Media losing credibility, diversity

Media losing credibility, diversity
BY LAURA WASHINGTON
Copyright by The Chicago Sun-Times
March 8, 2010
http://www.suntimes.com/news/washington/2089119,CST-EDT-Laura08.article


The 2010 media environment hews to the "if it bleeds, it leads" mantra.
The media have abandoned public interest journalism on the slaughterhouse floor. Real news is increasingly an endangered species. Draconian cutbacks at newspapers, magazines and TV stations have forced newsrooms to slash, even eliminate investigative, enterprise and beat reporting.

The decline of impact journalism is not news, but is accelerating, thanks to our Internet obsession and brutal recession. Accuracy, content and credibility are withering on the vine.

We missed the biggest story of the Feb. 2 Illinois primaries. Granted, reporters came through on other follies, with exposes of Dorothy Brown's "Jeans Day" and Todd Stroger's "friends and family plan." Yet what we'll remember years from now is the Scott Lee Cohen debacle. Five years ago, such a fatally flawed candidate would not have slipped through media scrutiny to snare the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor. It happens because there are fewer reporters who cover and "get" government and politics, much less get the space and time to influence political discourse. Voters should be able to rely on journalists to vet and expose political poseurs. The Cohen "surprise" says they can't.

Journalists who haven't been laid off or furloughed are being diverted to cover meaningless fluff and titillating trash. Americans read and hear more about Tiger Woods' sexual peccadilloes and Desiree Rogers' haute couture than our imploding state budgets and education crisis.

Ethics and standards are expendable in this anything-goes new world. There's always another media misstep just around the corner. Last month, Gerald Posner, the highly touted "investigative reporter" for the Daily Beast, was forced to resign after he was accused of multiple instances of plagiarism.

In Chicago, Vocalo media critic Rob Feder reports that two convicted felons, former Channel 2 anchor Larry Mendte and James Laski, the disgraced Chicago city clerk, were tapped for on-air jobs at Tribune Co. outlets. Mendte is a news commentator on the Tribune's TV stations nationwide, Laski a fill-in talk show host on WGN-AM. The moves show a "cynicism and contempt for the audience," Feder wrote.

Media diversity has always been a challenge, but now we're going backward, the annual study of newsroom hiring by the American Society of Newspaper Editors shows. The percentage of journalists of color in the nation's newsrooms dropped slightly, from 13.5 percent in 2007 to 13.4 percent in 2008, according to the most recent available data. There was a "net decline" in black journalists over the previous decade.

Can't we do better?

Yes, we can, but change is creaky and problematic. When elephants mate, the ground wobbles. When Comcast recently moved to gobble up NBC/Universal in a high-profile corporate merger, the government entered from stage left. Politicians in Congress are demanding that Comcast dance a ferocious jig to win their regulatory approval. Only left feet need apply.

That's a specialty of the left wing of the Democratic Party -- to whine vociferously about the perils of media consolidation. Corporations, the left squeal, are silencing independent voices.

For them, media salvation means that Democratic "media advocates" get to trot out the Fox Network bogeyman and declare we need the big "D" --diversity of opinion -- on the airwaves.

The media advocates will call on their loyal allies in D.C.'s Democratic Party majority to preserve the jobs of liberal TV talkers like MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews. They'll maneuver a few black faces onto the set of "Meet the Press." That's their brand of "diversity."

We can do better. Accuracy, credibility and diversity in the media mean more than propping up a few TV celebrities who agree with them.