By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | Are you as frustrated as I am over the cheap way the media is now covering “local news?”
Several years ago, it was the electronic media, principally local television, which began showing us more “blood and guts” in local news. But now, even the major daily in the area, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is headlining blood and guts stories with vigor. It almost makes you want to stop reading the newspaper. There are far better stories that the newspaper is not reporting.
To insure the record is straight, I say all this while getting a good pension from the Atlanta newspaper. I want the paper to prosper, but flinch at the way it is reporting the news today.
There’s a reason why we get all this gore and mayhem in our news. Simply put, it’s cheaper to chase ambulances and run to the areas where gore takes place than it is to delve into the significant news of a community. The television stations (all of ‘em) even take pride in showing us footage of a site “where the shooting occurred.” What good is that? Or a picture of the street corner “where the truck turned over.” Useless!
Picturing that scene only makes it worse. That footage or photo means little to the story. It appears that this is merely a way to “take up time or newsprint.” It follows in the tradition of Rebecca West, the British novelist, who in 1956 said “Journalism—an ability to meet the challenge of filling space.”
Mainly, filling space with blood and gore is far cheaper than deep investigative reporting.
Oh, were that it was not so!
All this amounts to putting out a lousier newscast or newspaper because that’s more profitable than doing the job these institutions should be doing. It is a poor record of accomplishments.
Now we recognize: even with the smaller staff than they presently have, the media cannot have a blockbuster story every day. Producing deep investigative stories takes time, sometimes lots of time, as reporters search records, follow-up on sources, and dig all they can to produce readable, substantial stories. Media staffs today are cut to the bone, and while they have these more substantial stories from time to time, they cannot have one in every edition.
That’s not what bothers us. It’s their selection of the news that bugs us. Every shooting, accident, family feuds, and celebrity hi-jinks, are just not necessary for a community to know about to govern itself. Now if five people are killed in an accident (remember the story out of Savannah), then that’s news. But we don’t benefit from knowing about every bloodletting that comes down the pike.
While cagey news-gatherers shirk away from “happy news,” at least they should strive for a balance of news, and not give us only grit-and-grime all the time.
We counted one media’s online edition’s front page the other day. There were six stories. All were blood-and-guts. Surely there are more activities going on in that community that are worthy of reporting and are not of this nature!
What is really unacceptable is that you might think that the media wants more viewers or subscribers. Their methods and selection of what to report serves to run off more people than to attract them. Yet these media people seem incapable of sitting back to take a long look at what they are doing, recognize it, and respond accordingly.
That’s my rant for today. We bet many of you are just as upset with us being fed little but gore journalism.
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