Pundit Country

As I wrote a few days ago, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released their report on the issues facing media outlets in 2009. The report covered corporate-owned, non-profit, and new media. The Columbia Journalism Review looked over the report and highlighted some of the more noteworthy trends and facts they read:

1. We estimate that the newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000, or roughly 30 percent, which leaves an extra $4.4 billion remaining. Even if the economy improves, we predict more cuts in 2010.
2. $141 million of nonprofit money has flowed into new media efforts over the last four years (not including public broadcasting). That is less than one-tenth of the losses in newspaper resources alone.
3. A new survey on online economics, released in this report for the first time, finds that 79 percent of online news customers say they rarely if ever have clicked on an online ad.
4. Advertising during the year declined for the first time since 2002, according to data from eMarketer. Updated August projections put the declines at 4.6 percent, to $22.4 billion in total revenues.
5. Only about one third of Americans (35 percent) have a news destination they would call a favorite and even among these users, only 19 percent said they would continue to visit if the site put up a paywall.
6. 71 percent of Americans feel now that most news sources are biased in their coverage and 70 percent feel overwhelmed rather than informed by the amount of news and information they see.
7. At night, when cable is dominated by ideological talk shows, Fox grew by nearly a quarter to an average of 2.13 million viewers at any given moment. MSNBC rose 3 percent to 786,000, while CNN fell 15 percent to 891,000 viewers…In daytime, CNN was up 9 percent over 2008 to an average of 621,000 viewers. But Fox daytime viewership grew again by almost a quarter, to roughly twice CNN’s audience (1.2 million viewers). MSNBC, relying on NBC news people more than talk show hosts, fell 8 percent to 325,000 viewers.

So basically, what you see here is a vicious circle constantly reinforcing itself. Since the start of the Great Recession, legacy media publishers are losing tons of money in traditional advertising so they’ve cut costs and some have increased their online presence to include online ads. Since most people aren’t clicking those online ads, publishers are flirting with the idea of paywalls to make up the lost revenue. The problem with this is that most people will simply stop going to the site if they have to pay (something publishers should have realized after The New York Times‘ disastrous fling with them (although it appears not even the NYT learned that lesson)). So publishers have spent even more money they will not see coming back as revenue, which forces them to cut back even more.

Since New Media seems to be linking quite a bit to Old Media, expect them to start transitioning to either original reporting with little or no payout, looking for hyperlocal sources to link to, or an increase in opinion pieces, leading to both a loss of investigative reporting and objective news in the hands of a very few number of people.

from the week ending March 14, 2010

• Meet the hypocrites: Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers.

• Media Matters: Right-wing media eagerly spread absurd claim that Obama plans to “ban sport fishing”.

• Wonk Room: Girl Suing High School Over Canceled Prom: School Is Saying ‘You Can Be Gay, Just Don’t Be Openly Gay’.

• Alan Colmes: Neal Horsley Arrested For Terrorist Threat Against Elton John.

• The Family Policy Network is attacking VA Gov. Bob McDonnell and warning that he has “made an enemy of the grassroots” by being insufficiently committed to discriminating against gays.

• Prop 8 Backers Seek to Take Control Of California Courts.

• Meet The New Texas Social Studies Requirements.

• The Archbishop of Denver tries to explain why a student with two mommies cannot attend their pre-school.

• Why are gay couples being excluded from Iowa’s domestic abuse bill?

• Rather than allow a lesbian student to attend prom with her girlfriend, a Mississippi school has decided to cancel the prom entirely.  Pathetic.

• Apparently, Chief Justice John Roberts thinks it is “very troubling“ for the President to criticize his rulings. Boo hoo.

• Rod Parsley, host of the conference called “Collide 2010″ declares that The End Times are coming that we are the “Rapture Generation”.

• Porter: Our Goal is “To Take Dominion in Every Area” and “Occupy Until Jesus Comes“.

• Ken Hutcherson blasts Focus on the Family for supposedly forcing James Dobson out and for not hiring him to take over, even though he wouldn’t have taken the job anyway.

• It’s amazing how quickly people go from “I don’t care who you are, this is funny” to “I deeply apologize” when they get caught for sending out racist emails.

• Conservatives hit back at Liz Cheney and company over their attacks on Justice Department lawyers.

• David Weigel: Palin: Growing Up, I ‘Hustled Over the Border’ For Health Care.

• Steve Benen: Anti-Reason Forces Unite.

• EmptyWheel: Clarence Thomas’ Revenge

As always, the majority of these items come from Right Wing Watch and Hatewatch.

While the info originates from the Pew Project For Excellence In Journalism, the following interesting tidbits were highlighted in an article by Eric Alterman and Danny Goldberg for the Center for American Progress:

• 48 million people get their news from the likes of Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Neil Boortz, and G. Gordon Liddy.
• The numbers of radio stations that carry at least some talk shows grew to 2,056 from 1,370 the year before, according to Inside Radio magazine.
• That’s more than twice the collective audience for the three TV network evening news shows combined,
  • more than five times the audience of the three network Sunday news shows,
  • nearly seven times the combined audience for cable news shows,
  • nearly 10 times the audience for NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” and
  • 16 times the audience for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

• one-third of talk radio listeners define themselves as moderates or progressive Democrats.

• 9 of the top 10 talk radio shows are hosted by implacable conservatives.
• 

For the week ending March 7, 2010

• Ken Hutcherson wants you to know that he is free of prejudice.

• Finally, did you hear the rumor going around yesterday that Chief Justice John Roberts was going to step down?  The story of how it got started is pretty hilarious.

• I had no idea that incompetence could be so lucrative.

• This just might be one of the most poorly written ads I have ever seen.

• This Is What It Looks Like When Right-Wing Activists Run For Public Office.

• This Is What Happens When The Religious Right Takes Over Your State.

• Think Progress: Indiana’s ‘sovereign citizens’ renounce their U.S. citizenship, claim to secede from the Union.<——My personal favorite this week.

• TPM: Louisiana sheriff forming a citizen militia to defend the parish in the event of a terrorist attack.

• Media Matters: Glenn Beck repeatedly likens himself to historical figures of note, including Socrates, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Benjamin Franklin.

• The Arizona Republic looks at the behind-the-scenes influence the right-wing Center for Arizona Policy has in shaping public policy in the state.

• Dammit Victoria, when did you go completely insane? If this was satire, it would be absolutely brilliant.  It is not satire.

• Andy Birkey: Twenty of Bachmann’s 47 missed votes coincide with media appearances.

• Amarillo’s Army of God takes on the biggest threat to Texas: Swingers.

• SPLC report finds that right-wing extremist groups have grown 244% in the past year.

• Sarah Posner: Religious Activism Behind Anti-Abortion Movement Outreach to Blacks.

As always, most of these items came from Right Wing Watch and Hatewatch.

From the Phoenix New Times:

It’s widely known that the self-righteous voice of conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh is enough to irritate the pants off of liberals and hippies from Burlington to Berkley, but two scientists at Northern Arizona University are using Limbaugh’s squawk to annoy a different type of nuisance: beetles.

We would have suggested a sobbing Glenn Beck, but that’s just us.

Bark beetles are destroying forests all over the western United States, and in a method they’re calling “beetle-mania,” NAU Professor Richard Hofstetter and truck-driver-turned-research assistant Reagan McGuire began using Limbaugh’s voice, as well as music, to try and get the beetles to relocate.

McGuire was a truck driver until hearing reports that bark beetles had killed about 74 million trees in Arizona and New Mexico and wondered if there was a way to “fight back using acoustic stress.”

McGuire took his suggestion to Hofstetter, who liked the idea and set him up in his lab, compelling McGuire to put his truck-driving days behind him.

The two began collecting infested tree stumps last fall and started using Guns ‘N’ Roses and Queen songs to see if the beetles would respond and leave the area they were destroying.

As if the nasally drone of Axl Rose or the shrieking fury of Freddy Mercury weren’t enough, the two started playing the beetles some of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, too.

“I thought, ‘What would be the nastiest, most offensive sound?’ To me, that would be Rush Limbaugh or heavy metal,” McGuire says in a statement provided to New Times by NAU.