[iheartmemcache]

Ebbs and flows.

We've had the tabloid 'yellow journalism' since at least the late 1800s with the Hearst media conglomeration[1]. One could easily make the argument that if it weren't for the US capitalist interests and the tabloids' depiction of the USS Maine going down[2], McKinley wouldn't have approached Congress to seek war. Nonetheless, the Washington Post's coverage of Watergate in the 70s was a case-study in fantastic journalism. More recently, The Rolling Stone's coverage of the financial coverage by Matt Taibbi was better than the NYT's in the late 2000s. The Manchester Guardian broke the Snowden story (which itself was just a masterpiece of journalistic execution, following the Watergate 'staggered release' model).

I thing what is new here is that 160 characters or a Snapchat emoji isn't a format conducive to conveying the nuances behind something as complicated as geopolitical affairs and sectarian violence culminating into factions like ISIS breaking out, due to the vacuum of power which existed after the stereotypical 'despot strongman' gets thrown out, leaving a void of power entirely disrupting two countries, dozens of ethnic groups, leading to three major fronts all vying for power in addition to what can easily be argued as a modern US/Russian proxy war. Sure, a 4 minute feature on NPR won't begin to do it justice, but sometimes you'll get 12 minutes of syndication from the BBC and let Lyse Ducett run with her on-the-ground coverage. If any demographics' primary (or worse,) sole method of news consumption is a 'headlines only' format, as it may be for the 14-21 demographic, I might be slightly concerned.

Tangentially, now that 24 hour cable news exists, you have the converse problem of having too much time to fill, so you'll get talking heads in an echo-chamber[3] consumed by the 65+ demographic. Cronkite and Morrow (and arguably even up to Jennings, which is what I remember watching as a child) at least had 30 minutes of airtime with a captive audience to go into the nuances. (And while the "big 3" were not without their biases, they certainly did an objectively better job than the disservice MSNBC and Fox News is doing.)

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[1] I suggest anyone interested in the media's influence on policy to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_Spanish%E2%8....

[2] While still inconclusive as to the cause, most historians regard this as not an act of war or sabotage but a ship design defect, evidenced by other ships of the same design failing in the exact same fashion.

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cP74QzyrLw Allow Jon Stewart on the O'Reilly factor delineate why the Fox News & MSNBC model is so harmful.