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Reader Voices: Who Pays for Content? | 22 comments (22 topical) | Post A Comment
MSM Forfeits[ Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#12)
by jimdoria on Thu Jun 28, 2007 at 09:28:29 AM PDT

The rise of Internet self-publishing has hastened the demise of MSM, but it is far from the only factor. In many ways, they've made themselves irrelevant by forfeiting their role as the "fourth estate".

Honesty in the press has taken a beating in the last few decades, from various angles. An increasingly media-savvy political regime (and I'm not just talking about the current administration, or even the preceding one) has made access to official sources the currency of political journalism. The result is a press corps that cozies up to their "adversaries" at the risk of being shut out. The graying of the reporters and those they cover has an effect as well. A lot of these guys (and gals) have been working together for years now. Familiarity takes the edge off of opposition.

Also, the legal team is now a player in the newsroom. It's harder to craft an honest appraisal of facts when a lawyer is peering over your shoulder, red pencil in hand, looking for potentially actionable language. And perhaps the 500-pound gorilla in all of this is corporate consolidation. Rather than many news organizations whose primary mission was factual reporting, today's new organization is likely to be just a small branch of a much larger enterprise, which often has other goals and priorities. These can and do run counter to the mission of accurately reporting critical, relevant information.

There are just too many reasons to question the motives and behavior of most news outlets today. People aren't stupid. In the marketplace of honest reporting, MSM hasn't tended their "brand" very well and now they are losing business because of it.

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