Good Lord, I could go off on a 10 page rant about this topic! But, in the interest of not ticking off moderators and other readers - and in the spirit of the U.S. news media - I'll keep it [relatively] short and spare some detail. :
1. News reporting in this country seems to be done by people who somehow manage to provide us with rather shallow, one-dimensional reports. It's a chicken-and-egg scenario: they do it because the average Joe Dumba$$ viewer has no attention span, but Joe D. has no attention span any more due (in part) to the way the media have presented news and entertainment in the past 20 years;
2. Argue with me all you like, but the vast majority of journalists doing the reporting are politically left-leaning. And, those biases show up in their reporting. Time was that a real journalist (a la Cronkite, Brinkley, Huntley, Reasoner) did a good job of putting those personal biases aside. That wall has eroded to zero now. It started with Watergate (IMO) and has accelerated down the road to outright bias ever since. The clear elation at the results of the 2008 election versus the somber mode on Election Night 2004 provide an obvious example. Not to mention the present fawning over all things Obama. There was
nothing like this in early 2001. Argue all you want, but newsrooms are overwhelmingly liberal places (I know this first-hand) and the average level of professionalism that reporters have (to keep it to themselves) has faded over the years. There is absolutely no way that you can tell me that Katie Couric, as an example, is a political moderate or conservative. She comes from a family of left-leaning people to the extent that her sister is the most liberal member of the Virginia House of Delegates. We also have Chris Cuomo at ABC and Chris Matthews at NBC to pick off some other low-hanging liberal fruit. Rarely do they do well in keeping the bias out of their reporting;
3. The level of depth in pretty much any given news report is just not there. News reporting on the major networks seems to be geared toward those with a 4th grade education;
4. It has become painfully obvious that, in the U.S. at least, journalism has become a refuge for nature's C students. Those hired by major networks and TV stations are clearly hired more for their looks and delivery than they are for their intellect or skill as an actual journalist. Again, this has been in the works for at least 20 years - but now we're seeing the fruits of this. After all, who is left to fill the shoes of the greats? A bunch of bubble-heads; and, finally,
5. The crossing of the line between news and entertainment. I DO NOT WANT TO HEAR ABOUT WHO WON DANCING WITH THE STARS OR LAST NIGHT'S AMERICAN IDOL OR SURVIVOR ON THE NEWS! It's unprofessional as Hell and it's
NOT news! You'll know that the four horsemen of the Apocalypse have mounted up when the BBC spends part of their evening newscast talking about this week's installment of
Footballer's Wives or some such thing. Yet NBC, ABC and CBS do this all the time. It erodes the reporter's level of gravitas and makes his whole operation look like nothing more than an upgrade to ET.
I could list numerous other gripes, but will leave it here - as these are the main ones.
