The news media’s scandal obsession?
The Hollywood Reporter’s Paul J. Gough writes about a new survey by the Pew Research Center on the news media.
There’s been no shortage of scandals to report on in 2007, from the death of Anna Nicole Smith and the subsequent custody battle over her infant daughter to the jail saga of heiress Paris Hilton. Despite the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a presidential campaign already under way, celebrity stories oftentimes have taken over the news. Pew found that 24% of all news was devoted to Smith at the time of her death, while 12% of all Americans said in early June that Hilton’s incarceration was their most-followed news story of the week.
The survey found that cable news is most to blame for the ongoing celebrity coverage, with 34% of respondents saying cable news had the most celebrity coverage, followed by network TV news (27%), Internet news sites (15%) and newspapers (8%).
“Booboisies” is the word the late Henry L. Mencken used to describe the backward state of Americans during his time. Nothing much has changed since then.
Comment by RGL — August 3, 2007 @ 10:47 am
In all honesty, cable does deserve a good amount of the blame for the amount of celebrity coverage going on in that the network’s have more time to fill and must make a profit for their parent companies.
If you even watched cable news around 2005 (I started around there), it seems amazing to see how much has changed in programming and people, but also how much more trash-tv news we get these days, from stupid videos to assorted stories about how (put name here) is in rehab and whatnot. Only on a rare occasion, like this, does FNC truly do news/talk coverage anymore, the rest of the time seems to be generic crime stories that I honestly have got rid of.
In all, if the money wasn’t the first thing on these network’s minds, we would probably get more news! News comes first, then money, or atleast I wish it worked that way.
Comment by Chris (clind) — August 3, 2007 @ 11:31 am
Frankly to Fox News Channel should change its name to the Tabloid News Channel. Their slogan could be “All missing women, all the time”
Comment by ba — August 3, 2007 @ 9:07 pm