The Age of Man

Ten years worse 28 December 2009

Today the news media apologist Howard Kurtz, appropriating a line from Ronald Reagan, asks “Are you better off, as a media consumer, than you were 10 years ago?” While conceding that all the obvious developments in news journalism suggest that the news today is dumber, shorter, and more amateurishly reported than ten years ago, Kurtz argues that this decade offered some high quality reporting–at least for a world in which general-interest newspapers are financially untenable relics, and only niche outlets can meet expenses.

This line of reasoning assumes that, in the internet age, the decline of dead-tree newspapers was inevitable–an assumption with which I would quibble.  Somebody in this decade figured out how to adapt technology to offer classified ads, how to target retail advertising to vast audiences, how to buttress an imperiled business model with innovative products that people want. It’s just that none of those discoveries belongs to newspapers or television networks.

And while it’s easy for me to link to poorly reasoned newspaper columns, no one should ignore or accept the more complete degradation of television news reporting.  At the local and national levels, television reporting is not to be taken seriously.  The only exception here is sports journalism–an exception which speaks volumes about our culture.

Most importantly, Kurtz’s assumption cannot explain why serious, well-reported and important journalism is being delivered everyday to an expanding audience in a totally anachronistic medium. I am speaking of the many heroic efforts, led by NPR, to preserve journalism on the radio.