You tell em Dad! Neither the Portland Press Herald or New York Times would print my Dads opinion piece on the state of the media today. But I will! * * * Don’t blame the TV cable performers – they are doing very well what they’re supposed to do. Blame the print news decision-makers who fled modern reality and abdicated their responsibility decades ago. Most of them haven’t been back. David Rohde was right but mistaken in his critique of the battle of prejudices being waged by MSNBC and Fox News (“The duel realities of cable news,” Maine Sunday Telegram 10/6/13). Rohde is correct on two counts: First, the portrayals of the Obamacare battle by Hannity, O’Reilly, Mathews and Hayes and cohorts severely distort the true picture and contribute to confusion and misinformation in a public desperately in need of clarity and truth. He’s incorrect in considering what they are presenting as “news.” It isn’t. It’s entertainment, just as it is intended to be. Television is an entertainment media, and its star performers are required to attract the interest and attention of a viewing segment. That’s what they do, and that’s what Rohde’s exemplars do extremely well. Television needs visuals, action and excitement. It avoids dense detail, and you don’t have to get far into the Obamacare documentation to see why the substance of it never makes the “news.” In fact, no one may remember – I’ll bet a lot of people don’t even know – that the term “Obamacare” is a nickname invented by conservatives to mock the Affordable Care Act. Democrats, including Obama himself, have recognized how handy it is, and now everybody uses it. It’s colorful and only vaguely accurate, which makes it perfect for our current media-driven form of argument. The public – all those combatants and all those disgusted people who reject the whole ghastly circus – is made up of voters, taxpayers, citizens. They deserve better. Yes, they are bedazzled and distracted by the incredible array of attractive distractions our media-soaked culture presents. But they still have to vote, pay taxes, practice citizenship. Or should, although so many abandon the entire business because there’s no reasonable way for them to figure out who or what to pay attention to. And that is the fault of the media barons of today. And those who have failed us since around the 1960s. Maybe the 1950s, as people in droves began to tell pollsters that they were getting most of their news – what they considered news – from television. Newspapers’ failure of responsibility became obvious with their complacent immovability in the face of modern technology and social change, since they were still making boatloads of money with typewriters, paste pots, presses, trucks and legions of men (yes, almost exclusively men in white shirts and ties, all smoking cigarettes). By the time the Internet started to flood the world and advertisers chased after fleeing newspaper readers, the old guys had cashed out and the business was an unfolding train wreck. It’s been too little and too late ever since. I ended a newspaper career of nearly 30 years in 1986, dropping my own lifelong campaign to get newspaper decision-makers to understand we needed to devote effort, imagination and intelligence to making interesting what was important. We needed to compete in a world where the rules were changing drastically. TV was only the beginning of the wholesale introduction of attention-grabbing vehicles that presented information and persuasion in ways that were a lot less work than reading the unadorned printed word. I didn’t have all the answers, but I wanted to push for much better writing and display, more frequent and imaginative illustration, new ways to connecting with people. I wasn’t very good at selling this unfamiliar gospel. Eventually, the news business and I gave up on each other, and I’ve been an observer now for as long as I was a participant. My convictions haven’t changed, though. Some writing and some news presentation I see now can do the job, but the general run of print is heavily dependent on an ageing, diminishing readership. With its new ownership and attendant infusion of cash, the Portland newspaper operation has reduced its USA TODAY-ification somewhat, and is providing some excellent reporting on meaningful matters. Some of the photography and graphic treatments should pull a certain number of Internet surfers into the paper. And Bill Nemitz is the leading character in successfully importing the cable TV sizzle. The web initiatives have the aroma of the future, and deserve a lot of hard thinking in terms of marketing. The long-form reporting that we’re now seeing frequently provides a first-class journalistic service. I’m sure, though, that the seemingly endless acreage of text limits the number of young Internet surfers being won over. They are the great body of potential upcoming newspaper readers. Our newspapers need to work diligently at finding the channels and treatments that will attract them. Like the rest of us, they seek entertainment, and are grateful when they discover it’s also useful. Jim Milliken, a Portland-based management consultant, ended his newspaper career as editor of New Hampshire Times in 1986. Earlier, he was managing editor of the Kennebec Journal in Augusta, where he had worked for nine years.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 10:59:26 +0000
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