Leave it to The New York Times to write a truly risible editorial. The Times, it seems, dislikes "the Counterfeit News".
What is especially idiotic is the last paragraph, which we can only assume is "the point". Like most of the NYTimes "news analyses", it completely and utterly misunderstands what the news media is all about.
If using pretend news is one of the ways these stations have chosen to save money, it's a false economy. If it represents a political decision to support President Bush, it will eventually backfire. This kind of practice cheapens the real commodity that television stations have to sell during their news hours: their credibility.
Following the escapades of reporter Jayson Blair, as well as the cheaply transparent story of Al-Qaqaa missing armaments and the bogus looting of the Iraqi National Museum. it takes a certain kind of willful self-deception to write this editorial.
The fact of the matter is that canned, pre-packaged news. and other kinds of P.R. succeeds because journalists are intellectually lazy and are under tight deadlines. I find it interesting, however, that The New York Times is indignant at people who are trying to do what they can to get their message out, instead of indulging in the decadent navel-gazing that is customary in journalism, and asking why it is that so much canned, pre-packaged news is produced in the first place. Could it be that journalists do such a piss-poor job of reporting the news?
What is becoming increasingly clear about the major media is that its raison d'etre as well as its methodlogy is s sad case of mass narcissism. Returning to this editorial keep in mind the last sentence:
This kind of practice cheapens the real commodity that television stations have to sell during their news hours: their credibility.
Credibility isn't a commodity. The product that the news media peddle isn't the bond of trust that consumers place with them, it's the content, what some might call the "news". (Just ask Dan Rather.)
In fact, their is no commodity in the news media anymore. The definition of "commodity" is, after all:
1 : an economic good: as a : a product of agriculture or mining b : an article of commerce especially when delivered for shipment <commodities futures> c : a mass-produced unspecialized product <commodity chemicals> <commodity memory chips>
Living in an Internet world, how could anyone actually think that news or information is a commodity? As I noted in an earlier post, this, our time, is punctuated by several ephoch-making transformations, one of which is the transformation of information from a stock to a flow. It used to be that the journalist knew what was best, and would "filter" the news of significance from gossip and bullshit. In our new world, the journalist has become nothing more than a busy-body middle man. And you know how everyone feels about a middle man, right?
Even dealing with information as a flow, and not as a stock, the virtuous cycle of news media is as follows:
- Good content leads to higher circulation/viewership;
- Higher circulation/viewership leads to greater advertising revenue; then
- Greater advertising revenue leads to improved content, and so on.
So if the news content is the actual product of the news media, what then is Credibility?
It's marketing. It's branding. That's all it is. That's all it ever was. Consider Lucky Charms brand Breakfast Cereal. No one would ever call it a "commodity", when you stop to consider how many other cereals there are on the shelf next to them. So, it's more like a product. Would somebody say that the Lucky Charms brand Breakfast Cereal product is the marshmallows or the leprechaun or the kids that are chasing them? No. It's the cereal, stupid. Everything other than the processed grains is product differentiation. It's the same way with the news media. Like cereal, the product of the media outlets is processed information. Everything other than the processed information is product differentiation in a crowded marketplace. Credibility differentiates one's news product in the information marketplace. Leave it to the editors of The New York Times to not understand their own business.
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