No News is Good News

That's an old saying that I'm going to take for a spin. My angle on it is that our news media does, at best, a poor job of serving the needs of the public. At worst they are just filling the pages with dreck. The newspapers are what I consider the best way to get complete information out to the public. Magazines can do a different job because they aren't under the daily pressure to put a product on the newsstands. For shear column inches a newspaper, in the course of a week, can and sometimes does, devote more to a story than a magazine ever would.

In my naivete I assumed that a large proportion of people read a daily newspaper every day. I do and assume that most do. In fact most do not. The fact that I read one newspaper every day does not make me well informed ( I should read more than one ). I am somewhat informed of one viewpoint. The pity is it makes me more informed that a large number of people. There are 19% of people that consumed no news yesterday (reference in Pew link ). That is no news whatsoever. Many people get news from TV ( superficial ) or online ( potentially as biased as any source ). I'm not saying I am better informed than most because I get news from a newspaper, supplemented with internet news and blogs. I'm just saying that a lot of people are not much concerned with being well informed. I often wonder if the people who choose to be un- or ill-informed are also the people that choose not to vote.

I only have two points to make in this post. I thought I better say so because I tend to ramble.

1. - Newspapers are more and more printing dreck.

2. - People aren't reading them as much. Maybe, as bad a thing as that is, it's also a good thing.

In some circles it is expected that one backs up one's assertions with facts, or at least opinions of other people that agree with one's assertions. I am reluctant to do that as it hurts my reputation as a mavericky blowhard, but if I must.

For 'more and more dreck' I offer #this#. Once a week my paper - the Regina Leader-Post ( a Can-West rag ) - prints a religion section. In the last offering was a smarmy article about a prophet predicting that the end is near. The prophet is a fringe Mormon who himself asserts that 'Prophecy is not an exact science'. Who would have guessed.

[Sorry folks the Leader-Post link doesn't load - the Canada.com mother site says it cant display the article - things are under construction - fey. The exact same article ran December 13 in the LA Times.  Kinda reinforces my point that the dreck goes wider than Can-West.]

The reason that this article is more than just bad fish wrap is that it sets a tone. With my tinfoil hat at the ready I am going to predict that this 'end of the world' shit is just going to keep coming and get thicker and more frequent. As we approach 2012 'respectable' news sources will pump articles about the "prediction" of rapture and the end times. The date hinges, in part, on the Mayan calender ending on that date. The Mayan calender is a bit complicated. Mainstream Mayanist scholars consider that a prediction of a cataclysm on or about December 21, 2012 is a misinterpretation (Wiki). That bit of sanity will not prevent the general public from thinking something will happen and if the traditional media pumps up the story for ratings no one is well served. I first heard of the end of the Mayan calender as it being the last date that was inscribed on a wall at a Mayan temple. If that is the case it is easily explained. Funding ran out, the stone carver had to use up accumulated overtime, somebody lost the hammer, anything could have happened. News stories about hogwash that many people believe in don't deserve the paper, or pixels they are written on. I'm not suggesting that you read the article. No one needs that kind of punishment. Trust me, it's as stupid as I have seen a newspaper article get. Best line : Prophecy, ....., is not an exact science.

All I am saying is that news should be more that just what is popular and certainly shouldn't be speculative.

My point # 2 comes from a 2008 biennial news consumption survey by the Pew Research Center.

Here's the lead-off in an article about the report:

For more than a decade, the audiences for most traditional news sources have steadily declined, as the number of people getting news online has surged. However, today it is not a choice between traditional sources and the internet for the core elements of today’s news audiences.

A sizable minority of Americans find themselves at the intersection of these two long-standing trends in news consumption. Integrators, who get the news from both traditional sources and the internet, are a more engaged, sophisticated and demographically sought-after audience segment than those who mostly rely on traditional news sources. Integrators share some characteristics with a smaller, younger, more internet savvy audience segment - Net-Newsers - who principally turn to the web for news, and largely eschew traditional sources.

Tidbit:

Most Americans fall into the three core news audiences - Integrators, Traditionalists, or Net-Newsers. The fourth group - the Disengaged - are very much bystanders when it comes to news consumption. They are less educated on average than even the Traditionalists and exhibit extremely low interest in - and knowledge of - current events. Just 55% of the Disengaged get any news on a typical day,

Since the early 1990s, the proportion of Americans saying they read a newspaper on a typical day has declined by about 40%; the proportion that regularly watches nightly network news has fallen by half.

These trends have been more stable in recent years, but the percentage saying they read a newspaper yesterday has fallen from 40% to 34% in the last two years alone.

Say what ????

Regular readers of magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Harper’s Magazine stand out for their high level of political knowledge. Nearly half (47%) answered three political knowledge questions correctly - the highest percentage of any news audience.

A high level of political knowledge means less than half the group can answer three questions correctly ??

Just for the halibut ( hey, I like a good slab of fish now and again ) answer me this question.

In your circle of friends and acquaintances are there more than two people you consider better informed than you are ?