yellow journalism

The writing is, as they say, on the wall. Megan McArdle:

While outlets like my employer [Bloomberg], and [Jack Schafer’s Reuters*], and maybe ESPN, may invest in commercial news, most of the political and international journalism that we’re used to seeing is going to be ideological, if not explicitly partisan. People will come to the news assuming that the people making it have an agenda — and they will seek out outlets that match their own agenda, if they see political news at all.

This matters for Democrats because, of course, the majority of people in the news media right now are Democrats, whose sympathies naturally lie with social liberalism, government programs and so forth. A more ideological media will be hiring more conservatives, and that will change what a large portion of the country gets as news.

Continue reading The return of …ooh, scary!… YELLOW JOURNALISM.

At least it’s usually interesting. Not to mention, local.

In the process of commenting on the way that the Washington Post – a paper presumably interested in goings-on in Washington, DC – seems only interested in the Kwanzaa Diggs shooting on the Op-Ed page, R.S. McCain notes:

Murder is news. Rape, robbery and drug busts are also news. And guess what? Crime coverage, if done right, sells papers. If the Washington Post can’t be bothered to cover a shooting that leaves one teenager dead and two others wounded, what the hell is the point of publishing a newspaper?

Good cops-and-courts reporting used to be a staple of American journalism. Was such coverage sometimes lurid and sensationalist? Sure. But it sells newspapers. The problem is that too many people in our newsrooms for the past several decades have failed to understand that they’re in a business, the object of which is to sell the product and make a profit.

Where I differ with Stacy is that I think that this is only half of the problem; the other half is that the people running the papers today don’t really understand that, by and large, if the American reading public wanted a national paper that defined the news we’d already have one. The New York Times likes to think of itself in such terms; so does the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times had some pretensions along those lines. The fact that all three papers are in financial trouble right now has apparently not been taken into account. Continue reading Bring back yellow journalism!