3 ms·
"Establishment journalism has long slipped entirely into infotainment." This remark, and your whole comment, is not well-informed. When you talk about "establ
by mturmon 13y ago
"Establishment journalism has long slipped entirely into infotainment."
This remark, and your whole comment, is not well-informed.
When you talk about "establishment journalism" (in the U.S.), you're talking about NYT, WaPo, WSJ, and a handful of other outlets like this. Each of these papers has its strengths and weaknesses, but "infotainment" is not the main weakness. (Take a look at the NYT front page today, for example.)
In other words, your gripe about "infotainment" may be the case, but that's happening in a different segment of the media, not the one the OP was targeting.
It's too bad, because the original post did have a good point, and was heading in the right direction. Probably the main problem with the NYT (I'm a subscriber, and I at least look at its front page every day) is that it does not like to rock the boat. It's an establishment paper. Some ideas, even if having merit, are simply out of bounds. ("Everything from A to C" is what Christopher Hitchens, in his pre-9/11 days, used to say.)
This "not rock the boat" tendency explains why the (ostensibly liberal) NYT had on board Judy Miller, a largely-discredited cheerleader for the Iraq war. She had access to top Bush administration sources, and she seemed to know what was happening and going to happen. Thus, she became a mouthpiece. The NYT, in this case, was willing to sacrifice being correct for merely being abreast of the establishment narrative.
That's the real problem with the high end of establishment journalism.
- VLM 13y agoYou make some good points. One interesting thing to contemplate is how would an establishment journalism organization do infotainment... we'll, videos of Kardashians in bikinis are not going to work in ink on paper physical newspapers. Maybe the way they would entertain while sorta informing would be to allow discredited cheerleaders a propaganda mouthpiece for entertainment of the readers (in addition to your valid point about just keeping up to date with current events). Some topics are out of bounds because rocking the boat usually isn't entertainment. And everyone else in their industry is in a race toward the fluff, and there's at least some interaction between those different lines of business, maybe not a lot, but some. If they intentionally went for pure infotainment, the wouldn't have to go too far off course, just a little further along the path they're apparently already on. I'm too young to do physical papers. I checked out nytimes.com and "Upworthy’s Viral Content Is Taking Off" apparently about youtube marketing. "The new albums of Pusha T and Cam’ron show they have..." "Mr. Gunn, a recent Emmy Award recipient, has emerged as a breakout star of “Project Runway.”" "William Wegman lives with his family and oft-depicted dogs in a pair of connected buildings in Chelsea." To be fair I admit they keep real news at the top and push the fluff downpage, but its looking perhaps 1/3 to 1/2 fluffy on their web front page. What they need are some lasagna recipes, add some young women posing in bikinis, tone down the editorializing, cut the hard news by about half, that would make them yellow journalism infotainment with the best. The point isn't that it could be turned into yellow journalism, which is obvious, but that its not far to go. They're about a new editor and one page redesign away, not really all that far.