GREAT CONVERSATION ON NEWS MEDIA

From last week's episode of PBS's Now, an interview with media activist Robert McChesney:

ROBERT MCCHESNEY: Yeah. I think journalism that does real investigative work, that goes out and examines how power works in the society and how it affects everyone in the community, that costs a lot of money to do. That's very expensive.

BRANCACCIO: You're telling me?

ROBERT MCCHESNEY: Yeah. You know that better than anyone. Anyone involved in the journalism side understands this immediately. And, the worst part of it from a owner's perspective is if it's good journalism, it's probably gonna piss off someone in power. That's not good for business either.

So, there's a strong commercial political pressure by media owners to do the easy stuff, the celebrity stories, the scandals, that give the illusion of controversy, but they're politically trivial. And, they're very inexpensive to cover. You just send a reporter to Aruba to interview people about Natalie Holloway. That's a lot easier than going and covering the toxic dump, or who some developer paid off a politician to build something outside of town and change the tax basis in the community. These are the issues we need journalism for. They're going by the wayside. They're just not being done in this country.

Click here for the rest.

If I had to give someone some introductory material about the myriad ways that mainstream journalism in this country is screwed up, this interview would easily qualify. It's all over the place, from blogs to media ownership to media economics to framing stories only in terms of what "officials" say. Great stuff; go check it out.

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