The Decline and Fall of the News

Atrios brings up the Duke lacrosse team case in its proper context:

I think the nationalization of stories which should basically be local ones is one of the not-talked-about-enough pernicious impacts of 24 hour cable news (and to some extent the internets as well). People are raped and killed every day, but some stories bubble up to the national media for bizarre reasons. In some sense this isn't really fair to the accused or the accuser, as the media attention they get is disproprtionate to the importance of the situation. It also gives viewers a rather distorted view of crime and the justice system generally in this country. And, it provides additional privileges to people who can afford celebrity lawyers/PR people who can spin their way into the press. They also of course take time away from coverage of stories of actual national importance. There are also the obvious race/class issues of which stories get national coverage and which don't, but even without that...

He's absolutely right. The things that used to be confined to the 6 o'clock local news are now being discussed for hours on end by prime-time exploitation specialists like Nancy Grace and Rita Cosby. I could name 10 stories from this weekend in my local paper that had just as much right to be examined nationally as the Duke lacrosse case, in terms of the seriousness of the crimes and the number of people they effect. The national news used to be reserved for national stories, and the main reason for that ws simply a function of time. There was one half-hour broadcast a day, and so you had to hit the top national and international stories within those 22 minutes. There wasn't room for the kinds of trial coverage we see today unless it involved a nationally known celebrity or an event of national importance. In this way the cable news networks pulled the networks along. Since they had to zero in on these stories to fill a 24-hour news cycle, they focused attention on them, forcing the network news to cover them as well.

Another under-discussed aspect of this is the fact that most of the producers and editors and talent in the cable news business typically come out of local news. They're just transposing their vision of how the news works into the cable news environment. It's also cheaper to get feeds of local stories from local affiliates than actually report a story from an overseas bureau (fewer and fewer of which even exist anymore).

There are so many reasons sensationalistic journalism has taken over the important news of the day. The most tinfoil-hat reason would be this: by shifting focus to stories like the Duke lacrosse case, media conglomerates take the heat off of the ruling class, keeping voters less informed about the issues that affect them and allowing the status quo, which keeps both media conglomerates and politicians rich and powerful, to continue.