV Group (formerly Hughes Electronics), operator of the largest American satellite TV system, DirecTV, and Intermix Media (creators of myspace.com) since 2005. See also Murdoch Newspaper List.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownership


Hard hitting journalism tend to hit the corporate owners hard so it went the way of the dinosaur.

This video pretty much explains what has happened in the last few decades:

Orwell Rolls in His Grave
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SV_mvc4zKw

...active campaigning against investigative journalism by conservatives in general and the Reagan administration in particular.

Conservative foundations funded groups like Accuracy In Media (AIM), which started the tradition of mobilizing their mailing-list members to call up and complain about "liberal bias" whenever the papers or networks ran anything that wasn't in lockstep with their own radical right views.

The Reaganites squelched reporting that undermined their Central American policy by courting editors, producers, and publishers, and "explaining" how their reporters were "being used to spread Soviet propaganda".

Biden is going on "The View" this week. :wtf: Politicians want to be everybody's BUDDY and not LEAD. I'm more than disgusted. :puke:

Journalism and the media used to pretend to be hard hitting but most of it was ALWAYS propagandistic. Over the years, most of us realized that we weren't getting the whole truth from the media. The rise of the Internet has made that much more apparent. Now most news channels have crafted their message to their ideological followers or degraded themselves even further to Gossip coverage.

Orwell was an optimist.

capitalized on this. News is entertainment.

My theory is the Corporations pushed this. If news is
entertainment serious issues are not covered in depth.
thus Corporations can do pretty much what they wish.
And therefore uninformed public does not question until
crisis arise.

...

:hi:

You're right. TMZ is severely hard hitting (if you're Tiger Woods or Britney).

Olbermann.

Maddow.

Shuster.

Schultz.

Ratigan (sometimes).

But ABC, CBS, NBC? No.

CNN? No. (The most trusted name in news is not trusted.)

Faux News. Are you kidding?

The reporting of news must somehow be separated from corporate profits. The only reason Olbermann and Maddow get away with it is because they bring in the big ad bucks because they deliver the viewers. Without them, that income would be much less, so GE/MSNBC/Comcast/whoever really owns the network let tolerate them. At least, so far.

Yes siree, I still remember all those reporters coming out of the woodwork to play in the Bill Clinton Zipper Hunt.

Then they all kissed Bush's ass when he was in office.

And now they are out again fanning the Tea Party hysteria and fluffing Palin.

Postmodernist "There are no facts, only opinions" garbage also has played a role.

organizations complicit.

I have read articles where news editors say that they report news that doesn't upset the viewers. They want them is a safe and cozy zone in which they are more ready to buy crap.

Or at least that is part of the justification: business sense dictates against hard-hitting scary stuff.

Advertisers own print and electronic media. I worked for a small newspaper and we did many fluff pieces to fill the "news hole." Any piece that required time or might piss off any advertiser or potential advertiser, or endanger access to politicians, was taboo. It was a microcosm of the larger problem. Also, that same newspaper is now owned by a huge media corporation that also owns nearly every newspaper in the southeastern part of the state. The news hole shrinks daily and so do subscriptions.

That's why.

career suicide or a closed door or glass ceiling.

"We" can't be given facts or too many will wake up.

"We" may well be past the point where even waking up will change much in our life times.

If you really want to see a form of journalism that is already dead, see local tv news. It's nothing but crime, fires, disasters, and scandals.