First there was slow food and then came slow money. Dan Gillmor proposes that we add slow news to the list.
I’ve long been a slow news advocate. Partly this is because I can’t keep up. I’ll admit it. The Amazon (it’s a river–look it up) of information that comes my way every day threatens to drown me.
Some examples:
- I have on my desk several books that I’ve promised to review, and by the time I get to them they may well be in their publisher’s remainder pile. When will I find time?
- President Obama walks the tight-rope of integrity swayed by the winds of public approval. Who has a catalog of the promises he made in 2024? Who has the list of achievements and failures regarding those promises? How are the stories of successes and failures presented?
- What really happened at Fort Hood? Did some of the dead and wounded fall to “friendly” fire? Was the perpetrator a jihadist or just another nutbar with a gun?
- The list goes on…
News from the 24 hour “news cycle” largely comprises publicity, propaganda, and/or entertainment. It is the fast food of journalism. It’s not good for us. It’s not healthy. It doesn’t even taste very good. Fast food journaists have abandoned the delivery of real information to people. They no longer share an obligation to INFORM. Today the obligation to increase share value for the shareholders of media properties trumps any frame of objectivity, truth-seeking, or public good.
The news cycle is an unforgiving Moloch incinerating information and always demanding more. We feed the fires every day and keep ourselves occupied gathering fresh fuel. In the USA, mass market news fills a grab bag of excitement and titillation. The race to be first with the news, or to nail down exclusive coverage is a perversity.
Marketing and public relations firms capitalize on the media’s hunger for content. Propagandists capitalize on the owners’ hunger for market share, and readers/viewers/listeners keep the market for “infotainment” alive. They find it easy to digest.
I’m reading David Swanson’s “Daybreak–Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.” I received the book a few months ago. The author and the publisher would have appreciated a review on or at least near the publication date. In fact, they were kind enough to include a news release about the book so, strictly speaking, I wouldn’t actually have to READ it. I could copy-type from the release. I could have had a scoop!
Day after day broadcasters, bloggers, and print journalist editorial staff spin propaganda aimed at influencing their audience. The boundaries between editorial opinion and objective information gathering and distribution have long since fallen to the exigencies of the infotainment market. I wrote yesterday about the EFF’s release of thousands of pages of documents they received from the government in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. All that informastion is grist for the mill of slow journalism. The challenge will be to make the slow news EFF story interesting enough to trump quotidian half-baked bullshit like the recent balloon boy ballyhoo.
Each of us has limited bandwidth for information. I think we should use it to prepare stories and/or to consume content more nutritious than the stuff Rupert Murdoch is trying to feed us.
One Comment
I winced when I read about the unreviewed stuff, but was relieved to read I’m not the only one.
Yeah, the signal-to-noise ratio has mulitiplied. And intuitive filters aren’t a silicon thing.
EFF has to boil down its own doc dump like NASA does its data. Then do a little media event to kickstart a headline like “Water on the moon!”