The Death of News
Does anyone else miss when the news actually reported the news? Today, I turned on several different news channels, and each one of them is covering the Kobe Bryant scandal as if it is really news. This is not news. It has very little to do with news. This information will not influence our lives in any way, and all it is happens to be a scandal. THAT is not news, yet this is all they seem to be able to report right now.
I would suspect that somewhere in the world people are dying. I would suspect that somewhere in Africa, rebel forces are still fighting for supremacy. I'm sure that somewhere in the United States, there are people starving, dying and living in horrific conditions that could use the media to actually tell us that there might be something wrong.
It's not just this either. It's more than Kobe Bryant. The news stopped being the news the second they went from being investigative reporting to being "catering to the administration" reporting. Reporters won't ask the president hard-hitting questions because they fear being removed from the Presidential Press Corps. Reporters reporting on the war weren't willing to give an objective opinion because they were embedded with one side of the war, very obviously making themselves completely biased towards one side of the combat. I have yet to see any reports from anyone who was embedded with the Iraqi soldiers. I do, however, remember a bunch of reporters indicating that they were patriots (during the campaign) and that they supported what the country was doing. Complete bias throughout the entire reporting.
In order to get the story, they essentially gave up on actually getting the story.
Reporters who risked their lives during Vietnam must be turning over in their graves; well, not all of them cause some of them sacrificed their integrity to become embedded in Iraq. I think back on how reporters handled Watergate, and I realize we'll never see investigative reporting like that again because today's media is filled with cowards that want an easy story that allows them to make a name for themselves as part of the hype. There are people right now making their future careers based on Kobe Bryant, a complete non-story.
Yeah, I know there are those who disagree with me, mainly because it's very easy to coax this into a partisan debate. But that's not what I'm about with this rant. I'm against the media's complete surrender of investigative values. Right now, we're not seeing the ramifications, but this estate has sacrificed itself for the easy story, so I guarantee that we're rarely going to see hard-hitting reports anymore. Instead, we'll have nothing but armchair reporters reporting from CNN Headquarters (or pick a network) who ask all of the questions from a central office, never even going out into the field themselves. An example: on CNN a few minutes ago, the anchorwoman kept pushing one of the reporters in the field for her opinion of why the NBA took the actions they did, and she said she didn't know, but this anchorwoman didn't seem to want to accept that, feeling that this other woman's opinion concerning a subject she knew nothing about was somehow important. This is the kind of reporting we get nowadays.
I really miss the days when the news reported the news.
Stumble It!
