Americans Love News (Though Putin Does Not)

 

A recent report, https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2022, from Oxford University and Reuters on the state of public confidence in journalism in six developed nations rates the public in the USA as having an especially low (and declining) trust in media as a source of valid information. 

Lacking an imperial overlord to manage national information transmission, the USA has always had a highly localised journalistic landscape. As Indian land became colonies, then, with westward expansion post-independence, territories and eventually states, news reporting was very much a regional matter. When radio arrived there were no central government networks created from the get-go like the CBC, BBC, ABC, JBC and so on throughout the British Empire. US radio was and has remained largely regional. While national radio and TV networks like NPR, PBS, NBC and Fox eventually developed there, much of the news content was and still is locally focused. In recent times a few quality US newspapers (NY Times, Washington Post) have developed a national following, but content about the USA emphasizes its source region (e.g. the NYT I get to read is the Great Lakes version).

Thus I find the Reuters report inadequate as it features centralized and geographically small nations such as the UK and Finland alongside vast and decentralized media environments like Brazil and the USA. Until the widespread  availability of digital media only a generation or so ago, populations across a large federal nation without national (and usually government supported) broadcast media were treated to greatly varying versions of what constituted news. This seems to have remained so even though other regions’ news is now accessible digitally. This may well be because many people in a country of large and varied territories don’t often visit or even care much about what distant regions think of as important. In the USA and it seems Brazil that has translated in recent years to a distrust of information deriving from afar, especially where it is seen as emanating from an elite centre. Even here in Canada where both the French and English media tell much the same story across the land, some communities, especially in Alberta and Quebec, distrust news they see as deriving from Ottawa-based outlets.

I know the USA well, having lived next to it or, for a few years, in it and having worked there frequently for over 50 years. Americans have been and still are are voracious consumers of news. They just don’t believe what doesn’t emanate from their own ‘tribe’. The creation of online media has massively enhanced the opportunities for extremists of all stripes to extend the boundaries of what constitutes broadcast news and opinion. Paradoxically (?) this has led to a widespread distrust of media in general in the democracies, especially in the USA. It's just too bad that isn't also true of today's Russians! But of course full control of information is a seminal requirement for any lasting autocracy.

 

The Promise of Blogging

Blogging as an online form of diarising and journaling is now 20 years old. I have been at it for the last five of them and find there is still a lot for me to learn about how to make online journalism deliver thought-provoking alternative perspectives to our subscribers. Excellence in blogging is not easy: “The reality is that most blogs are poorly managed, attract dismal readership numbers and are soon abandoned. Does this mean that blogging is dead? Of course not! It just means it’s not easy. Like most things in business, the blogging market is subject to the basic principles of supply and demand” - Heather Baker of the B2B PR Blog.  

If more of us understood that, to hold onto their followers, blogs must deliver a lot more to readers than unformed opinions and ignorant rants, we bloggers could have a better chance of becoming a part of more people’s daily reading diet. Another Heather, Heather Yaxley of Greenbanana, says it well: “In an increasingly competitive world for individuals and organisations, it is not enough to simply be able to ‘do’ things or even to do them well. You need to be able to know why something is the right thing to do – and be able to explain this to others”.  

In this blog we strive to bring you a varied diet of perspectives on life and world events as seen from a mature 'First World' English-speaker's viewpoint. In this era of sociopolitical all-inclusiveness, we believe there is too much reluctance to proselytize our pride in Western values and viewpoints as developed over many hundreds of years of slow democratization and declining injustice. If our sometimes whimsical and sometimes hard-nosed take on standing up for such values generally intrigues you, do please let your friends and contacts know about us! And follow us regularly yourself by using 'Join this site' or the 'Follow by Email -> Submit' link, or by connecting via Google+, all in the right side column. If you like to subscribe to blogs via feeds, look for the RSS symbol in the header bar to click on. See you next post!

Rigging the Jury Online

My eye was caught today by one of those curiosity news items that seem to speak to matters beyond their limited immediate interest - swarming Amazon book reviews.

We live in an age when the proverbial Common Man can comment online on anything that takes his fancy. Virtually every review or newsy website and most of those that sell you something let you 'Comment' on their content. Sometimes these are monitored before posting but, as the Amazon piece illustrates, there are all too often ways of 'gaming' that process to slip by it. The process of policing is often erratic, presumably largely because it involves a lot of on-the-fly decision making on the part of the owners of a well-read site. 

I occasionally submit comment on my morning paper's online articles. It helps 'keep my hand in' as a blogger plus allows me to vent or educate about things I care a lot about. Writing Letters to the Editor rarely proves worth the time spent but an online comment will get published most of the time. When it doesn't, it can be hard to fathom why. While news outlets publish some form of comment policy, recently I had a couple of submitted comments disallowed as 'abusive' when they contained content very similar to some previous posts in this blog.

That said, I do feel something is quite off-kilter about the torrent of selective comment that an open web seems compelled to accept. Local restaurant rating websites are one example of this. They let you and I rant but provide no considered comment of their own. Yet shouldn't one assume that the publishers of these sites have some special knowledge that readers would like to benefit from? To be a ratings app maker does not seem to require much subject expertise; just the ability to produce the right software. When the inexpert reader is the only arbiter how much real new knowledge can other readers expect to gain?