Sunday, February 03, 2013

LOCAL NEWS. AN ENDANGERED SPECIES.


The Establishment Media at the local level is becoming more and more pathetic by the day.

Newspapers are turning into a sad pile of advertorial and wire-service-padded dreck. With unceasing cutbacks in staffing and penny pinching efforts at production costs come reduced newsholes and the appearance of each daily edition as no more than an advertising circular with a wee bit of content thrown in, fortified increasingly with ego drunk, barely readable self centered opinion pieces with no use to the public trust whatsoever. There should be little if any puzzlement as to why print news media is losing readership in a never ending free fall over the past several years. What the fuck is left to read anymore? Why plow through a newspaper with a page featuring a five column by eighteen inch ad (on a six column by twenty one inch page) just to jump to a continuation of an article when you can probably read the same stuff online with less attempts to interfere with your concentration?

Local television increasingly isn't. Oh, sure, TV news is still mostly led with the usual murders and fires, but anything of relevance to anyone at the neighborhood level (especially after the first five to ten minutes of the newscast) is dwindling. Desperate for viewer ratings, newscasts substitute the latest whiz bang mobile live truck technology for any sort of reporting of substance. Local stations are padding their daily and nightly broadcasts with increasing amounts of corporate sponsored ad spots disguised as public interest items mixed with infotainment. Most of the “breaking news” shit is usually fires, accidents and cop chases in cities clear across the state or even the country, with no local relevance at all.

Is this perhaps a sign of the times? Many people seem simply disinterested at increasing levels in what is going on in their world, whether locally, globally or otherwise. It may well be true that the local Establishment Media is giving its audience what they want in the sense that, not only does the audience seem to even know what the fuck they want anymore, but deteriorating resources at news outlets are incapable of determining local information needs anyway. What local communities get as a result is a hodge podge of flashy but limited ability all gussied up and disguised as actual journalism.

Is it time to start ignoring, boycotting and subsequently shutting down all this shit? Would it really do any good? These unholy alliances between the media outlets and advertisers are simply too strong to see any sort of marked termination of the current practices, much less their operations. A core element of any local populace is going to slink right along like rats to the Establishment Media's Pied Piper tunes. Maybe it's time for some of us who are not quite as afraid or lazy in employing our critical thinking abilities to start an open and vocal critique of the what these corporate swill pushers are trying to shove on us as relevant news and information for the useless garbage that it truly is.