Kicking the Media While It's Down, Continued

Here's two nice follow-ups to yesterday's post. The celebrity/gossip rag In Touch decided to go legit last week and focus on the Virginia Tech tragedy. Today it reported the substance issue flopped, giving it horrendously low sales. So much for that. I remember about 10 years ago the Boston Herald, which I would place on a journalistic par with Newsday, also opted to go with a more journalistic redesign and focus less on the tabloid style front page and gossip. About two months later they switched back after circulation fell. Also worth noting is that while many daily newspapers and traditional substantive print media are suffering declining advertising and circulation, most gossip magazines are doing just fine. After all, they're giving the public what it wants.

Second, tonight the great Bill Moyers will have a special on how the media was duped into selling the Iraq War to the public on bogus, if not ouright false, pretenses. I could write a long post about this, but here's some quick thoughts. First, the so-called "legitimate" news media is supposed to do investigatory work and act as a watchdog against the government. This obviously did not happen. Far too many media outlets simply regurgitate whatever the government (or anyone else) tells them without proper fact checking or verification. You can attribute this to laziness, budget cuts in investigatory teams, a rush to be the first out with the news for ratings reasons or a combination of all three plus some other things I've omitted.

Second, and this is one of those strange, twisted compliments, you've got to hand it to the Bush Administration for doing such a masterful job of selling the war. Their messaging was tight, their spokespersons for selling the war were compelling (at the time) and the media bought it hook, line and sinker. As a PR flack, I can vouch for how important it is to be proactive with the media and set the agenda as much as possible so you get the message out that you want. Watch the documentary Weapons of Mass Deception to learn more about how this was accomplished.