Risk by Dan Gardner

Author:Dan Gardner [Dan Gardner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780753516164
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

But still it is wrong to say, as many do, that the drive for readers and ratings is the sole cause of the exaggeration and hysteria so often seen in the news.

For one thing, that overlooks a subtler effect of the media's business woes, one that is – again – particularly advanced in the United States. 'In some cities, the numbers alone tell the story,' wrote the authors of The State of the News Media 2006, published by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. 'There are roughly half as many reporters covering metropolitan Philadelphia, for instance, as in 1980 . . . As recently as 1990, the Philadelphia Inquirer had 46 reporters covering the city. Today it has 24.' At the same time that the number of reporters is declining, the channels of communication are multiplying and the sheer volume of information being pumped out by the media is growing rapidly. How is this possible? In one sense, fewer people are doing more: The reporter who puts a story on the website at 11 a.m. also does a video spot at 3 p.m, and files a story for the next day's newspaper at 6 p.m. But reporters are also doing much less – less time out of the office, less investigation, less verification of numbers, less reading of reports. In this environment, there is a growing temptation to simply take a scary press release at face value, rewrite it, and move on. With countless corporate marketers, politicians, officials, and activists seeking to use the media to market fear, that has profound implications. Reporters are a filter between the public and those who would manipulate them, and that filter is wearing thin.

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