The Crumbling Fifth Estate [UPDATED]

When the media gets something as tragically, as completely wrong as the story of the trapped miners, it's time to reflect (as if that time only just arrived) on our information addiction, and on the sources that feed our fix.

It's inevitable that stories are gotten wrong. Sometimes big stories. The significance of the story can be debated, but its drama -- and its simplicity -- cannot.

This isn't a firefight in a labyrinth of streets and alleys in some Iraqi village. This isn't about double agents or lobbying scams: this is about men trapped in a hole in the ground. We all know where that hole is. It was very quickly and easily determined who was trapped in that hole, and what trapped them.

Our saddened psyches got the better of us: we wanted good news so badly, we took bad news and changed it to fit our needs.

This suggests a host of larger problems, but the main one, I think, is this: it takes time to sort out the simplest of challenges, and we don't have, or aren't given, that time anymore. This isn't just a problem with the news media -- after all, it is the families of the miners that were soonest and most tragically misinformed, not by the media but by mine officials. We all want information, and we'll take it before it even qualifies as such.

How does this reflect on, and apply to, our simplistic worldview, our foreign policy, our conduct of a war -- and on what we really know about them?

How much would your life change if your slowed the rush of information into your cranium?

UPDATE: And now, like the shark eating its own innards, the media feeds on itself. The top story: how they screwed up the story.

--T.A.

Comments

[Richard Lawrence Cohen]

Important thoughts. I linked to this post.

[Ally]

As a former jounrlaist, I see the problem this way: even before the advent of blogs and the greater Web, print journalism fell victim to pressure from TV. Instead of doing thorough reporting, filtering information and then writing a story, reporters everywhere now tend to vomit raw notes into print, onto the web, over the air. TV has long been guilty of putting raw and often inaccurate reporting on the air, but it's now endemic to the "profession," whether the outlet be print, electronic or cyber.