Look Ma, I'm Meta!

I caught this quote in a cinematical article:

...news organizations don't look at people as human beings, they look at them as stories. Sensational stories.

It's really true. Last weekend two of the editorial-ists I read commented on how the TV news media makes a big deal out of, well, things that aren't really a big deal. Here's what Paul Krugman had to say:

Al Gore never claimed that he invented the Internet. Howard Dean didn’t scream. Hillary Clinton didn’t say she was staying in the race because Barack Obama might be assassinated. And Wesley Clark didn’t impugn John McCain’s military service.

All of the above were major non-stories that were made into career-ending debacles that stemmed from fabrications, overstatements, and remarks taken completely out of context. Krugman (it's worth noting), assigns guilt to Karl Rove here, and while I think Rove's greatest gift to America would be a quick and timely death, we can't hang this on his head alone. It's not like he invented tabloid journalism--he just helped move it from the supermarket mag-racks to the living room boob-tube.

This sort of nonsense, frankly, is how media will die. It's on it's way. The oft-quoted statistic is that more people are getting their news from The Daily Show than from more of the shows on Fox News or CNN. The reason is that Jon Stewart can report facts and then make fun of them (for entertainment value), while mainstream media try to make the facts entertaining while still maintaining a veneer of sincerity and journalistic integrity.

Why do this? Why not simply be honest and... integral... ? Apparently honesty and fact aren't fun to watch, and the pursuit of ratings trumps all else. And that worked for a while, when there weren't that many alternatives, but we live in the Information Age, boys and girls, and as they say in the old country "that dog won't hunt".

This must be why more and more people are turning to the blogosphere for their information. Sure, it's biased, but we know it's biased and we've accounted for that. At least it doesn't pretend to be overly objective.

In the future, there will be no news, only blogs.