Appearance
Bad News : The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All
If you buy the role Fenton proposes for the media, then perhaps you might like this book more. But since he simply posits that the media is there to protect the country, promote unity, and a whole list of other (about 10 total) roles of the media, and then fails to explain why this is the media's role.....I sit there questioning this expansive role of news.I see the newsmedia as a source of information. They are to provide the people with the who/what/where/how and why of what is going on in the world at large and locally. They are NOT to be ideology machines, whether good or bad ideologies.Fenton observes how foreign news has drastically declined since the Cold War and how disastrous this has been. Here, describing the ins and outs of his field he excels, and does not spare any administration or political position. Yet he fails to notice that the reason why it was so much easier to report news in the Cold War era, and why his goals of unifying the country blah blah were so much more attainable is because we had an obvious enemy in front of us. In today's society, what foreign threat do we focus upon? Terrorism, the middle east, n. korea, chinese economic expansion, resurgent russian and japanese nationalism? Its unfortunate and a very valid point that the newsmedia seems to focus on NONE of these, at least with their own correspondents abroad. But Fenton's attacks often draw upon the sympathies of a post-911 world. Of course the news, like the government should have paid more attention to Bin Laden and company. We now that NOW. But hindsight is 20/20.
Bad News : The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All
Fenton's plaint is well-taken: Americans need to be better informed. But, as humorist Dave Barry once noted, try to get them to read a four-part newspaper series on bauxite mining, and they'll flip to the sports pages. What to do? As the cliche has it, there are No Easy Answers here.Fenton blames the news media's corporate ownership for the decline of the news. Maybe. But it was a CBS marketing exec, not anybody in the news department, who first sounded the internal klaxon on the fake Air National Guard memos. The newsies wanted so badly for them to be true, they couldn't be bothered to properly verify them.What's truly remarkable is the mention made of liberal media bias, and the advent of bloggers. These are noted in passing, and are basically "of-course"d aside, but it's still startling to see a major media figure even acknowledge their existence. Maybe the MSM is coming out of denial on this score. I guess they'd have to, sooner or later. You can't be a gatekeeper when the walls are down.Throughout, Fenton casts the Bush Presidency as a calamitous consequence of the failures of the news media. Sorry, not buyin'. This is merely a retread of the liberal notion that the American public are too stupid to vote in their own best interests, unless liberals tell them what those interests are. As for Bush being culpable for 9/11, as he insinuates at one point, the reader is galled anew at the cheek of liberals, who hold their guy Clinton blameless for his eight years of dithering, yet point fingers at the Bush team for not sorting out the muddle in eight months.Fenton's conclusions are pessimistic: TV news needs to be expanded, and fortified, but how can extended news programs draw a viewership? The public probably isn't up to it, is the glum conclusion. Fenton is right that if internet gossip replaces hard news, then the citizenry will suffer. But the success of substantial major blogs, which have caught out major media outlets in errors, distortions, and downright fabrications these past few years, bodes well for the public's appetite and capacity for hard, informed news. If TV can't deliver it anymore, then that's hardly the public's fault.
Bad News : The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All
I remember that I thought, at times, that American news shows would do better if they watched BBC or listened to NPR. I simply couldn't find what I wanted to know (i have to confess I skipped a good chunck; i couldn't take it) such as an answer to "Why all the major broadcasting stations chose to use certain words in reporpting the incidents in middle east, war on terror, war o/[i]n iraq, etc? (I still don't know when it actually became a war, in terms of the offical U.S. forein policy). The U.S. disregarding the U.N.'s inspection/judgement was enough at least for some of us to doubt any yet-coming-out proof of existence of WMD's. It is a piece of news, indeed informative one, if we hear a simple truth like it's too risky for reporters to go into certain regions and don't really know what's going on there or the U.S. goverment didn't allow reporters to go to certain areas, etc. Again, some of us figured anyway because we never heard iraqis talk on TV--even now we do rarely on radio (to tell you the truth i haven't had a TV for a long time). I believe that the american media didn't fail to inform the public what they knew, but they failed to inform that they didn't/couldn't know. Chomsky, though i often find myself disagree with him, is better---by far.
Bad News : The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All
WHAT A NIAVE AND PATHETIC BOOK.C0NSIDERING THE PUBLISHER (REGAN) AND HIS FAVORED ROSTRUM TO VENT HIS VIEWS AND PRESS HIS BOOK (NUMEROUS FOX PROGRAMS), SHALL WE NOT TAKE HIS VIEWS MORE AS AN ARGUMENT FOR S0CIAL SECURITY REFORM AND PERHAPS ENFORCING A RETIREMENT AGE?(TAKE WHAT SOCIAL SECURITY AND YOUR PENSIONS WILL GIVE YOU AND RUN . . . . !)TOM, IT'S TIME FOR CHECKERS WITH RUSH LIMBAUGH AND BILL O'REILLY.
Bad News : The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All
Anyone who tries to follow news in the current atmosphere of world events knows that journalism, TV journalism in particular, is in a sad state. Retiring foreign correspondent Tom Fenton is canny to jump on the issue right now, when it's fresh in a lot of minds. He offers a lot of insights into what's wrong now. But in the end he lacks a clear vision of how the industry used to be and how it got to be where it is now.Fenton points out that the major American TV networks have exactly one foreign bureau these days, in London. At home, "news" often consists of repackaging press releases from the government or Big Business, and abroad, news is regularly purchased wholesale from the BBC and other sources, international bureaus have withered to a few stringers, and many networks (Fox News in particular) have fallen prey to creating "spectaculars" with celebrity newsmen like Geraldo Rivera.The author is correct to point out that this represents a major decline from the heyday of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. News is on the skids. But as early as page twenty-seven, he reveals why things used to be better back in the Golden Age of newsgathering: the Cold War. Fear of the Soviets justified massive outlays that can't exist in the absence of a monolithic enemy. Any Noam Chomsky acolyte would point out that this means the news was NEVER really about facts, but rather about nationalist propaganda.And Fenton is contradictory about how things stand today. For instance, he suggests that many news veterans are still stuck in a Vietnam-era liberal mindset and that's why they're eager to let slide on hard news gathering, tossing softballs to world leaders like President Bush and Vladimir Putin. Let me repeat that for you: he thinks that it is old-line leftism that is causing the news to give a free pass to right-wing nationalists like Bush and Putin. Need I explain why this is a ridiculous notion?Still, there are a lot of ways Fenton is correct. Because newsgathering is toothless today, we have no context to understand forces like Islamist terror and Russian neocolonialism. Frivolous attitudes toward Chinese industrial expansionism and Venezuelan saber-rattling leave the average American unequipped to prepare for what may be our next big national struggle. And our highly overpaid news anchors have a moral responsibility to push their correspondents and stringers for a higher standard of reportage.Even the solutions Fenton suggests are valid. An hour-long prime-time news show every night would be a good idea, and the success of shows like Dateline and 60 Minutes proves that people would watch them. An FCC willing to enforce the networks' responsibility to the public good would bring news in line with what it should be, and what we certainly need, to grasp our place in the world.For all this good, Fenton's appeal to false nostalgia and his oddly contradictory view of how things are right now undermines how we see and understand his arguments. (And all this is not helped by odd typographical quirks that suggest the publisher was in a real hurry to get the book out and move on. I think we should expect higher quality from a HarperCollins imprint.)Fenton is canny to spot a real need and throw his weight behind solutions. And with a little time and consideration, I suspect this book could have been a major contribution to real improvements in the state of affairs. But as it is it's a near miss, a selectively useful and alternately odd book that clouds the issues as much as it clarifies them. If you want to participate in the push for a more responsible press, this book is not the one for you.
Bad News : The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All
Tom Fenton worked for many years as the senior European correspondent for CBS News. From 1966 to his retirement in 2004, Fenton covered almost every major European and Middle Eastern story. Nearly a decade before 9/11/01, Fenton tried (in vain) to convince his bosses at CBS that CBS should do an interview with Osama bin Laden. As a journalist on the ground and in the field where news happens, Fenton received four Emmy Awards, a Columbia University Dupont Award, and numerous other awards for his reporting. Fenton currently lives in London, England.In Bad News, Tom Fenton starts a campaign to galvanize Americans to demand more from their news media, especially the networks. He offers a "fiery indictment" of how far the news has fallen since the conclusion of the Cold War. The book reveals a news-gathering environment destroyed by corporate employees obsessed with the bottom-line, staffed by producers and executives more concerned with ratings than with the news, and "dangerously dependent" on information gathered by news agencies instead of ferreted out by correspondents.The era of foreign correspondents is over and with it is gone the time when network news covered the important stories as a public service. Now, the network news has been taken over by corporate parents who have turned it into a "cash cow." Critical issues and stories are abandoned by producers because the American public might think they are too boring, distant, or depressing.Fenton argues that news media working with the mindset of entertainment instead of education is more than irresponsible: it is dangerous.A great read and interesting inside look at the news and what's wrong with the media today.