Changes at The Times-Picayune lay bare the roots of a national trend

From The Lens, a report on the role of media deregulation at the FCC and it's implications for the Times-Picayune.

Changes at The Times-Picayune lay bare the roots of a national trend:

The recent changes at the Times-Picayune to stop publishing a daily paper and instead publish three days a week are unfortunate for the residents of the city and surrounding areas.  However, it was only a matter of time before this or something similar happened given what’s been happening to newspapers across the country for the past couple decades.  Lots of people claim that this is a result of the growing popularity of online news and the glut of information in general available on the internet, or of not enough people subscribing to the paper and paying for content.  While this is partly true, it’s important to see this change in its broader context. There are two other, very important things to note that help explain what happened to the TP: changes in policies relaxing media ownership regulations and the cost of producing and distributing news.  Once we take these into consideration, we can better understand the role of consumption patterns and the internet in the changing news industry and the likely consequences of current policy decisions.

People Eating Each Other

Everywhere I look I'm finding news clips about people eating each other.  It started in Miami about about a week and a half ago with that guy who apparently ate part of another guy's face.  Now I hear about it in other parts of the country and even the world.  This is beginning to look like a classic example of constructing a crime wave.  Vincent Sacco is one of the leading researchers on this topic.  Among many other publications, he wrote a readable book called When Crime Waves in which he discusses how news organizations make it appear that there's been a rise in a particular criminal behavior.  He points to a number factors that happen in the corporate news industry to increase coverage of a particular crime, but that are completely independent of any actual increase in that behavior.  By extension, this is one of the ways that news constructs public opinion and consciousness.  If a fundamental goal of the corporate news is attract viewers and generate revenue then the sensational and extraordinary is one effective way to do this.  When a particular issue or topic temporarily grabs the public's attention (such as kidnapping, elderly abuse, or the current zombie phenomenon), then responsible news workers and news organizations go out and find more stuff like it.  Not only that, but they also might try to link other less interesting content to that particular theme in an effort to "feed off" the popularity of the theme and increase consumption.  The actual frequencies of the specific behavior might not be changing at all, but the news' attention to it has and now they're trying to fit everything they can into that popular theme.  With the increasing amount of surveillance cameras, cell phone cameras and other such recording devices (there's a whole literature on panopticism and a surveillance society) recording and disseminating strange events occurring randomly around the globe, the news' ability to construct a crime wave or other wave is even greater.  Now much of it happens online, through social media sites.

Censorship in the U.S. Press

Project Censored on Media Matters with Robert McChesney:

Media Matters is a radio program/podcast hosted by renowned media scholar Robert McChesney out of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  Robert McChesney's scholarship focuses on the political and economic policies that create the rules that govern and regulate the U.S. press.  As a political economist who focuses on policies, his criticisms of the U.S. press are directed towards the media industry and how certain trends in media content are the result of institutionalized practices and pressures that constitute complex, profit-oriented media institutions (rather than corrupt individuals).  Such structural arguments like this mean that the solutions to the problems associated with the media require changes in policies and institutional arrangements, not changes in individuals (as individuals often adapt to the demands and logics of the institutions).

A couple weeks ago McChesney had representatives from Project Censored on his show. Project Censored is an organization run out of Sonoma State University that highlights key stories that were largely ignored in the U.S. corporate news.  The reasons for the absence are largely due to industry-wide structural forces that constrain and pressure decision-makers within news organizations across the country.

Here's a link to the audio file.

Changing the Narrative: Mainstream Media > Corporate Media

So, on the Social Media, Social Justice panel at Rising Tide VI this year, we talked about making a concerted effort to start using the term "corporate media" instead of "mainstream media," especially when referring to the news (Jordan Flaherty was the first to mention this).  I think this is not only a good idea, but a necessity.  Why?  Well, because the term mainstream media sets us up to mentally think "average," "the middle," the "most popular,"or something similar to that.

Distractions: Casey Anthony and Episodic Crime News

So, everyone's been talking lately about the Casey Anthony case.  I don't know much at all about this case, nor do I care.  I actually see stories like this as distractions.  Sociologists who study crime in the media (especially the news) note that most crime reports focus on the actual event, such as the specific crime, victims, some demographic--"there were shots fired at x street at y time of the night, one victim taken to the hospital").  Others, though many fewer, might focus on the court case, and the specifics of the everyday activities within the court room.