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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (93544)	1/4/2005 3:51:46 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793725

Newspaper sale$ decline should be blamed on the journos By Jack Kelly jewishworldreview.com The best editor in America today isn't a journalist. He's Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, also known as the "Instapundit." He's endangering my livelihood. I used to say that I was in a declining industry, but fortunately, I was declining faster than it was. Now I'm not so sure. Last year was a lousy year for newspapers. Circulation was stagnant, or dropped, at two thirds of all dailies in America, including such biggies as the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times, where readership is in free fall. Most years recently have been bad years for newspapers. In 1950, 123 percent of households subscribed to a newspaper. (One household in five subscribed to more than one paper.) Today the figure is less than 53 percent. Circulation declines may be larger than these numbers indicate. Four big newspapers — the Chicago Sun Times, the Dallas Morning News, Long Island's Newsday, and the Spanish language newspaper Hoy — have admitted supplying bogus numbers to the Audit Bureau of Circulation. The evening newscasts on network television have been losing viewers even faster than newspapers have been shedding readers. Audiences for the nightly news on ABC, NBC and CBS have fallen 59 percent from their peak in 1969. At dinner time in 1980, 75 percent of all television sets in use were tuned to one of the three nightly newscasts. Last year, barely more than one in five were. Worse times are head. Senior citizens are, by far, the most reliable newspaper readers and watchers of broadcast television news. The younger people get, the less likely they are to subscribe to newspapers or watch Dan or Peter or Brian. When our current crop of seniors dies off in five or ten years, we're going to be in a world of hurt. We have a technological problem. The "news cycle" is now 24/7. Because of production and distribution costs, it's impractical to put out a newspaper more than once a day. This means that much of what we report as "news" is really "olds" to that portion of our subscribers who watch television, listen to radio, or go online. The broadcast networks — which exist chiefly to provide entertainment — are used to providing us with news at a time that is convenient to them, a half hour in the early evening. The cable news networks provide news updates constantly throughout the day and well into the night. If our only problem were technological, newspapers would still be in pretty good shape. Radio and television deprived us of the ability to give you breaking news first. But since all you can get in a couple of minutes on the hour and half hour is the headlines, and all the copy in a half hour television newscast would barely fill a single newspaper column, we still had a large lead in providing depth and context to the news. That's where our trust problem kicks in. Journalists rank near the bottom of the professions in honesty and ethical standards, according to Gallup's annual survey. Last year, only 21 percent of respondents said newspaper reporters had high or very high ethical standards. An awful lot of you don't trust us to get our facts straight, to tell both sides of the story, or to put the news in context. For that, more and more of you are turning to web logs, or "blogs." There were hardly any blogs five years ago. There are more than four million today. There could be eight million by the next election. Blogs provided you with information we in the "mainstream" media didn't want you to have, such as John Kerry's "Christmas in Cambodia," and the fact that the documents on which Dan Rather and CBS were relying for a hit piece on President Bush's National Guard service were forgeries. Journalists tend not to like bloggers, because they report on errors we make. Dan Rather and former New York Times editor Howell Raines are unemployed chiefly because of the vigilance and tenacity of bloggers. (We journalists rarely turn the spotlights we use on business leaders and government officials on ourselves.) People who work at journalism full time ought to be able to do a better job of it than people for whom it is a hobby. But that's not going to happen as long as we "professional" journalists ignore stories we don't like and try to hide our mistakes. We think of ourselves as "gatekeepers." But there is not much future in being a gatekeeper when the walls are down.

To: LindyBill who wrote (93544)	1/4/2005 4:08:33 AM
From: KLP	Respond to of 793725

Wonderful report, LB! The American and Australian military folks deserve so much credit, and this small piece reflects just a bit of why..... >>>>>>This January 2 report is written by local Dutch diplomats who traveled to Aceh and saw the reality on the ground. We will cite the two principal paragraphs, and leave them unedited in their original rather charming Dutch-English, The US military has arrived and is clearly establishing its presence everywhere in Banda Aceh. They completely have taken over the military hospital, which was a mess until yesterday but is now completely up and running. They brought big stocks of medicines, materials for the operation room, teams of doctors, water and food. Most of the patients who were lying in the hospital untreated for a week have undergone medical treatment by the US teams by this afternoon. US military have unloaded lots of heavy vehicles and organize the logistics with Indonesian military near the airport. A big camp is being set up at a major square in the town. Huge generators are ready to provide electricity. US helicopters fly to places which haven't been reached for the whole week and drop food. The impression it makes on the people is also highly positive; finally something happens in the city of Banda Aceh and finally it seems some people are in control and are doing something. No talking but action. European countries are until now invisible on the ground. IOM staff (note: this is a USAID-funded organization) is very busy briefing the incoming Americans and Australians about the situation.<<<<<<< >>>>>>>only fault The Diplomad can find with the Dutch report is that it understates the role of the Australians in the relief effort -- they deserve considerably more credit than this report gives them. It's hard to praise the Aussies too much for what they have done in the wake of the tsunami. They are absolutely splendid -- too bad they've got that thing about that weird game, uh, cricket, is it?<<<<<<<