The High Price of News

This is a short post about an article written by David Corn, The Nation’s Washington editor. In a piece titled “Who Will Pay for the News?” Mr. Corn wrote about Main Stream Media (MSM) reporting versus “free” news and the avalanche of independent internet news sites.

In Mr. Corn’s piece, he describes modern students who regularly get their news from an array of the well-known MSM avenues. Yet, he says, barely a handful of those students admit to actually paying for any of it.

Mr. Corn warns that much of what we comment on and what we learn about in our world comes to us “because of the work of journalists toiling within mainstream media environs” and that we forsake the MSM at our own peril. It takes money to make that happen and in the end he encourages us to “support your local MSM”, in other words “Pay for It”, otherwise risk losing access to seasoned, educated reporters who know how to dig for the truth.

In this case, the truth is I doubt Mr. Corn’s concise revelation is news-worthy. If you are like me, then for the last few years you have dragged your butt out of bed each day and read “the news” from numerous sources which you technically did not pay for.

Now, I’m talking about comfort levels here. Personally, I do prefer printed versions. I found myself struggling to read an excellent New Yorker on-line piece on Wolfowitz recently. It was well written but 12 full pages of internet reading goes a bit beyond even my limit of interest.

Yet, anyone who fashions themselves as an average modern American, in tune with our addictive technology, would probably say that only a fool would pay for something that is made available for free. I quit subscribing to my local newspaper a long time ago. If a “news site” requires subscription fees, I simply don’t read it.

But I agree with the statement that information, specifically factual information, is not free. There is a price for it all and somebody has to pay for it.

Generally speaking, facts are valued by the variable qualities of timeliness, relevancy and accuracy. Perhaps you may claim the facts have a different quality, as well, but that pretty well sums up the issue for me.

I know that a misplaced emphasis on any one of those qualities instantly devalues the fact in question.

Mr. Corn makes a good case that there are indications when the timeliness of MSM reporting is lacking. On one hand, the MSM quickly relayed the claims of the Bush administration regarding WMD dangers in Iraq. On the other hand, the MSM “delayed” reporting that those claims were utter bullshit—and took a mighty wide track around that delayed summary, I might add.

We may gather many clues from this mainstream example but we, the readers, may specifically note how a perfectly accurate and relevant report can lose its common value in terms of misplaced timeliness.

Mr. Corn also makes a good case regarding the galaxy of independent “free” internet sources, particularly the hated and feared “bloggers” who provide unqualified and unpaid reports of a different nature, presumably undermining the profitability of traditional MSM resources. Here, as you are most likely painfully aware, independent people may now outpace traditional media in terms of timely reporting on many issues such as government intrigue, political shenanigans and cover-ups, and rumored conspiracies of all colors. As Mr. Corn notes, these revelations often take the form of a meandering “rant” which has little basis in vetted, researched truth, the kind of truth that only “journalists toiling within mainstream media environs” are capable of uncovering.

From this independent example we may note how a perfectly relevant and most timely claim of “the news” may be worthless in terms of accuracy.

Now, there’s the curious part.

You see, I am doing this for free. I am posting this without being paid. What I’m doing is not “news” in the traditional sense. I am commenting on something that Mr. Corn does for a living. He brought the subject up. Without him, without somebody paying him to write things like this, my comment about it would have even less of an impact than it does now. I understand this.

And I wonder, but not too often, about who actually is getting paid. Who makes money providing blogspot service, for example? I don’t know but it’s not me, I can tell you that.

But it is no wonder to me that I do not pay money to Mr. Corn’s vaunted MSM for factual reporting. If anything, the only way I do pay is in being lead by the nose to read “news” which is not new. I can read the Kansas City Star any day of the week, for example, and not be surprised how the concocted headlines and AP articles all read word-for-word the same as those in contained in the USA Today or CNN on-line.

I don’t think I could go a week now without reading alternate views and reports from Asia Times On-Line or the International Herald Tribune which have magically become more trustworthy, technologically advanced and “freer” versions of my local MSM. It is only from these avenues that I learn of remarkable writers like Howard W. French.

http://www.howardwfrench.com/

Mr. French is employed by the MSM. But it is only through his independent web site that I get the true and relevant glimpse of his world.

From the mass of free independent sites on the internet, from the global disease of graphomania, I get a perspective that I can’t otherwise purchase and one that simply doesn’t exist consistently in the heavily controlled output dictated by the Westernized, AP-ized MSM conglomerates.

Mr. Corn may cry that traditional journalists lose their jobs as a result. But I expect many will take up new employment as free, independent contractors of the world’s news.

We all may pay indirectly for timeliness at the cost of accuracy via non-traditional sources, or more directly for accuracy at the cost of timeliness via traditional sources. But who or what, exactly, should we pay for relevancy?

In this case, it seems we may already be getting something for nothing.

Cheers,

Mb