Maybe if I live to eleventy billion years old I can approach Roy’s ascerbic wit. On the state of the media puke funnel:
This would have piqued my interest even if David Broder hadn’t gone on about what a great populist Sarah Palin is at precisely the moment when a new WashPo-ABC poll showed that Palin has never been less popular…
It’s an unavoidable problem, I fear, of democracy in an age of mass communications and dwindling dollars. To the honorable old question, why oh why can’t we have a better press corps? I can only answer: No money in it. The Kremlinology of the press, citizen and otherwise, can be extremely subtle, but the basic state of play is that those with little power are desperate and those with much power are scared.
In the positivist view, this constant tension is supposed to create a better state of affairs, with the bustling marketplace of ideas yielding a better product. Maybe the positive thinkers think that better product is a higher degree of truth. But from what I’ve seen, it’s more like the progress of junk food: from an agreeable, consistent, and convenient substitute for the real thing, to something everyone eats and nobody remembers is junk.
The almighty dollar.
February 19, 2010 at 3:50 pm
As some semi-famous journalist said at some journalist convention:
“After all, the only reason they ran your shitty story is because they couldn’t find an advertiser to buy that space.”
February 19, 2010 at 9:49 pm
It’s not that there is no money in it… it is that there is no merit-based feedback. Suppose that every time some wingnut made a prediction that later turned out to be false his or her reputation actually suffered as a result… then we wouldn’t be in this predicament.