Defiantone.com

Sometimes I find something that nails a point home far better than I could because I normally resort to rampant profanity while talking about destroying things. Others, analyze the problem at hand a provide a variety of viewpoints. Check out this news snippet originally found here. The original paper was from 1989 but it still holds true today.

To become sophisticated citizens, Americans would need high-quality, independent journalism; but news organizations, to stay in business while producing such journalism, would need an audience of sophisticated citizens…. Because most members of the public know and care relatively little about government, they neither seek nor understand high-quality political reporting and analysis. With limited demand for first-rate journalism, most news organizations cannot afford to supply it, and because they do not supply it, most Americans have no practical source of the information necessary to become politically sophisticated. Yet it would take an informed and interested citizenry to create enough demand to support top-flight journalism. The nature of both demand and supply cements interdependence and diminishes the press’s autonomy. On the demand side, news organizations have to respond to public tastes. They cannot stay in business if they produce a diverse assortment of richly textured ideas and information that nobody sees. To become informed and hold government accountable, the general public needs to obtain news that is comprehensive yet interesting and understandable, that conveys facts and outcomes, not cosmetic images and airy promises. But that is not what the public demands.”

Source: Democracy Without Citizens: Media and the Decay of American Politics
(New York: Oxford University Press) 1989 by Robert M. Entman

This entry was posted on Friday, July 29th, 2005 at 1:52 am and is filed under I was too lazy to organize these. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.