No News Is Bad News…

NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS...
[SOURCE: Center for American Progress, AUTHOR: Eric Alterman]
[Commentary] The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s third annual “State of the News Media 2006” report couldn't have been released at a more fortuitous time. With the ongoing drama over newspaper chain Knight Ridder’s corporate investors forcing the company to offer itself on the auction block and this week’s news that McClatchy Co. bought it for $6.5 billion, a new round of speculation about the health of the newspaper industry is well underway. Yet another source of journalistic anxiety arose when McClatchy immediately announced that it was selling off 12 of the 32 papers it inherited from Knight Ridder and the little-known fact reported by the San Jose Mercury News (one of the papers to be dumped by McClatchy), that eight of the 12 papers to be sold are union shops. While all this took place after the PEJ study was completed, the congruence of the two events simply added to an increasing sense of foreboding about the industry for nearly everyone who cares about its future. The study itself, which tracked data and a variety of public polls throughout the year (while studying the content of newspapers, magazines and Internet magazines for a single news day, May 11, 2005) is an illuminating look into the bowels of the American media machine. For the day that specific content was tracked, PEJ confirmed something that many close observers certainly suspected: More and more news outlets are crowding themselves around fewer and fewer stories, hitting the public over the head with them until the blood flows from the cranium. Finally, we face the fact of a progressively more confused and fractured public sphere, made up of individuals who have lost the old, binding ties of a shared cultural experience of having trusted news sources in common. Down this road lies a loss of what binds us together as democratic citizens, leaving only consumers in its wake.
http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=1487391