No News Tonight

A recent study of cable "news" channels found that Fox News and MSNBC are more dominated by opinion shows than actual reporting. As an MSNBC viewer, I didn't need to be told that. But it's worse than I thought; while commentary made up 55 percent of Fox's content, a whopping 85 percent of MSNBC's content was commentary. I think the coverage of Pope Francis' election may be the only reporting I've seen on MSNBC recently, at least since the Arab Spring. And, as noted in an earlier post, commentators almost always discuss the same stories. The NBC reporters who appear on the cable channel are simply there to add content to the punditry.

I obviously don't watch Fox, as I find commentators on that channel dumbing down the discourse with their lies. But many MSNBC commentators dumb down the discourse with their style. I need only note Michael Eric Dyson, who needs to put a hip-hop-oriented spin on everything he talks about and plays with words when it's not necessary and not even appropriate. When a reporter like Howard Fineman comes on to deliver news he's gathered, he always talks about it from an opinionated perspective. It's embarrassing that there's so little actual reporting on MSNBC compared to Fox, where the slogan "We report, you decide" is actually partially accurate. They do indeed report.

CNN is the only cable news channel devoting a majority of air time - 54 percent - to reporting, and even its reputation has taken a hit; in discussing the Steubenville, Ohio rape trial, Candy Crowley, a heroine only a few months earlier for moderating the second Obama-Romney presidential debate, framed the discussion of the rape case to make its sound like the rapists deserved more sympathy than the victim. I don't really care if they did blow their promising football careers, and no one else should. They wrecked their own lives.

Overall, the three cable news channels combined offer 63 percent commentary to 37 percent reporting. And, here are some other nuggets of unpleasant truth from the Pew study. For those wanting to be the next Woodward or Bernstein, you're not going to like this:

*The report says that "daytime (cable news) programming now resembles prime time, with interviews and opinion replacing coverage of live events and breaking news."

*Interview segments are up 31 percent from 2007 to 2012; live event coverage dropped 30 percent in that same period.

*There are currently fewer than 40,000 employees working in newspaper newsrooms, the lowest since 1978, and newsroom employment is down 30 percent since its peak in 2000.

*Local TV news, always a dubious proposition at best, is even more so: coverage of government and politics has been cut in half, with sports, weather and traffic now making up 40 percent of the content for viewers.

If there's anything encouraging in this report (and I'm stretching it here), it's that 31 percent of people surveyed said they stopped getting their news from a particular outlet because they felt it no longer offered them the news they were used to getting. In other words, there's incentive for news outlets to improve their journalistic standards and get back their lost audiences with the news their audiences want and need. That's not likely to happen; the only people this news outlets want to please are the shareholders in the companies that own said news outlets. Less money for reporting means more money for shareholders.

Fortunately, there's always your local newspaper (assuming it hasn't folded), as well as a couple of the national news programs on commercial broadcast television, and the PBS NewsHour, which does a pretty good job exploring the big stories of the day and restricts news about movie and music stars to intelligent stories about the work they've produced, not their public personalities. As for me, I don't feel like I'm part of the problem by bloviating on this blog. I write and report for local news sites, and I never comment here on the local news I report; here I only comment on national news that I obviously don't report myself, and I keep both roles completely separate.

In fact, don't be surprised if one day I end this blog entirely. I may get sick and tired of my own opinions.