Who's Gathering the News?
POWERLINE BLOG
As we have said countless times, most of what we do is not primary news reporting. Every once in a while we break a story based on first-hand accounts, but most of what we do is commentary on the news. For that, like all commentators, we rely on others for the primary function of gathering and reporting the news.
Sadly, the news-gathering function has been corrupted in recent years, as sources like the Associated Press have been drawn into editorializing rather than reporting. Another negative trend is the financially-driven downsizing of news-gathering operations across all of the mainstream media, from television to newspapers to magazines. The latest sign of this trend is the leaked proposal for CBS News to outsource some of its news-gathering to CNN:
CBS, the home of the most storied news division in broadcasting, has been in discussions with Time Warner about a deal to outsource some of its newsgathering operations to CNN, two executives briefed on the matter said Monday.
Broadly speaking, the executives described conversations about reducing CBS's newsgathering capacity while keeping its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor, and paying a fee to CNN to buy the cable network's news feeds.
That's great: CBS keeps Katie Couric and fires its reporters. There is a huge demand for primary news: raw information, carefully and reliably reported by knowledgeable and objective newspeople. The proliferation of media outlets, including the internet, has increased that demand, not reduced it. It is ironic, and unfortunate, that news organizations are increasingly willing to abandon the function for which they are uniquely qualified, primary news reporting, in favor of news presenting and commentary, fields in which they have no advantage over a host of competitors. |
