ht: SDA: Culture of Condescension
"It used to be that a handful of editors could decide what was news--and what was not. They acted as sort of demigods. If they ran a story, it became news. If they ignored an event, it never happened," Murdoch said. "Today, editors are losing this power. The Internet, for example, provides access to thousands of new sources that cover things an editor might ignore. And if you aren't satisfied with that, you can start up your own blog, and cover and comment on the news yourself. Journalists like to think of themselves as watchdogs, but they haven't always responded well when the public calls them to account."
(...)
(...)A recent American study reported that many editors and reporters simply do not trust their readers to make good decisions. Let's be clear about what this means. This is a polite way of saying that these editors and reporters think their readers are too stupid to think for themselves."
(...)
Despite the blemishes, however, Murdoch said newspapers can still count on circulation gains "if papers provide readers with news they can trust."
I'd add that that would be just the beginning. The big-money newsmedia must end its leftward bias, its politically-correct self-imposed censorship.
C'mon- for a few recommendations, call a terrorist a terrorist, because a terrorist is a terrorist, and stop accepting the lies of the "Palestinian" propagandists at face value and stop favoring "Palestine" over Israel, for one thing, and stop being pro-Left and anti-Right... be fair and balanced, just report the news facts, report what many would consider relevant, not holding it back for political correctness reasons or for radically-extreme-and-revolutionary-special-interest agenda-related reasons... and certainly not for reason of manipulation of the Peoples' perceptions of the world around them.
The list of the problems the mainstream media has which account for its astonishing, unprecedented decline in audience is much longer than Mr. Murdoch likely realizes.
One should pay close attention to the criticism of the MSM as rendered by bloggers and their commentors. After all, these are the people who are fed up with the arrogant, we-know-best propaganda and manipulativeness... the Pravda-likeness of the Big-Money MSM.
