"Boring" Indeed!

 

I know.

I was going to keep  my blog positive, beautiful and affirming.

Then I made the mistake of clicking on an article on the Foxfire home screen that really pissed me off.  So, of course, I have to rant about it.  At least a little.

The article is titled "The Rise and Fall of the Star White House Reporter." It's an opinion piece based on the premise that the Biden press briefing room has become so boring that White House reporting has lost ratings (horror of horrors!) and newsrooms are going elsewhere for the kind of news that produces clicks, views, and ad revenue. Oh my fucking god!!!   

 

I'll confess, I didn't read the whole article.  I got so peeved I had to make it go away.  All I could think was, here is some idiot millennial who hasn't a clue what role news is supposed to play in a democratic republic, whining that the actual STUFF of government is too boring to make stars out of the folks who report it.  Because it's not selling soap, so "news"rooms are going elsewhere to get the good stuff.

This is everything--E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.--that is wrong with 21st-century "journalism."  

I wrote about this all the way back in 2005, after reading a book called "Bad News" by Tom Fenton, a former foreign news service reporter.  He bemoaned the fact that foreign news had become so "uninteresting" since the dawn of for-profit news, that major networks all but closed down their foreign offices in order to concentrate on the juicier soap operas happening right here on our own shores.  Here is a link to the piece I wrote back then: The News Is All Bad

My most succinct distillation of the issue facing the nation with the demand for "interesting" (read: sensational enough to capture the eyes of our hyper-consuming public) news was this:

With the advent of cable television, with its all-news formats creating the 24-hour news cycle, the Big Three networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS—suddenly found themselves competing for viewers in an arena where, obviously, there were big bucks to be made (after all, CNN seemed to be rolling in dough…) The news departments were designated "profit centers," where they had once been public service. Their mission changed from serving the public to entertaining it; and that, in one fell swoop, spelled the end of any meaningful news reaching the eyes of the American people.

That was seventeen years ago.  I think it can be said that, in the interim, Trump and his outrageous, evil antics multiplied exponentially the potential for disaster precipitated by this move to "for-profit news." 

This, more than even the explosion of social media, is what has led us down the path that we are on now:  The one to the ultimate destruction of our government and the American way of life.

How do we change direction--go back--especially if the journalism field is now dominated by youngsters like whoever wrote this ridiculous Politico opinion piece bemoaning the "boring" Biden Administration; "reporters" who have no idea that what they're doing has the potential to destroy the country?

We are in such big trouble.  

*Note: I did go back and try to read the rest of the article.  I'll confess once again, I didn't make it to the end.  But this time, it was more a case of  "TLDR"  (Too Long, Didn't Read)  While I don't like to look like I have the millennials' gnat-like attention span, the article could have done with some judicious "OK, that's enough" editing.  Seems like the author was trying to turn the tenor of the article back in the direction of "It's ok if the White House is 'boring,' it's not supposed to be the bad reality show it's been for the past several years... "  But he never actually got there.  So while I'm willing to concede that perhaps the writer wasn't the first tier idiot I thought he was at the outset, he didn't convincingly prove he wasn't, either.