No Time For News
(AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
That seems to be the way we’re dealing with our media outlets in the 21st century, at least according to a study that came out this week. In an MediaNewsDaily article ominously entitled “Time Spent With Media Falters, Digital Spawns Shorter Attention Spans,” it was written that:
The average American consumer spent 3,530 hours with media in 2006--down 0.5% from 2005, according to the just-released estimates from the 21st edition of Veronis Suhler Stevenson's Communications Industry Forecast. That drop follows a period of decelerating growth that the VSS report attributes to the increased efficiency of utilizing digital media--especially online and mobile technologies--which tend to be less time-consuming than traditional media counterparts…It’s all beginning to come together. This study comes a month after a Pew report showing that public awareness hasn’t improved over the past 20 years, despite the influx of myriad media options:
"We all knew that there was only 24 hours in the day, and even with multitasking there would be a point where people maxed out," says James Rutherfurd, executive vice president and managing director at VSS, who oversees the report in conjunction with consultants PQ Media. "It has just come a little faster than we thought because of the efficiency of digital media."
More than a decade after the Internet went mainstream, the world's richest information source hasn't necessarily made its users any more informed. A new study from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that Americans, on average, are less able to correctly answer questions about current events than they were in 1989.All this data leads to the conclusion that we are getting extremely targeted in how we consume media. We get precisely the information we want with the spin/presentation we want and move on. It’s not the “digital divide.” It’s not necessarily the “cares” versus the “care nots,” as I observed last month. It’s just an issue of personal efficiency and our rapid-fire culture.
We don’t want to read longer articles if we can get a brief synopsis. Sound-bites on the news are shorter. Even the New York Times has decided to get smaller. I know I’m sounding like the world’s oldest, Grandpa Simpson-iest 30-something, but wasn’t all this information supposed to improve things?
It turns out that Bruce Springsteen was wrong. It’s not just “57Channels and Nothing On.” It’s hundreds of outlets, but nobody’s watching.
Example: CBS has delicately flirted with the lack of availability of loan money for homes and other consumer goods.
What you haven't done? An indepth story about a very similar lack of available loan money during the Ronald Reagan years which, at the time, was caused by Reagan's fiscal policy soaking up all the available loan money. The radio said that businesses are having trouble getting loans. I've seen some speculation that the feds will be dropping interest rates on loans the next time they meet. I'm predicting that the drop in interest rates will NOT make money available to people or business.
Unhappily the lack of reporting is not limited to this story; it goes across the entire spectrum of what used to be the news.
And the television media in general, CBS in particular? They're cutting back on what little news that they've been reporting in favor of stories about celebrities that don't interest a lot of us at all and making up a story that tries to lay the blame for their own lack of reporting on their viewers who got tired of waiting for real news when it bacame obvious that they weren't going to see on the evening news any more and left.
See results of the survey:
http://people-press.org/reports
/display.php3?ReportID=348
A better question directed toward you might be "do you really think the terrorists are so dumb that they haven't already thought of this and more?" If so you are seriously underestimating them. That's a mistake.
If we give up a free press, we have lost one of the main principles that this nation stands up and which makes this nation unique. We're already lost so much. The so-called Patriot Act/FISA has created a partial version of our very own KGB. I don't think we can afford to lose any more of our freedoms and rights.