Comments on: Why American media has such a signal-to-noise problem, pt. 2

By: The Summer of Hate provides a watershed moment for “reasonable Republicans” | Scholars and Rogues

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 19:05:14 +0000

[...] If you’re a reasonable Republican, all this has to trouble you (and I’ve heard enough Republicans say that it does to know that I’m not imagining things). The issue isn’t that all GOPpers are like the fruitcakes running loose here in the Summer of Hate. In truth, this silliness is the work of a minority that isn’t big enough to do much damage at the ballot box. So since they can’t win using the techniques prescribed by law – you know, campaigning, voting, that sort of thing – and since their opinions are shared by so few (again, national polls on health care say over 70% of Americans favor a public option, for instance), they’re trying to get their way by being the loudest. By resorting to rhetorical misdirection and deceit when reason and fact are so thoroughly stacked against them. By pitching the most obnoxious tantrums. By resorting to base terror, intimidation and thuggery. By playing on the media’s insatiable thirst for noise. [...]

By: Scholars and Rogues » Educating PlayNation: Obama, iPads, Xboxes and America’s culture of noise

Tue, 11 May 2010 03:56:13 +0000

[...] Let’s start with his thinly veiled whack at FOX News and their ilk. You know, the activities of broadcasters are governed by laws and regulations and policies. Before Reagan set our intellectual zombification in motion with his FCC appointments, there was this thing called the “public interest standard.” I won’t go into the details because unless you’re reading this on an iPad while you listen to Justin Bieber on your iPod and play Gran Turismo on your portable gaming system you’re probably about dead from boredom as it is, but the short version is that there were rules that media companies had to abide by, and one of them was the requirement that they act in the public interest. And no, that does not mean “what the public is interested in.” [...]

By: Scholars and Rogues » 9/11 happened on Obama’s watch! GOP noise machine already hard at work on the history books of the future

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:17:00 +0000

[...] tremendous power in telling people that they’re right. The public interest, by god, is what the public is interested in, and an appropriately undereducated populace can be counted on to ignore complex news in favor of [...]

By: Dr. Wu

Dr. Wu — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:26:57 +0000

Shannon and others have demonstrated that there is a relatively linear tradeoff among bandwidth (the amount of information one can push down a channel in a given time), power (how much energy is invested in operating the channel) and signal quality. In engineering this is applied to the physical characteristics of a channel, such as a satellite link or a piece of optical fiber, but your arguments suggest a useful analogy to broadcast economics. The broadcast monopoly of Cronkite’s heyday was characterized by low bandwidth (the need for only three networks to to produce only one 30-minute newscast a day, as opposed to filling a 24-hour news hole) and high power (the economic power of networks which viewed news as a loss-leading prestige product and a societal obligation for using the public airwaves). Consequently, quality could be high (skilled reporters, producers with the integrity to resist political pressure, broad news-gathering organizations) which resulted in high quality (in terms of “error rate” (accuracy), “signal to noise ratio” (significance) or any other metric). It’s no coincidence that after diluting the same economic power across the need to fill far more bandwidth Reasoner, Cronkite and Murrow have given way to Couric, Blitzer and Grace.

By: Dr. Slammy

Dr. Slammy — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:48:08 +0000

Walt: Outstanding points. Dr. Denny has written a bit on those issues in the past and hopefully will continue doing so.

nader paul kucinich gravel: We’re not here so you’ll have a place to cut and paste incoherent rants.

Tom: I don’t think the fact that we’ve let education succumb to the same corrosive “look! shiny things!” dynamics as I describe here really rebuts my point. Instead, I’d say your argument would be better put this way: “Yes, you’re right, and the same kind of thing may be happening in education. So we have to reform education significantly in order to make it work.” And on that point, we’d be wholly in agreement.

Lex: “It’s a sad state of affairs given that an adversarial, representative democracy is dependent on well-informed constituents.” But this is PRECISELY THE WAY IT WAS DESIGNED. This was the basic assumption that the founders made in constructing our systems. It’s easy enough to look back at the 18th Century and see why they made these assumptions, but the fact is that they were wrong (or at least they were only correct within a narrow context) and we have now learned this the hard way. If we were starting over, that very assumption is the first thing we’d need to dynamite.

By: Russ Wellen

Russ Wellen — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:23:20 +0000

These two pieces helped me understand why there’s more money to be made in talking about the news than in reporting the news. Today, anyway.

By: Lex

Lex — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:51:38 +0000

It’s a sad state of affairs given that an adversarial, representative democracy is dependent on well-informed constituents. The noise of infotainment is much more manipulatable (yeah, maybe i did just make that up) by the political adversaries on high, which further endangers the health of a political system dependent on well-informed citizens. Imagine a situation like Watergate today. You can’t, because there would be no bi-partisan investigation nor even the journalism that might lead to it.

But i’m not sure that we’ve progressed along a steady decline to the media hell we currently inhabit. There was a lot of noise during the Red Scare until Murrow cut through it with a strong signal.

And i’ve been reading an interesting book about the history of Opium. Until the early 20th century, opium addicts were something to be pitied rather than feared, or a subset of immigrant communities with their strange and exotic ways. It was mostly media noise that transformed the addict (even little old Southern Belles) into dangerous criminals, which led the government to act against the substance with vigor. And that ended with most addicts becoming actual criminals.

Unfortunately, noise feeds back more readily than signal in the media-government relationship.

By: Ubertramp

Ubertramp — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 06:36:37 +0000

Walt, I don’t think you’d find much argument here about any of that. Several of the S&R writers have written about and lamented the demise of print news in past posts.

By: Tom Shortell

Tom Shortell — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 03:29:30 +0000

I’m sorry Sam, but I don’t buy the education aspect of your argument. Isn’t it just as likely that a tolerance for foolishness, entertainment really, is a creation of the culture we’ve developed where people expect to be entertained or engaged by something — anything — constantly, regularly and right-God-damned-now?

If we (and I mean that for the public as a whole) valued priorities like being informed and fairness in our media coverage over our entertainment, we would still be raising hell over Fowler and Brenner. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Education won’t make people care more, unless it’s one of those Soviet-style “re-education” camps.

By: Walt

Walt — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:43:12 +0000

As a former journalist (daily newspaper editor, AP & UPI salaried correspondent) I find missing mention that virtually every significant journalist got his/her start in a newspaper.

Further newspapers have been losing marketshare for the past 25++ years, long before cable TV or the internet came along.

Faltering newspapers are gobbled up by larger corporations, losing any roots to the communities they serve. And now TV stations follow suit, reducing their roots to Main Street USA.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:14:55 +0000

Good article. Do not forget that Corporations now own the media. They are not going to report on anything that makes them look bad. Take General Electric as one example. They own NBC and MSNBC. There are some who suggest that GE has silenced Keith Olbermann. I will not get into the specifics here; a simple Google search can point one to the information. However, Olbermann has come out and said that there is no truth to the story.
One can also find instances of Fox News Corp. being used by the Bush White House and the Pentagon as a propaganda arm. Until the media is once again independent, we will always have the noise.

By: Scholars and Rogues » Why American media has such a signal-to-noise problem, part 1

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:33:20 +0000

[...] Tomorrow: The Media Empire of Noise [...]