Posted on 10/28/2009 6:45:33 AM PDT by kingattax
There have been a lot of bad days recently for what’s come to be known as the Mainstream Media – or MSM – but Monday was one of the worst.
New circulation figures showed that big city papers had lost as much as a quarter of their circulation in the last six months. And new TV ratings showed that CNN, the cable network that prides itself on news coverage down the middle, finished dead last in prime-time against more partisan rivals like Fox News and MSNBC.
Are the two connected?
Eric Alterman, a media columnist for the Nation, and a frequent critic of the MSM, thinks they are. "Non-partisan news, and news aimed at a broad audience, doesn't have the cache, and therefore the consumer base it once had,” Alterman said. “The whole notion of citizenship has been declining for decades now.”
With the proliferation of media across platforms these days, there’s less shared knowledge among people, who are increasingly heading to niche outlets for information. At the same time, there’s a large appetite for the new media world where the MSM gatekeepers no longer hold as much clout, and “he said, she said” journalism gives way to strong point-of-view. Just last night, NYU hosted a debate among prominent journalists on the subject: “Good Riddance to Mainstream Media.”.
And in today’s cable news universe, Alterman said, “politics without a slant, without a point-of-view, is interesting to very few people.”
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
Gimme a break. If CNN was No. 1 and Fox news was last, would anyone of these lightweights be printing anything like that?
He’s wrong. That’s why so many have migrated to Fox. Too much media with a leftist point of view. The Dallas Morning News, which decided it was going to be “progressive” lost 22% circulation this last year.
“The whole notion of citizenship has been declining for decades now.”
This is by the left’s design. We traded the “melting pot” for multiculturalism and diversity. Now, we have people with views and attitudes that simply can’t coexist.
The destruction of America is coming along as planned by the left.
Then why is CNN and CNBC down so much? Why are FOX News and the WSJ the only mainstream cable news & publication outlets with viewership increases? It's not with/without slant that's at issue, it's liberal slant that's being rejected. Now, go back to your Daily KOS sockpuppet mentality like a good little boy.
As much as I enjoy "progressive" papers getting their butts kicked, with the DMN most of their decline probably is due to them raising their rates to a ridiculous level to $40,00 + bucks a month. A friend of mine dropped them after being a subscriber for over 40 years for just that reason.
God !
When he learns the difference between cachet and cache,
get back to me.
Geeeeeeez
“And new TV ratings showed that CNN, the cable network that prides itself on news coverage down the middle”
And that’s where I stopped reading.
Thank you Politico for quoting extensively from that leftwing nutcake Alterman. You guys are such tools.
When has “politics without a slant, without a point-of-view" been tried in the MSM? It's never been tried by the MSM in my lifetime.
Yeah.
'Til then maybe he oughta stick to credit cards and checks. ;)
Where is this "non-partisan news" of which he speaks? I said this after the election and it's still just as true today as it was then. If newspapers want to survive, they have take on the role of antagonist of the politicians. It's the traditional media role, and while they may not thrive as they once have, it would stave off the bleeding. But no, they've chosen instead to cheer-lead for the administration. Why would you pay money to read an article that just restates talking points you hear on the news? What is the point of the media if it's just an echo chamber for whatever the administration says?
Oh, and it's a myth that journalism is non-partisan or objective. What it should be about is getting to the truth, and sadly it doesn't do that any more. Too often I read stories where two people on opposite sides of the political spectrum say different things. But the newspaper never really checks to see if one of them is more correct than the other. They just report the quotes as if all opinions are equal, and clearly they are not.
So what ails the newspapers? Laziness in investigating anything. Lack of actual facts in news stories. Mistaken reporting of inaccurate facts handed to them by the people they are interviewing. More and more younger people get their news from the internet. Why? Because internet articles are fact checked by readers and corrected. Newspapers don't check facts and offer corrections days or weeks later on obscure pages mixed in with stuff people barely read. Newspapers also censor the news and only present things from a monolithic point of view. When one of the papers get out of line and print something new and different, the others chide them for catering to some imaginary bogeyman. It's group-think writ large.
Citizenship implies people being active in government and being informed about what is really going on. You can't get that from newspapers any more. You can only get it from the internet. Citizenship isn't declining, people just can't get the news they need from the dead tree media.
Ping.
Well stated.
I tell you what...this article is the very definition of delusional.
These idiots don't even know what a true "right wing" news network would even look like, which is why they look at FoxNews as "partisan." Other than Beck and Hannity, Fox is right down the middle.
This is a joke, right Betty?
Here come the bailouts.
And the government control of the news. They should name the paper "Pravda" and get it over with.
The MSM / DNC cheerleaders have been in denial for so long about their content causing their decline that no one will convince them otherwise. They remind me of a guy clinging to the mast of a boat that is sinking while refusing every life line thrown to them.
Now it is to late to save the ship, these suckers will be chanting this stuff right to the bottom. Time is on our side and they will disappear.
The MSM / DNC cheerleaders have been in denial for so long about their content causing their decline that no one will convince them otherwise. They remind me of a guy clinging to the mast of a boat that is sinking while refusing every life line thrown to them.
Now it is to late to save the ship, these suckers will be chanting this stuff right to the bottom. Time is on our side and they will disappear.
Like Err America.
“O’Reilly, host of the top-rated cable news show, told an audience last week that networks need to give viewers “a product that is entertaining and informative.” As for his 8 p.m. rival on CNN, O’Reilly said: “Nobody watches Campbell Brown. You have to evolve if you want to survive in the commercial world. If you are going to do a straight newscast in prime time, you are going to lose.”
Brown is losing not only to O’Reilly and a partisan on the left, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, but also to Nancy Grace, who hosts a more tabloidy show at the same time on sister network HLN.
CNN President Jon Klein says he knows why those approaches work, and he’s not going to go there. “It’s the oldest trick in the book to trot out over-the-top hosts and put them on a cable-news show,” Klein told POLITICO in May.
There’s no doubt that the over-the-top, and politically partisan, hosts are having more success attracting viewers on nights when there’s no major news event. Acknowledging the low ratings, Klein told staffers on Tuesday, according to TVNewser, that CNN “refuse[s] to do the things that might get us a quick number or cater to the extremes that would alienate our core viewers.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~
LOL .. Mr. Klein, you’ve got it backwards. Viewers have been driven to Fox BECAUSE of your flimsy and exclusionary approach to the news those ‘extreme’ conservatives demand, who represent the majority of flyover Americans.
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