Is the world going bad, or, is the coverage just getting better?

[mattvardy]

A question derived from a very intriguing quote I read a few days

ago in a main-stream Toronto newspaper. <p>

 

The statement went something like this: "The world isn't getting

worse, the coverage is getting better". At first glance I was

impressed with the 'catchiness' of the statement, made by a

reporter, but now I wonder whether or not it holds any truth and

thought it might make for an interesting discussion.<p> What are

your thoughts?

[mattvardy]

I think both statements are likely true to some extent. In recent months the world has seen the Iraq war and the tsunami of the coast of Sumatra and Indonesia, and even news coverage on the local level seems to have an increased level of crime content - especially when compared to many years ago, or so I hear from my grandparents :) It's difficult to say whether the world is really worsening, or whether the world's crime rates and disasters are of a different scale today than in the past. Certainly, from a technological standpoint, news coverage (reporting, documentary photography and/or photojournalism) has improved. Maybe today's society has just become more interested or receptive to news and therefore with an increase in demand, suppliers of news (photojournalists, journalists, etc) have broadened their coverage and, consequently, their audiences...

[dickhilker]

As I see it, the mainstream media are today far more concerned with presenting stories and views that pander to popular tastes than maintaining standards of journalism. The trashy stuff that used to be the province of the tabloids is now finding its way into the likes of the NY Times and similar once - reliable papers. When respected reporters are caught red-handed fabricating derogatory stories, it places all media in a bad light.

 

My earliest recollections of world news are the crackly radio reports of WW II, week-old newsreels at the movies and the Life magazine coverage all presented with a united patriotic fervor that appealed to the public. Now, coverage is far more immediate, reported by more people, professional and amateur, and presented with no apology for bias against our government and its policies.

 

To respond to your question, it seems the world is still a mixed bag of good and bad, but the quality of coverage has sadly lagged the quantity with which we're deluged.

[jpursley]

This only addresses one part of your question, but a large part of the chaging nature of 'news' is an increased pressure on news organizations to generate larger profits. This means a lot less of the expensive original and investigative reporting, and a lot more quoting from press releases.

 

This also drives the more and more common "Missing Woman of the Week" stories. Missing people reports are not up, but these stories attract more viewers, which means more profit for the 'news' outlets.

 

Emotional stories that attract viewers - missing women, shark attacks, celebrity beliefs/weddings/whatever - are getting a lot more coverage than they used to because they generate more profit. Less profitable are the detailed policy discussions and actual international news (in the US at least).

 

"If it bleeds, it leads" is no longer a local news phenomenon...

[markci]

The coverage isn't getting better -- it's getting much worse. The media fixates on violence, gore and whatever freak show is available to boost ratings. In the U.S., after an increase in the 80's and a decrease in the 90's, violent crime rates are about what they were in the 70's, but coverage of it on television is through the roof. This is one thing that Michael Moore did get right in his "Bowling for Columbine."

 

I certainly hope Canada isn't headed in the same direction, but maybe it's inevitable.

 

About 13 people in the U.S. are injured every year by sharks. 1500+ are injured by toilet bowl cleaning products. Some day maybe the media will declare a "Year of the Tidy-Bowl" but I'm not holding my breath.

[jpursley]

I suspect, btw, that the responses will vary wildly depending on the nationality of the poster. Coverage of the same events is drastically different in different areas of the world.

 

An obvious example: Here in the U.S. the footage from Iraq shown on the news is pretty well edited. There are generally images of tanks blowing up buildings and maybe some bombs going off in the distance with plumes of smoke rising, and soldiers generally on patrol or hanging around their bases. The news shown to the rest of the world about Iraq is very different: much more graphic footage showing the direct aftermath of war and insurgency.

 

This is just the most obvious example I could think of; this trend surely applies to plenty of other subjects. So whether "The world isn't getting worse, the coverage is getting better" for a particular person probably largely depends on what coverage is being discussed.

[michaelaly]

<i>So whether "The world isn't getting worse, the coverage is getting better" for a particular person probably largely depends on what coverage is being discussed.</i>

<br><br>

I agree. Coverage getting 'better' is a hard call to make, but I think we can all agree that coverage is getting much more extensive; as for accuracy and bias, those are separate questions.<br><br>

One thing to keep in mind is that in our grandparents time not only were there far fewer people in the country(U.S.) but there were far fewer news organizations. Technology and population have given way to a splurge in the ammount of news we have access to. This in turn makes the papers/tv stations etc compete more and more. I worked in television news for some time and whenever a competing station changed something in their broadcast the others followed suit almost immediatly. If one station started reporting every DUI in the region, soon enough the others jumped on the bandwagon because they were afraid of loosing viewers to gimmicks. And time and again when news stations come up with new ways to hook viewers they come up with gimmicks(new graphics, new sets, screen crawlers, scaring everyone with weather reports etc...) instead of coming up with new and interesting story ideas or actually engaging the viewer with thought provoking journalism. This is probably why our 5pm news had lower ratings than re-runs of Frasier. This is the state of much of the journalism in the U.S.<br><br>

The odd thing is that people are watching less and less TV news(not sure about newpapers) because the violence, gore, and gimmicks are not getting ratings. I think people are sick of it, I know I am. Or maybe I'm just being an optomist.

[fivetonsflax]

It is not enough to be a passive news consumer. One must take in (preferably by reading)

multiple sources, think critically about the stories as well as their presentations (and

presenters), and avoid being distracted by meaningless fluff.

 

If everyone did that, there would be no profit in fluff, and the news people would stick to

real news. Of course, I'm not holding my breath. :-)

[marbing]

Think of it this way. At least the violent and terrible stuff is uncommon enough to still be 'News'. If we get to the point where it is 'News' that somebody got up, went to work and came home safely...THEN we will be in trouble.

[GerrySiegel]

If one wants a balanced perspective one has to really search for it. I stopped getting the daily newspapers because of the crud quotient. A quote from a movie comes to mind. Remember The Big Carnival,where Kirk Douglas, a cynical and opportunistic rascal reporter sets up a man to die slowly in a mine collaps so he can milk the story to the syndicates. He says " Good news is no news." So,if you define good and bad in some operational way,then your question can be answered. If you measure the quality of the world by the headlines and stories of serial killers, and the tripe of Hollywood romances, the world is just about the same as it has been such Jack the Ripper. Off hand, I kind of like Hawaii. But I liked it better when the traffic was less of a bummer...so there are qualities of life that can be measured. How is that for philosophical pinning the tail on the donkey -)) Aloha, Gerry

rep. House of Irwin Ltd, Shipping Kosher Delicacies and Dog Treats, worldwide except Canada.

[bhneely]

One thing to keep in mind about the media is that they aren't in the business of delivering news. They are in the business of selling ads. Salaciousness and strife cause people to watch the news, which leads to more expensive advertising, which leads to more coverage of salaciousness and strife. It's all about soda and laundry detergent.

 

And to answer the original question, no the world isn't getting worse. Overcrowded, overused, certainly, but never forget that at it's core, life is brutish and short. For some species it's just longer and more interesting than for others.

[felixg]

Coverage is not only getting "better" (I would prefer to say "more extensive") but also more immediate. Back in the 70s (I am probably the same age as your grandparents!), when I was photographing in Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, etc, there was a real problem with getting the results back to potential market before they were too old to be of interest. Today you can make an exposure anywhere on Earth and have it on the picture desk in seconds. Not that anything real ever reaches the viewer/reader: only the acceptable is ever published.

 

For what it's worth, I think the world is very painfully slowly getting slightly better, not worse, than it was then.

 

You are also right about people "switching off" on the "gore" ... which is a shame, because thanks to editing they never really see any of it. I believe that citizens should see what really happens in the theatres of their nations' foreign policies. Anybody who thinks that, in a lifetime of media coverage, they've seen even a hint of the what really happens every minute is sadly mistaken.

[andrew_mcgrath1]

I don't think the world is getting worse, although the "end is near" folks might believe otherwise. One can pick many times throughout human history seemingly worse by comparison; I happen to pick WWI and just after. The First World War resulted in the deaths of 13 to 15 million people. If that wasn't horrible enough, a year or so after the war ended a great flu epidemic killed another 25 million worldwide. And from 1917 onward, the Bolsheviks began the slaughter of millions of Russian and Eastern European people. That's a pretty bad half dozen years, and it bridged the gap between the Armenian and Jewish Holocausts.

 

As for the coverage, the ease and speed with which info and images can be processed has led to information overload. This, in turn, seems to have prompted many people to find a kind of refuge in non-anonymous non-traditional news items, such as the weekly missing blonde woman/girl so prevalent in current US reporting. People get a simple, east to follow story of a person with a name and face, which apparently saves them from having to think about far more significant issues or solutions to critical problems. News reporting as we used to know it, and journalism for that matter, is all but dead. Sadly, this includes photojournalism, although it's more for a lack of audience than the availability of skilled practitioners.

[h._p.]

As seems to be my fate, I'll contribute the contrary view that the world is getting better and the coverage is getting worse. Or, to be more accurate, a lot of the world is getting better and most of the coverage is getting worse.

 

Countries like India and China are raising the general standard of living while, in the west, the majority live in a style which their ancestors could hardly have dreamt of.

 

At the same time the national news services, even the public services like the BBC, believe that the only good news is bad news. They believe that the public wants spectacle and disaster. They might be right. However, this combination is hardly new. Take a look at national newspapers from 150 years ago and you'll see the same emphasis on didaster.

 

Local newspapers, radio and television have a different view. They know that their audience want to hear about the good things that are happening locally and they provide that service. They aren't immune to the disease but they are resistent to it.<div></div>

[boris c han]

"suppliers of news (photojournalists, journalists, etc) have broadened their

coverage and, consequently, their audiences..."

 

This isn't true, at least not in North America. At any one time the major media

players will focus on a limited number of "stories" that have some kind of

resonance in the US and and largely ignore the rest of the world. If US troops

pulled out of Iraq the coverage would end almost overnight , just as it did in

Somalia. If you go back 20 years and look at the international coverage in

magazines like Time and Macleans it was more extensive than it is today,

notwithstanding the time lag in getting those images back to base. The

coverage of the tsuanami was no more than a blip on the radar, vast numbers

of people regularly die as a result of natural and man-made disasters in Asia

and Africa without making a single paragraph in the US media.

 

As to whether the world is "getting worse", probably not. Things are cyclical,

and right now it's clearly not as bad as the worst of times in the last century,

but things are taking a dip downwards......

[GerrySiegel]

In an absolute sense,during my lifetime I really believe that people's taste in news is getting more degraded. And that people's manners are getting "worse." If you come across a book by Steve Allen called "Vulgarians at the Gate" you would find many many examples. In this sense, the question is not about relativism. In absolute terms there is a higher quota of dopes,morons,and vulgarity for vulgarity sake. Reality TV seeks to entertain by grossing us out. And popular culture coverage has to seek weirder and weirder formats to entertain. I think it is interesting,because the recognition that more people get their news from the Daily Enquirer than the Washington Post is a worry.<p> Why? Because this country,and its the only one I got,seems to care more about the squalid romance than the availability of medical care in Sudan. I did my part in raising my offspring. And it was against the grain of popular news and popular culture (which are hopelessly blurred. Latter is another issue we have no time for here),

Gerry...seeking the beautiful muses to photograph in lieu of the graffiti and burnt toilet seats still lifes in our local park toilet....We can make a difference.

[chris_waller]

The world is no worse than it used to be and probably a lot better. Look at the past - Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, the Black Death etc. It still happens today - Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Bokassa, Pol Pot, Amin, Kim Jong-Il et al. but now we see it on the news every evening.

[bacsa]

It's just the coverage getting better.

[h._p.]

One liners: the first resort of the terminally thoughtless.......<div></div>

[chelsea]

Percentage wise, probably no worse than ever. We've just been breeding like flies and trampling the hell out of the planet, more of us to make mischief, and with new technologies, on a bigger and broader scale. And that new technology brings to light stupidity factor much quicker than ever. And Gerry is right, manners and a sense of consideration from each other have gone down the toilet.

[beeman458]

"What are your thoughts?"

 

That's certainly a good excuse of an explanation for the obvious.

 

Example; Shark attacks aren't on the rise, it's just that the attacks are reported in a more efficent manner. Besides as more folks spend time at the beach, it's the fault of the humans for "swimmin wit de fish-es":) Okay!

 

Example: Is there a rise in pedopilia or is it just that there's more web sites openly promoting this sort of behavior being reported on the six O'Clock news?

 

Example: Is there a rise in sexually transmitted diseases or is it just that there's better detecting methods, we know more about their transmission and the news is happy to tell us about this point?

 

Politicians have always been scummy, so we won't need to go there:)

 

"Is the world going bad...?"

 

No, I wouldn't say it's going bad, it's just that the due to the overt distruction of any and all morality compasses, things that were considered evil are now socially acceptable and folks are being forced (the PC thought patrol) to turn a blind eye to evil and now it's rampant. There's always been evil among us, there hasn't always been newspapers.

 

So in response to the question, yes there's more evil/bad to report but it's not anything out of the ordinary considering the true nature of humanity and this rise is to be expected when one throws a perfectly fine compass away.

 

Egocentric questions are such a terrible thing to waste:)

[GerrySiegel]

Pretty sour view of humanity, lad. I am still optimistic,hard wired in me, when I read about someone donating a kidney. "I try to be more cynical, but I just can't keep up." Lily Tomlin. And that cynicism is more applauded in the press I believe. Fallout of Watergate perhaps. Small heroisms and acts of integrity do not get reported,they are so common and page 14 copy.

[j.w.]

The notion that there was once a journalism that reported honestly, fairly and unbiased is a myth. Just look into the journalism of the 19th century England and America, or the Hearst legacy of the mid-20th century as typical examples.

 

The very idea that an unbiased view of any recent history can be presented by a medium that requires the economic resources of a corporate entity is, at the very least, naive. The very nature of commercial, corporate or state controlled media argues against there being an unbiased view.

 

For that matter, no one individual is capable of rendering an opinion on any contemporary subject or event without the intervening filter of personal bias.

 

However, I know people working in media who make it a serious personal mission to present every piece as "unbiased" as possible. Of course, they have to maintain, on a certain level, a personal myth in order for such work in that career to continue.

 

So, is the world getting worse? Back "then", folks just didn't talk about certain stuff, like we tend to do today. The harder you look for stuff, the more likely you are to find it.

 

So maybe that's one data point arguing for the position that the world's pretty much the same, we're just more aware of events now.

 

But I can just as easily hypothesize that, as observers within the stream of the history that we are attempting to comprehend, its impossible for us to gain a truly objective view of our era, without the perspective of an external frame of reference, such as what the study of history provides.

 

Media coverage and the role of media in our culture is a dominant factor that both illuminates the happening of events and sways public discourse and popular culture.

 

That being the case, perhaps the conclusion can be reached that "the world", and "the coverage" [read: media] are one in the same. Or, more precisely, "the world" also encompasses all that is composed of, and influenced by, the various media. The one influences the other. They are the same.

 

Rephrase the question in this thread's subject line to a statement: "As the Coverage Gets Better, the World Gets Worse".

[james_oneill]

That's how a newspaper might put it.

 

Here's an example. In Britain, the number of children murdered each year has remained about constant since victorian times, although the population has increased. When I was 7 and 8 years old I walked to and from school alone and many other kids did the same. These days fear of abduction (etc.) that come from reporting of some dreadful means parents simply won't allow it. The risks haven't got worse, but we have a greater awareness that there is a risk.

[GerrySiegel]

Let us ask the question this way. Is the world a more dangerous and scary place or is that the number of dangers and scares is constant, and the press reports them more, they get more display, and the statistics are better collected. I think the world is absolutely more dangerous and scary than it was when I was a child in the '50s. We had nuclear weapons and the cold war,but it seemed so 'off shore.' Now since 9-11 there is a sweeping paranoia at large, fueled by no less than our Executive Branch. Therefore let us take some measures,and perceptions of the truth and I bet if you asked: Is the world more dangerous and scary than when you were a kid that 75% of respondents would say "Yes."<p> Now,true,we had 1918 influenza and the casualties of the Civil War, and a bunch of nasty things that did indeed make the news at the time. Including the Titanic and the Johnstown Flood and the San Francisco earthquake. But despite those,I never felt the fear factor that one sees at large. The watch your ass mentality at least. I hope I am wrong. I just surprised myself by some non social relativism in my thinking. So my thoughts are that ya gotta define some measures and measure them. But that popular 'perception' is indeed,as someone just said, a cogent kind of reality. GS