We Do What We Can But Understand...

TW: What we do is limited. The quantity of media has exploded over the past thirty years with cable and now the internet. This has shattered the old MSM revenue models leading to a decline in average quality. Superficiality is the result. When one watches a newscast, a reporter on scene maybe even with personal interviews and new footage of a story were common. Now one usually gets a reporter talking over file footage perhaps on site perhaps not and even if so probably merely standing in a press pool outside a courtroom or tragedy location not actually working the story. Furthermore, fewer and fewer media outlets can afford the specialists who brought depth of experience and expertise to a topic, leaving the superficial as the only option.

On the internet with blogs, one gets much more opinion than analysis for the simple reason that opining is much easier than analyzing which is much easier than investigating a story. As the piece below points out, opining lends itself to hyperbole and conflict making every news item ripe for...hyperbole and conflict.

On the flip side there are truly wonderful blogs with very specialized content much more so than ever were available pre-internet. These sites provide rich content likely beyond the expertise of most readers but if one is interested in a particular topic they are very useful. But few have the time or inclination to consume their knowledge hence the aggregators (e.g. Huff Post, Drudge etc.) about whom most folks rely to filter their data. But then you end up back in the "conflict and hyperbole" world.

From Economist:
"IN HIS fine book "Breaking the News", James Fallows argues that political journalists have an unhealthy tendency to cover public-policy debates as horse-races, for the simple and understandable reason that most journalists have a good grasp on the dynamics of political power struggles in a democracy, whereas it's not really feasible for most of us to have much depth of expertise in more than a tiny fraction of the issues we're expected to write or speak about. A few of us have been griping here about the low signal-to-noise ratio in public discussion of Sonia Sotomayor's nomination, but we haven't ourselves done the kind of close scrutiny of Ms Sotomayor's legal opinions that we've suggested. In part this is simply because doing a close reading of a legal opinion is fairly time-consuming, even if you know that area of the law well. It is also because, as with policy, even a journalist who spends huge chunks of his professional life reading opinions and briefs is unlikely to be competent to assess the quality of a jurist's reasoning outside a few domains..."