Posted on 08/11/2014 5:31:35 PM PDT by Biggirl
RIP Robin Williams.
(Excerpt) Read more at video.foxnews.com ...
LOL, you have no idea what conservatives have complained about and written books about for the last 50 years in regards to the loss of hard news in America.
In this long thread you have not even expressed any interest in it.
The American news media has self destructed in about 40 or 45 years, and you not only don’t have any interest in it, you weren’t and are not aware, that it has even happened.
I never said anything about whether a consumer of news could hear things related to entertainment and the arts, it was that it was limited and in a correct proportion, today it is almost all we get.
There is a reason that the top consumers of HARD news, adult news, dry, factual news reporting to primarily male audiences, canceled their newspapers, and magazines and discarded television.
Of course I have interest and am aware. I’m not even disputing that specific point with you. The rise of People Magazine was a key media event in the chain you’re talking about.
It isn’t about the rise of People magazine, female publications were fine,there were plenty of sources for females to get their information, what changed was the feminisation of American news that men needed, the boring and dry, fact rich reporting about issues of great importance.
Almost all mainstream media is now a version of women’s magazines - celeb gossip & neurotic sensationalism and what hasn’t totally converted, has diluted itself.
What changed was newspapers ending their women’s section as ‘sexist” and as a “pink ghetto” to keep it from diluting, or contaminating the hard news, they started affirmative action to hire females and blacks to write for the people who were not the number one consumers of newspapers, what they got out of it, was that they lost their hard news audience, and the females and blacks didn’t become newspaper readers to replace them, the same happened to news magazines.
There was a time when men would religiously watch the black and white network news, now it is useless, my guess is that this minor celebrity dominated network news while our serious issues were ignored.
Sports aren’t war though. Sports are celebrity. Arguably sports was what got western culture into the cult of celebrity, it really started with the gladiators. Opera isn’t popular anymore, back when it was popular opera singers were massive celebrities, complete with divorces and sex scandals and all the other trashy celebrity culture we have today. I’m not bringing opera into anything, I’m pointing out that opera was already in that world. The cult of celebrity has extremely deep roots that show your complaint about it being something “new” are silly and ill-informed.
Back then there might be an article in the back of the paper about that celebrity, maybe just a paragraph. Today there are many 24-hour TV channels. People are glued to celebrity worship today like they could never be before
On this thread there are multiple examples that show that’s not true. We’ve got celebrity stuff as front page news dating back to the Civil War. Yes we do have more media now, which translates to more celebrity news, but as long as there’s been news (dating back to Roman criers) celebrities have been a front and center portion of it.
What you are managing to do is to miss the conversation entirely, the feminization of news and the creation of a adultfemale/femaleteen/celebrity culture where the news is dominated by celebrity and female interests from fashion to health to human interest angles in everything, in other words anything but the hard news that men need and want.
Even war and foreign affairs and science has to be written to female sensibilities when it comes up, the “human” angle, how it affects children, not our security.
Almost all mainstream media is now a version of womens magazines - celeb gossip & neurotic sensationalism and what hasnt totally converted, has diluted itself.
What changed was newspapers ending their womens section as sexist and as a pink ghetto to keep it from diluting, or contaminating the hard news, they started affirmative action to hire females and blacks to write for the people who were not the number one consumers of newspapers, what they got out of it, was that they lost their hard news audience, and the females and blacks didnt become newspaper readers to replace them, the same happened to news magazines.
There was a time when men would religiously watch the black and white network news, now it is useless, my guess is that this minor celebrity dominated network news while our serious issues were ignored.
Examples of 24-7 obsessive celebrity worship? I doubt it. I also doubt it was nearly as common then as it is now.
No, I’m pointing out that your end of the conversation is built on a blatant misunderstanding of basic fact of history. There is no minimization of the news, the celebrity culture dates back to gladiatorial day and has NEVER been dominated by women.
No, war and foreign affairs and science are not written to “female sensibilities”.
You are, quite simply, pathetically wrong.
What changed was they realized men read the “women’s” section and so calling it that was stupid at best and at worst alienating a chunk of the readership. That’s really it.
TV news has ALWAYS been worthless. There’s a reason the TV comes first in TV news.
TV News can be summed up as Crime-Weather-Sports. It’s pretty lousy.
There weren’t 24-7 news channels so obviously that wasn’t physically possible. There’s a lot more mass media now, so again obviously it wouldn’t be physically possible for ANY type of news to be as common then as now. But celebrity news was still huge, look at post 59, that’s the front page of what was one of the leading hard news journals on the planet right in the middle of the Civil War. Look at post 26, look at the stories that lost out to Clark Gable’s divorce. The idea that celebrity news was “back page” or “women’s section” news is quite simply laughable, the cult of celebrity dates back a very very long time, and has ALWAYS managed to make top stories, even when it probably shouldn’t.
Don’t forget the human interest story, always gotta wrap up the half our with puppies.
“And finally, one senior citizen in Spring Oaks has found a delightful way to feed her parakeet...”
Wow, that is just insane.
There is no “minimization of the news” according to you, and it is men who drive this celebrity culture, and newspapers stopped calling the women’s section the women’s section because men like it so much, not because of feminist complaints in the early 1970s
To top it all off, you claim that TV news has not gone downhill and been feminized since the 1950s and early 1960s.
That is all too idiotic to comprehend.
I never said anything about “minimization of the news”, and I said that it’s PEOPLE that drive celebrity culture with equal participation by men and women. At least you got the 3rd point kind of right, really the move was them realizing there’s no reason to label a section “half of you don’t want to read this”, even more so when it turns out that a good chunk of that half WERE reading it.
And I never said TV news hasn’t gone downhill. I said it started off worthless. Though it’s definitely found ways to be worse. Not from feminization, from pointless confrontation. TV news these days is all about yelling. of course so are you, so it’s surprising that you don’t like it.
The only idiotic thing here is how much effort you put into ignoring the facts that have already proven you hideously wrong in every way.
I still look at some my old newspapers and magazines going back well over a 100 years, it has changed completely, not to mention that some of us witnessed the transition that started in the late 1960s.
Some of us went from being news junkies and subscribing to up to five newspapers, to eventually dropping all of it.
The same reason that people quit watching network news as it became feminized and trivial.
The same thing that females did to news and journalism, is the same thing that we are witnessing and fear will increase in the military, it will focus more and more on the female’s interests.
bump
shallow, trivial, distracting from real issues, glorifies immoral celebutards, and a lot of other negatives
Yes there is. Network news is not "confrontational", it is trivial, it is geared more to a female audience and is about 56% female.
Morning news audiences are even more likely to be female. almost 70%.
Feminists did away with the women's page, they wanted the female view and interests in the front section, they got their way, and we quit reading the newspapers.
Network news is just stupid. Always has been. Because it makes money the exact same way as any other TV show, selling your eyeballs to advertisers. It is, for all basic purposes, a half hour sitcom, and always has been. With less text than the front page of the newspaper there never was any chance that TV news would be informative, and it never has been.
As a guy that claims he used to read 5 newspapers a day it’s shocking you would EVER think TV news was useful. Even in the “good old days” you would have to have noticed that the TV versions of stories was basically the first paragraph of the newspaper version, and that 90% of the stories you read in the newspaper didn’t even get that much coverage. I don’t see how any newspaper reader from the old days would ever have taken TV news seriously, it boggles the mind.
Feminists didn’t do away with the women’s page. The NEWSPAPERS did, because it was their page to begin with, and they made the change. Because they realized it was a dumb idea in the first place.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.