US Media Continues Failing

Not only are newspapers going out of business, magazine subscriptions fallin, and ratings for TV news shows falling there is an even more serious failing in US media: they aren't serious journalists! Maybe people have stopped reading and watching and listening because the content is such drivel it isn't worth wasting the time.

Here is Paul Krugman pointing out the outrageous nonsense that passes as "media reporting":

Reporting on health and the health of reporting

Both Igor Volsky and Ezra Klein catch major media organizations picking up completely false GOP talking points, and completely misrepresenting the CBO “scoring” that created so much consternation last week. Neither of the plans CBO studied contains a public option — yet people who got their news from allegedly reputable TV shows were led to believe that the CBO results were devastating news for advocates of a public option.

This is disastrous — but it’s also nothing new. Today Bob Somerby refers back to one of his major themes: the press utterly misrepresented the health care debates of the 1990s, both the Clinton plan and the fight over Medicare funding.

It would be one thing if these were really complicated issues — as some pieces of the health-care debate are. But the Medicare mistakes included elementary things like not asking whether numbers were adjusted for inflation; the misreporting on the CBO is hard to understand from anyone who has been paying even a bit of attention to this issue as it unfolds.

You know, this isn’t even a matter of investigative reporting — it’s about getting reporting on simple facts, facts that are right out there in the public domain, somewhere in the general vicinity of the truth.