A pretty good essay on why so much of the media now does these cheap and superficial stories so often:
Tragedy, Media and Marketing
Posted by JonKatz on Tuesday July 02, @01:15PM
from the why-some-stories-get-covered-so-well dept.
If only H.L. Mencken or A.J. Liebling were still around to
weigh in on the kidnapping stories suffusing our media lately.
Alas, they're not. They wouldn't even be able to find work
these days. And too bad. If healthy media criticism still existed, someone
might have pointed out the insane hype that shrouded tragedies like the death
of Princess Di and TWA Flight 800. Pandering media hype isn't new to
people who've been on the Net or the Web. Just consider the hacking and
porno scares and insane coverage of offspring companies like Microsoft and
Amazon. Why does a case like the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart get so
much attention when others just as horrific get none at all? The answer is as
obvious as it is depressing.
Magazine and newspaper critics -- like Liebling, Mencken and I.F. Stone --
once wrote bitingly and insightfully about the greed, hypocrisy and warped
values of the people who ran conventional news organizations, and about how
those traits affected media coverage. This criticism gave us some context with
which to grasp and comprehend what we were reading and seeing. But as
media became increasingly corporatized in the 80s and 90s, such critics
vanished. Media criticism turned into celebrity journalism, with a growing
focus on media moguls and TV superstars. Even greedy capitalists like Bill
Gates were fawned over by the toughest reporters and critics, when they
should have been paying more attention to his business practices.
Every now and then, however, an old and new media issue pops up. It's
disingenuous for media gasbags to wonder why the kidnapping of Elizabeth
Smart from Salt Lake City gets tides of media hype while the kidnapping of
7-year-old Alexis Patterson from Milwaukee gets so little. We know why.
The answer has been the same for years now, and only gets more clear with
each corporate acquisition of a media property: modern media is about
making money, and that depends entirely on selecting stories that entertain,
titillate, blow up or confront.
Last week, CNN devoted a whole program to the mysterious process by
which some tragedies -- the Death of Di to name one -- get staggering
amounts of media coverage, while others -- like Mother Teresa's death the
same week -- merit relatively little. CNN's high-minded panelists debated
whether racism was the issue: Smart is a rich white kid, Alexis Patterson is
poor and black. Is there a double standard? Others suggested Smart's
parents were understandably working to promote media coverage, to involve
more people in searching for their daughter. But this dichotomous coverage is
familiar to Net veterans. Kevin Mitnick got as much media coverage in our
time as Al Capone, even though he never killed anybody. Hacking gets vastly
more media attention than assault or robbery, cyber-porn more than the
newsstand kind. Media are always selective about what makes them
hysterical.
It was striking to realize that none of CNN's panelists came close to the
simple truth: media are market-driven, not idea-substance-or-content driven.
Even the once-staid weekly newsmagazines are as likely as not to have movie
stars on their covers, despite the number of important stories worthy of
coverage. Cable channels, newspapers and newsmagazines cater to wealthy
people -- no matter what color -- because those are the consumers
advertisers want to reach. To some degree, this has always been true. But as
more media have been taken over by massive corporations like AOL
Time-Warner, Disney and General Electric, the process has vastly
accelerated. News gets marketed just like cereal. Numbers rule. Ratings
shape not only news coverage, but our very perceptions of the news. Such
companies don't decide not to cover Alexis Patterson because she's poor and
black. Profoundly pragmatic and opportunistic, they'd be happy to exploit
blacks as well as whites, if the demographics worked. They don't cover
Alexis Patterson's abduction because poor viewers in Milwaukee or
elsewhere have nothing to do with ratings, ad revenue or profit margins.
Blonde kids from wealthy families in Salt Lake City do.
Even so-called serious media like the New York Times and Washington Post
are market-driven, focused increasingly on high-end consumer products
spawned by digital technology, and on entertainment and controversy. The
Times runs several weekly sections brazenly aimed at affluent second home
buyers, wine connoisseurs and other high-end consumers. Stories about
redecorating million-dollar cottages don't appear because they're
newsworthy, but because they draw readers with money, thus advertisers
with revenue.
The Elizabeth Smarts of the world will always trump the Alexis Pattersons.
Modern media online or off, aren't steered by editors and producers making
moral and creative judgments, but by business conglomerates, lawyers,
analysts and market researchers. Their sole imperative: generate controversy
(a la Monica Lewinsky), select stories that draw the most desirable readers
and generate the greatest profits. This principle is evident in media coverage
of computing and software as well, and has been for years. Stories about the
Net invariably center on marketing -- what will make the most money, or
what might be of interest to frightened and confused parents, rather than what
is significant. Look how much coverage child pornography online gets, and
how little coverage there is of truly revolutionary techno-stories, from gene
mapping to AI. And most Americans have never even heard of open source,
let alone had the chance to consider it's many implications. Intellectual
property and copyright laws have been re-written, thanks to digital
technology, yet these stories get sporadic and incomplete coverage.
Media debates about story judgment and ethics are often this hypocritical and
disingenuous, mostly because critics and panelists aren't really free to speak
the truth -- moral media died decades ago. From Princess Di to terrorism to
kidnapping, stories grow in a hyper-information environment, one which
promotes argument and hysteria and, increasingly, filters out the lives of poor,
ordinary, or non-marketable people. Modern media takes stories and filters
them through an increasingly sophisticated marketing machine.Online, blogs
and small sites are freer than conventional journalists to set a broader agenda,
but their audiences remain small and fragmented.
Thus, there's no mystery about why Elizabeth Smart's kidnapping gets so
much more attention than that of other kids. The only mystery is how long it
will take the media -- and more importantly, the public -- to understand and
acknowledge the reality of their own new, intensely corporate, value system.
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