Exploitive, invasive, insensitive, and perhaps worst of all, over-eager, like some 10th grader's first trip to second base beneath the Friday night bleachers, squirming blindly and hoping for something to suckle with little in the way of form, control or knowledge. The news media in this country has grown into an unruly teenager, become far too centered around personalities providing entertainment rather than reporters reporting the news. To make room for advertising, and to generate a targeted audience for that advertising, its product comes inherently watered and/or dumbed down, and openly, often unapologetically, biased.
Our Fourth Estate doesn't always cover what it should when it should, opts instead to provide uninterrupted live coverage of sensationalized stories, sometimes nothing more than the odd celebrity turd, whatever people are buzzing about on-line, what's trending. Geo-political machinations are going on the world over every single day (as in, it's always daytime somewhere...), and though they may not have a direct effect on American life, they impact us as a species, especially considering how 'global' everything has become in the last two decades.
This should be acknowledged, but normally isn't. The American media will only cover something if it directly affects our home soil or interests abroad, or if it becomes a situation that's gotten out of hand, reveals a gross violation of human rights, and even then usually as an afterthought. I am not some Continental snob by any means, I have my own store of abiding patriotism, very proud to be an American, but we are ever only part of the story. Watch any American news broadcast, then watch or listen to, for instance, the BBC, and note the marked difference. American news is far more American-centric than the BBC is Britain-centric.
And when it does throw its attention somewhere, it's all sorts of balls to the wall, and amidst the hysterical pursuit of a scoop (which is pretty much unattainable in this real-time world) it can't help but over-react or get things wrong. Ever since Katrina, the slightest atmospheric hiccup north of Cape Verde throws our collective media into immediate 'Hurricane Watch!' (and this, mind you, is intended more for viewers in Butte, Montana than it is for anyone watching along the Gulf or East coasts). They devote non-stop airtime to 'important' judicial verdicts, some of them relevant (like the Zimmerman trial), some not so (like Casey Anthony or Ariel Castro...tragic yes, but does anyone outside of plaintiffs, defendants and all attendant parties need to hear every word of these verdicts...?). At election time, forget it, the media's relentless 'calling' this state or 'calling' that state without fact-checking, leads to confusion, mistakes and retraction, time and time again. It happened in 2000, and in 2004 and '08, and numerous mid-term elections.
Overeager and sloppy.
Not to mention, and maybe this is just me, the anchors are getting dumber, less knowledgeable. I've seen more than a few unable to pronounce, on the air, an assortment of locales and names that should be standard knowledge. Words like Karachi, Caracas, Islamabad...Reykjavik. They're toughies for sure, and mistakes happen, but they seem to happening more frequently. Recently I saw one individual, on a local newscast, mispronounce Armistice (Ar-MISS-tiss) twice!
This might be a generational thing, a sign of the up-and-coming Generation Y taking the 'okay is good enough/everyone gets a trophy/there are no losers' philosophy with which it as raised into careers, but if so, that's a sorry state of affairs. I don't think I want to live in a world where we stop expecting something of the people to whom we turn for information.
In other words, in this complicated, frenetic, on-the-edge world, new organizations are not places for someone to do 'the best they can', to be rewarded for merely trying.
