Thursday, January 27, 2011

Assignment #1-repsonse to Wahl-J chapters 2-3

One of the limitations of scholarly books is they are, by their nature, out of date by the time they are published. This is not a big problem when writing about Greek history, but is clearly limiting when the subject is as rapidly changing as the media, especially when you consider the influence of the internet.

Journalists and the Public is a relatively recent book, published in 2007. But, that means she was writing and editing it for some years before that, and basing it on even earlier scholarly work. The first quote is in response to a quote from James Carey in 1997. So this quote is commenting on the state of journalism 14 years ago. This is before Wikipedia, Twitter and Facebook existed, before the scales had really tipped toward online content, when the printed version of newspapers was the more important format.



What is interesting is how this has changed. Email addresses started appearing at the bottom of most articles a while ago. Now all reporters are expected to be interactive to a large extent, in comments and in social media.
Peter King is the most senior NFL football writer at Sports Illustrated. In the old days, It used to be very hard to reach people like him. Now, he is readily accessible through his Twitter account. So much so, in fact, that I stopped following him when he started responding to questions like "what's your favorite song on Darkness on the Edge of Town?"

So much for her statement " (journalists) don’t see the necessity for listening to the public". However, her assertion about the paternalistic attitude of journalists is more accurate. Two factors likely contribute to this.
One is that a journalist can't get too swayed by what a handful or commenters or emailers think. They have to consider who the larger audience is for their media outlet. Also, most of the journalists working are a product of the pre-internet revolution generation, so they likely carry some of the paternalistic mind set from that era.

As for the second quote, the content of all media is influenced to some degree or another by the funding source of that media, despite efforts to maintain a "firewall" between the journalism and the advertising. Commercial media are all advertising vehicles, which produce content to get people to read/hear/view the ads. "Woman's magazines" have traditionally been particularly bad about this, with advertisers expecting content that features their product to run next to their ads, as explained in this fascinating article by Ms. Magazine founder Gloria Steinem.

The content is also determined by the political point of view of the people who own and run the media. This has been increasing more recently with people like Rupert Murdoch, first with his newspapers, then with Fox TV. In a way, this is a return to the period before advertising, with partisan media catering to a given point of view. But with ads.

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