Where is objective reporting?

What's happened to news reporting? I'm increasingly frustrated. I'm sometimes hard-pressed to determine what's reporting, what's pure pontificating, what's analysis and what's entertainment disguised as news.
 
I'll sometimes watch MSNBC. I naturally assumed I would be viewing bona fide news broadcasts. Each program paraded reporters holding respected journalistic credentials. Each shed light on topics of the day - emphasizing political issues and events.
 
Soon, however, I realized my naiveté. I found that these political news programs interlace, blend and blur predictive journalism, opinion preaching, commentary and amusement entertainment. All come across seamlessly wrapped in various thicknesses of news façades.
 
A viewer can be captivated by long segments of pure theater interspersed with hard news. I'm now alert to the entertainment or opinionated spins dominating these broadcasts. But even with my new frame of reference, I remain perplexed and flustered by some airings.
 
The gravity of the blurring, in the guise of news reporting, reached a crescendo at the Democratic Convention. I cringed to witness much that was a barefaced disservice to innocent viewers. MSNBC picked Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann to head its Denver coverage that political week. Both emerged as frontline supporters of Barack Obama, not a good stance for broadcasters purporting to be even-handed journalists.
 
Indeed, after Obama's acclaimed Invesco Field acceptance speech Matthews declared that he was casting aside any residual impartiality one might believe he still had. (His evenhandedness had virtually evaporated.) He declared that he would champion the Democrats' nominee.
 
Even I, a rabid Obama supporter, was flabbergasted and then dismayed by his declaration. Clearly the Denver anchoring duo shed any pretense of being reporters; both emerged as cheerleaders.
 
How did such blurring of reporting, opining and entertaining come to dominate our news media? The simple answer is found in the cutthroat competition among and outside traditional news outlets. Recent tsunami changes in communications technology have led us to the point that we are often victimized.
 
First were the 24-hour cable networks. Clearly we should applaud that we are no longer limited to learning each day's news in edited 30-minute evening recaps on three major networks. But full 24/7 coverage brought certain unintended consequences.
 
Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, in their never-sleep formats, battle to report what they uncover before their competitors can tell all. But unlike reporting before 24/7 news cycles, we are often told things that no editor can critically verify before they are aired. In the rush to get news stories to viewers, "first" took command, trumping "accurate." That leaves the consumer to responsibly accept breaking news with skepticism.
 
Simultaneously, news reporting inched toward showmanship. Corporate thinking valued entertaining segments to siphon viewers from the competition. In fact, today's television channels regularly intermix news and entertainment. The Daily Show, SNL, The O'Reilly Factor, The Colbert Report, and Countdown are worthy examples. Sadly, a fair percentage of American viewers report these as their preferred news sources.
 
Today's competitive pressures have plainly corrupted reporting standards. As consumers of media productions, we suffer as these sources stray from traditional news reporting. The legitimacy of what we see and hear becomes increasingly problematic.
 
And then came the internet. Blogs, MySpace, Flicker, etc. have changed news … again … for the worse. Each further degrades hard news reporting. Through these unregulated outlets, bona fide hard news, innuendo, conspiracy theories, disinformation and all matters of opinions get equally disseminated as real news.

Meanwhile we don't critically question and sort out the disgusting glut of unsupported claims.
 
Truth, the quality that undergirds any functioning democracy, is the notable casualty. As blurring increases for what is verifiable news, we citizens aren't aggressive in separating truth from falsehood and fantasy. We seemingly resist uncovering for ourselves the validity of unfiltered assertions.
 
Indeed, I was amazed by the nonsense that many e-mailers sent me during the presidential campaign. I remain saddened that they must have believed (or wanted to believe) the gibberish they passed on as truth.
 
We must be more than cautious about the blurring of news reporting in all of its exploding forms and sources. Our consumer reluctance to critically evaluate what is presented raises monumental concerns about how long we can continue to effectively govern ourselves.


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Gary Knox is a retired Yuma area school superintendent and guest columnist for The Sun.