Our Sources of Information are Corrupted

It seems harder than ever to trust the news.

The cable channels all seem required to have a point of view - Fox News is for conservatives; MSNBC is for liberals; CNN is supposed to be 'down the middle'. But just this week, in covering the protests and police response in Ferguson, Missouri, CNN used this breaking news graphic:

Turns out the 'source' in this case was apparently a female caller to a radio talk show. No one could confirm if she was at the scene of the shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown or not.

One person who thinks news coverage is part of the problem is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In an essay for Time, the former NBA and college basketball great asks, "How can viewers make reasonable choices in a democracy if their sources of information are corrupted? They can’t, which is exactly how the One Percent controls the fate of the Ninety-Nine Percent." You can read the full Kareem Abdul-Jabbar essay here.

But even Time isn't the pillar of journalistic integrity you may have once considered it to be. Just this week Hamilton Nolan at the website Gawker published this story on how Time is ranking its writers and reporters based on several factors, including website hits and how beneficial a reporter's stories are to advertisers!

There's nothing wrong with quality advertising. After all it kept great newspapers afloat for decades and kept great news shows like 60 Minutes and Nightline on the air for years. But there used to be an imaginary wall between the editorial content and the men and women selling the ads. Now, however, we see a legendary news organization judging reporters on their 'advertising-friendliness.' What's a reporter supposed to do...especially in this day and age of fewer good reporting jobs?

I started seeing this destruction of the imaginary wall between editorial and advertising more than a decade ago. I worked for a large radio chain with headquarters on the East Coast. They were trying to seal a huge advertising 'buy' with WalMart at a time when many towns and communities were trying to fight new stores coming to their area. It was also a time when WalMart did very little radio advertising. We got a visit from a regional manager of the radio company who suggested we should try to avoid any negative content on the air about WalMart. It was understood to be a very strong suggestion.

How do we turn this around? Good question. Twenty years ago, 90% of the broadcast media in the US was controlled by 50 companies. Now 90% of the broadcast media is controlled by 6 companies.

For every independent media outlet like KSER and every hard-hitting journalist like Amy Goodman, there are cities full of corporate-owned cookie-cutter formatted radio and TV stations. That old saying about the people owning the airwaves is starting to seem quaint.