Nobody likes to hear bad news unless there's some good news in it. Charismatic religious leaders promise a better life or afterlife. Hitler promised a greater Germany and blamed "somebody else" for their problems.

What's our promise of something better? Even in the most hopeful forecasts of the post-oil age it's not going to be much fun around here.

A few thoughts on the structure and nature of the news media

Media and Advertising:
First and foremost the current structure of the MSM news media drives it toward poor coverage. We tend to think of news companies as engaged in the business of investigative reporting. Where they research a story, generate a report and sell it to the consumer to cover the cost. In this model a news company competes with its peers to provide higher quality news. Once upon a time that was true, but now the model is slightly different. Since the advent of modern marketing and advertising news companies are engaged in the business of producing an audience and selling advertising space to cover costs. In this business model the reader, listener or viewer is not the consumer but the product. In this model news companies compete to provide a higher quality audience. Higher quality news uses the central processing route. A higher quality audience uses the peripheral processing route. High quality news is all about critical thought. A high quality audience is all about click, whirr infotainment. Critical thought is not conducive to selling tons of crap that one doesn't really need.

Opinions about the Media
When thinking of the news media we typically think of the free press. Which directly leads us to think of freedom freedom of speech. Consequently we think that the role of the news media is strongly aligned with the interests of democracy. A free and open exchange of ideas and information being debated in the public sphere. If one has a strong objection to the quantity and quality of reporting on a particular issue, say peak oil, then negative impressions of the integrity of the free press develop. In order to maintain these negative opinions one needs a reason to think badly of the press. For progressives it's Rupert Murdoch and corporate hegemony, for conservatives it's the liberal media. For Joe six pack it's neither, the news is just fine. Joe isn't sufficiently informed about anything to find fault with the coverage. It is worthwhile to note that the low quality of coverage makes it easy to find fault, but the fault that you find is based on what you were already concerned about that was missing or poorly covered. This leads you to believe that the news is biased against your particular values whatever they may be. Since the practice of investigative journalism is rapidly dying (if not already dead) more people are finding fault with the media. News companies are experiencing a credibility problem. We are already seeing comedy routines like The Daily Show replacing network news as a source of news and of course the internet, which brings me to my next point.

Search vs Broadcast
The traditional news media of print, radio and television are all broadcast systems. The news comes to you. The internet is a search system. Open up a browser to the homepage and then go looking for news. If you want to know what everyone else is looking at then you go to Google news or something similar, but if you want to know what the latest news on peak oil is then you need to type peak oil into a search engine. It is not possible do do this with out already knowing the term. Thus using the internet to find the content not presented in the broadcast news is investigative journalism for one and that is not very efficient. News in the sense that we know it requires broadcast systems. So the question is how do we fix the broadcast news? I see two answers. One, we go back to subscription news services without advertising. Two, we create a new system to share all of that individual investigate journalism, sort it, covert it to manageable packets and broadcast it all in a high quality way without a revenue stream from advertising or subscriptions. I'm open to suggestions on this.

Dropping Out
On a closing note many people are realizing the poor quality of the MSM people are dropping out. They are not consuming news. The upside of this is that people are no longer subjecting themselves to the infotainment that passes as news. The downside is that current events are no longer disseminated. Just as anecdotal evidence of this I work at a Cooperative Organic foods store and a locally owned coffee shop, both in close proximity to university area and thus a liberal crowd. Fully half of my coworkers did not know that Al Gore had won the Nobel prize until I asked them what they thought about it.

Tim Morrison

PS Professor Goose, it was nice to finally meet you. Gail introduced me to you after your speech at the conference.