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.

Nice to see members of the Obama administration engaging in it. They’ll need to get some practice because the GOP is only goinig to keep pushing harder and harder in the coming months as they try and take seats in the House and Senate.

While I don’t usually watch Meet the Press, I think this may be not to miss.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Call me old fashioned, but I like it when smart people call out craven fools for incendiary rhetoric. Having said, that, I really wish he’d stop referring to the health care reform legislation in the past tense.

Brent Budowsky, an aide for former Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen, writes today in The Hill what many progressives have been saying for quite some time; that the Progressive Caucus in Congress is probably the last thing standing in the way of what is looking to be a significant electoral loss for Democrats later this year.

Budowsky correctly points out that voters who wanted change in how politics are conducted at the national level are not getting what they paid and worked hard for. What they are seeing are the same money changing hands to get legislation passed between corporations and politicians, it’s just that the letter after the name is a “D” rather than an “R”.

People will not stand for it, when after two years in office, they discover the jobs they lost aren’t coming back anytime soon, while a federal bailout of some of the largest financial industries are permitted to give the money out as bonuses with no accountability. When people discover there could have been a real comprehensive way to address the health insurance shortfalls in this country got traded away for a solution that a) doesn’t really address the real problem and b) mandates that everyone now buy into the broken system, they are going to be angry and will start looking for someone to blame. And the GOP will only be too happy to point out that Democrats control all three branches of government. Budowsky puts it more succinctly:

Here is a great truth that remains unspoken in official Washington today: On issue after issue it is the Progressive Caucus that speaks for the majority of political independents, not the president who gives in too easily, not the Republicans who oppose any change, and not the Casablanca Democrats who exploit the 60-vote rule for petty cash, petty pork or petty vanities.

He goes on to point out the four key things Democrats can still do to stem the tide, as long as they can get the rest of the party to follow suit. You should go over and take a read through. Very smart and very easy to grasp.

Related articles

• Senior sources: Democrats set to exclude GOP from final health care deliberations (cnn.com)
• Negotiations Will Occur on Health Bill, Progressives Have Opportunity to Make Them Fruitful (news.firedoglake.com)
• What’s negotiable in the non-conference conference? (And how do we get in?) (dailykos.com)
• “Bundling” Activity By Lobbyists Goes Unreported (huffingtonpost.com)
• Peter Daou: Ethics and Believability in Politics: On Sifry’s Theory of an ‘Obama Disconnect’ (huffingtonpost.com)
• Blue Dogs Can’t Find a Bone? PAC Donations Plummet (news.firedoglake.com)

John Cole over at Balloon Juice writes about his amazement at a recently published article concerning how the Republican health insurance reform plan received no real media analysis while the Democrats plan was not only vetted by several committees, it was torn apart every which way by every corporate media pundit in America, and yet the GOP plan was treated as if it had been vetted and given careful consideration.

I seriously do not get this country. The subservience to the Republicans by the media at least made sense when they were in the majority and held the Presidency in 2001. But this is 2009, the Republicans have been routed electorally for the past few years, everything the Republican party believed in failed miserably the last eight years and they have been exposed as total frauds, they released a budget with no numbers on April Fools day, they have been whipping up teabaggers and gun nuts into a froth for months and screaming about death panels because they have no ideas or solutions, and when they finally do release their health care “plan,” it totally and completely sucks. It is nothing but fail, fail, fail, from the GOP, they just lost two more seats in the house, they are going through a horrible (yet delicious) civil war, yet according to the media, everything is bad news for Democrats.

Sadly, it’s been this way for years due in some part to the near monopoly conservatives have had on beltway media outlets since the 1970’s. I’m afraid that absent constant pressure from groups concerned with media accuracy and transparency coupled with a political class that refuses to do business with outlets that traffic in hyperbole and rumor, this will continue to be the norm rather than the exception.

The whole piece is here.

Related articles

• The Right And The Tinderbox (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
• An overview of mean-spirited, partisan statements (dailykos.com)
• Political Culture: Still Two Americas (popdose.com)