Long post, today, about what makes a news outlet “good” and how Dave would aim to change the things that news agencies cover. Let’s have a look:
As a “consumer” of news (or user of news, or just citizen) I am interested in knowing which organizations do the best job providing news. The more they focus on news, the higher their score. I think there actually is a way to quantify it in a meaningful way.
Consider: When Anderson Cooper devotes his whole 2-hour show on CNN to the return of two children to their families in Missouri, that would add very little to the score of CNN. On the other hand, the Headline News channel, which repeats the top stories every half-hour, would score relatively high, because of the variety of the stories they carry, and the relevance of those stories.
There are some problems here: the main one being “who decides?” Who decides what scores to give media outlets? Dave has a proposed answer:
There is a way to separate the human interest stuff that’s clogging the air waves from hard news. When four climbers are lost on Mount Hood, for example, if we look at it dispassionately, we’d see that the only people who are affected are the climbers (who died) and their families. If you want to stretch it, other people who climb mountains in inclement weather might also have an interest in that information. But the rest of us are only getting an emotional hit from the story. We project ourselves into the situation, and think how horrible it would be to die that way, or to have a family member or friend die that way. It’s not news, it’s not conveying information that affects us, it’s story-telling.
On the other hand, there is information that is news, that affects all of us, that has almost no story-telling to it. When the Fed raises interest rates, there’s no story, but wide impact. The fact that many Americans don’t understand how it impacts them, is perhaps itself a story.
There are so many points to make here that I scarcely know where to begin. First, Dave uses terms like “effect” and “news” as though they have standard, agreed-upon decisions. Does the Mt. Hood story affect you if you are a climber? What if you have always wanted to go climbing? What if you grew up hiking on Mt. Hood, but will never go back? What if you know people who go hiking all the time? At what point does it fall into Dave’s definition of “effect”. There are some incredibly empathetic people in the world, some of whom are affected by virtually everything they hear about. Do we use their standard? Daves? Or maybe my own personal style which would say that almost nothing has a widespread affect, and the things that do are vanishingly short on content.
Where do you draw the line? The prime rate, on an infinite timeline, affects everyone in the world… but so does the spending of government expenses to locate climbers on Mt. Hood. Someone who doesn’t have investments or loans (or has loans with fixed rates), doesn’t keep much in the way of open credit, is not nearly as affected by that as is the accountant responsible for keeping track of the helicopter expenses of the search team. From whose point of view do we judge what is “newsworthy”?
And the answer, ultimately, is that we would all have to decide for ourselves, and we would have to have a widespread vote… and people would have to be allowed to vote in whatever way they see fit, not held to some standard invented by an arbitrary third party.
The fact is that we already have this animal, and it’s called the free market. You vote with your feet and with your dollars and with your words. If you don’t like the way a certain media outlet covers a story, or you don’t like how they select them, you have options. You can stop watching. You can be a squeaky wheel. You can open a blog and blog news, hell do a videoblog or podcast. You can find a better option and recommend it to your friends… and as people stop watching shows that present news that people don’t want to see, advertisers pay them less, and eventually they change their programming to fit the market.
It’s imperfect and slow, but it does (on the whole) work. Human interest stories get play because people want to see them.
The problem, here, is tha Dave believes that there is an objective, universally correct scale for determining whether or not something is “news”, and he believes that he’s found it. In reality, the scale that he’s found is neither objective nor universal, and there certainly isn’t a universally agreed-upon definition of “news”.