President John F. Kennedy once said he got “far more out of the New York Times than the CIA.” Those were the days when major U.S. newspapers and the three networks maintained foreign bureaus staffed by prize-winning foreign correspondents all over the world.
No more. At the end of World War II there were 2,500 U.S. foreign correspondents; today there are fewer than 250.
Constant trivia has afflicted U.S. media since the end of the Cold War (e.g., almost two years of O.J. Simpson that kept America’s collective eye off the international ball; infamous skater Tonya Harding, who got more airtime in a comparable news period than the fall of the Berlin Wall…Paris Hilton, whose mind-numbing, one-hour interview on “Larry King Live” reminded the millions who watched that addle-brained celebrity has now displaced merit-based fame.
For obvious reasons, open source information is no longer the traditional collection from open sources. This aspect of the intelligence business has become infinitely more complex. There are now 26,000 individual newspapers in the world that have to be monitored because one or two of them might contain a piece or two of a global terrorist puzzle. To complete the global Tower of Babel babble, there are 26,000 radio stations; 21,000 TV stations; 108 million Web sites; 75 million blogs; 56 million MySpace squatters; 100 million hits a day on YouTube; 8,000 news and information portals; 200 million photos on flickr.com, increasing at the rate of 5,000 per minute; 45,000 daily podcasts; and 2.5 million Web-enabled devices.
Some of which – by accident or intent – might provide useful information. Information that, now, is filtered through a batch of beginners, usually scared witless about stepping out of line and offending some political hack.
If you’re intelligent enough to sift through the crap, the Net is an amazing source of news and information. I haven’t read a newspaper in years.
People still read newspapers? That is news to me.
Dog bites man. – Not news
Man reads newspaper. – News!
Disagree with the first three, or atleast point out, most blogging takes place in response to traditional news stories. The decline of investigative journalism, the rise of power groupie stenographers, is like a looming ecological collapse. The basis of the food chain is disappearing. Enjoy the steaks as long as they last.
And we did it to ourselves! ((media consolidation, media as for profit, no payback in “news” for free use of public airwaves, etc))
C’mom Bobbo, we don’t get our news from blogs. Gimme a break.
Real news reporting has been in short supply for a long time. The numbers Eideard quotes just prove it.
I get better reporting form the BBC (TV or Web) or the New York Times than just about any other news source. I’ll guess that the rest of the newspapers fill their paper with articles from Reuters or AP, because it’s rare that two newspapers in a city (where two papers still exist) have distinctly articles about a real news item. Local news usually comes from the police “blotter.”
[Duplicate post. – ed.]
I get all my news from Dvorak. All the news that fits. Seriously though, I dig this newsfeed.
The hoi-polloi will always want their bread and circuses, for the aristoi there are papers like the NYTimes. We just have to figure out how to have the commoners pay for it.
Two perspectives: 1) from a public perspective, we’re loosing our ability to know what is true, this was highlighted by Bill Moyers in his documentary of press coverage leading up to the war in Iraq. Rather than being overly critical of the Bush Administration, which has been done, he documented the press folding over on itself retelling reports from other ‘news’ sources that were often administration officials ‘seeding’ the news and fact that was just rumors. It was quite amazing. 2) From an Intelligence gathering perspective, its always been a well regarded fact that the press is our best HUMINT source used by national leaders as the quote from President Kennedy states. True there is a lot of information on the web, it just takes much more time to make sense of it all and our national leaders who used to read the papers for analysis based on investigative journalism are now faced with stories on so-called celebrities and retreads of the evening news shows daily. Pretty sad facts.
lose – : to miss from one’s possession or from a customary or supposed place.
loose – : not rigidly fastened or securely attached.
These two words are NOT interchangeable and do NOT mean the same thing. A moron is a loser, not a looser. We lose our ability, we don’t loose our ability.
#13, Hop, I loose my ability to post after some lose change clogs my keyboard.
You won’t get the Ultimate King Kahuna Moron Award that easily. I know you want it.
Thank you, Hop; that has to be the single most grating fucking misspelling on Earth. I just can’t fathom how someone can reach adulthood, and have read the correct spellings in context countless thousands of times – and yet still continue to misuse ’em.
The POS American eddamacation system – AAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!
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