VANISHING NEWS MEDIA??

I nearly fell off my chair the other evening watching Global News make themselves look stupid. But I'll get to that later.

First: a day hardly goes by without some "wailing and gnashing of teeth" over the decline and demise of daily newspapers. The malaise has filtered down to TV network news, which is being battered(as are the newspapers) by the internet. Most of what is written about the decline is self-serving boilerplate. It wails about how corporate ownership cares nothing about journalism. It weeps over the loss of readers and viewers under the age of 40. Evidence of that decline is clear. Watch TV News, especially the U.S. networks. Almost all the commercials are for aches and pains and osteoporosis and erectile dysfunction - all "maladies" prevalent among older viewers.

Newspapers have for years lamented that their audience is dying of old age. The same is evident in attendance at jazz concerts (real jazz, not "fusion" which may be everything from rap to hip hop) classical music concerts - where the only younger people are probably music students. New York's Metropolitan Opera is in a deep hole. La Scala in Milan is kept going by government subsidies and tourists.

The mourners are right. Interest in conventional news media is diminishing. The shrinkage is accelerated by the feckless rush toward making the media more youth-friendly. The rush to lure a younger demographic (see CBC Radio) has left thousands of listeners, viewers, readers stranded.

But there is another wide to it all. Many years ago when the Davey Commission on Media (Senator Keith Davey) met to examine the decline (this was almost 40 years ago!) of media, one of the pronouncements made by Senator Davey was that many people in the media (print and electronic) knew much less than their readers/listeners/viewers.

The word is: credibility. Of course you say, the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Globe and Mail present a high standard of journalism and, aside from differences of opinion) do not insult the intelligence of their readers.
But print media have suffered more than anywhere else, by a loss of revenue from the cash cow: classified advertising. It's virtually gone.

Back to the top of this item. Credibility. I have the greatest sympathy for the financial woes of Canwest Global TV. Yes their revenuea are down. Yes, they have cut staff. Yes, they made reckless acquisitions that haemmorhage money. But there is, lamentably, more. There is credibility.

Monday February 16th was Canada's new "Family Day." Along with President's Day in the U.S., both stock markets were closed. I watched Gobal National on that Monday evening. The news reader announced: "Here are today's financial numbers." Up on the screen pooped the index for TSX and the Dow. They were correct, except they were Friday's close! I waited patiently for the news reader to apologize for the gaffe. There was nothing. The next day I tuned in again, hoping for some recognition that they had goofed. Nothing. I EMailed my complaints. Response? Nothing.

What is worse - that the TV News people didn't recognize their mistake, or that the audience was compliant and said nothing?

Yes, there are problems for the media. But those problems are aggravated by a precipitous drop in credibility. And oh yes - one last jab: did anyone tell the august host Kevin Newman that there is no such word as "mis-cheev-ee-us."