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Tragedy, Media and Marketing
Magazine and newspaper critics -- like Liebling, Mencken and I.F. Stone -- once wrote bitingly and insightfully about the greed, hypocrisy and warped values of the people who ran conventional news organizations, and about how those traits affected media coverage. This criticism gave us some context with which to grasp and comprehend what we were reading and seeing. But as media became increasingly corporatized in the 80s and 90s, such critics vanished. Media criticism turned into celebrity journalism, with a growing focus on media moguls and TV superstars. Even greedy capitalists like Bill Gates were fawned over by the toughest reporters and critics, when they should have been paying more attention to his business practices.
Every now and then, however, an old and new media issue pops up. It's disingenuous for media gasbags to wonder why the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart from Salt Lake City gets tides of media hype while the kidnapping of 7-year-old Alexis Patterson from Milwaukee gets so little. We know why. The answer has been the same for years now, and only gets more clear with each corporate acquisition of a media property: modern media is about making money, and that depends entirely on selecting stories that entertain, titillate, blow up or confront.
Last week, CNN devoted a whole program to the mysterious process by which some tragedies -- the Death of Di to name one -- get staggering amounts of media coverage, while others -- like Mother Teresa's death the same week -- merit relatively little. CNN's high-minded panelists debated whether racism was the issue: Smart is a rich white kid, Alexis Patterson is poor and black. Is there a double standard? Others suggested Smart's parents were understandably working to promote media coverage, to involve more people in searching for their daughter. But this dichotomous coverage is familiar to Net veterans. Kevin Mitnick got as much media coverage in our time as Al Capone, even though he never killed anybody. Hacking gets vastly more media attention than assault or robbery, cyber-porn more than the newsstand kind. Media are always selective about what makes them hysterical.
It was striking to realize that none of CNN's panelists came close to the simple truth: media are market-driven, not idea-substance-or-content driven. Even the once-staid weekly newsmagazines are as likely as not to have movie stars on their covers, despite the number of important stories worthy of coverage. Cable channels, newspapers and newsmagazines cater to wealthy people -- no matter what color -- because those are the consumers advertisers want to reach. To some degree, this has always been true. But as more media have been taken over by massive corporations like AOL Time-Warner, Disney and General Electric, the process has vastly accelerated. News gets marketed just like cereal. Numbers rule. Ratings shape not only news coverage, but our very perceptions of the news. Such companies don't decide not to cover Alexis Patterson because she's poor and black. Profoundly pragmatic and opportunistic, they'd be happy to exploit blacks as well as whites, if the demographics worked. They don't cover Alexis Patterson's abduction because poor viewers in Milwaukee or elsewhere have nothing to do with ratings, ad revenue or profit margins. Blonde kids from wealthy families in Salt Lake City do.
Even so-called serious media like the New York Times and Washington Post are market-driven, focused increasingly on high-end consumer products spawned by digital technology, and on entertainment and controversy. The Times runs several weekly sections brazenly aimed at affluent second home buyers, wine connoisseurs and other high-end consumers. Stories about redecorating million-dollar cottages don't appear because they're newsworthy, but because they draw readers with money, thus advertisers with revenue.
The Elizabeth Smarts of the world will always trump the Alexis Pattersons. Modern media online or off, aren't steered by editors and producers making moral and creative judgments, but by business conglomerates, lawyers, analysts and market researchers. Their sole imperative: generate controversy (a la Monica Lewinsky), select stories that draw the most desirable readers and generate the greatest profits. This principle is evident in media coverage of computing and software as well, and has been for years. Stories about the Net invariably center on marketing -- what will make the most money, or what might be of interest to frightened and confused parents, rather than what is significant. Look how much coverage child pornography online gets, and how little coverage there is of truly revolutionary techno-stories, from gene mapping to AI. And most Americans have never even heard of open source, let alone had the chance to consider it's many implications. Intellectual property and copyright laws have been re-written, thanks to digital technology, yet these stories get sporadic and incomplete coverage.
Media debates about story judgment and ethics are often this hypocritical and disingenuous, mostly because critics and panelists aren't really free to speak the truth -- moral media died decades ago. From Princess Di to terrorism to kidnapping, stories grow in a hyper-information environment, one which promotes argument and hysteria and, increasingly, filters out the lives of poor, ordinary, or non-marketable people. Modern media takes stories and filters them through an increasingly sophisticated marketing machine.Online, blogs and small sites are freer than conventional journalists to set a broader agenda, but their audiences remain small and fragmented.
Thus, there's no mystery about why Elizabeth Smart's kidnapping gets so much more attention than that of other kids. The only mystery is how long it will take the media -- and more importantly, the public -- to understand and acknowledge the reality of their own new, intensely corporate, value system.
Something I've been kicking around for a while, and I'm neither pro nor against, so I'm wondering if anyone would like to think this through with me, is the idea of strict rules (either from the govt or some trade organization) regarding what can and can't be called 'news'. If i make my orange juice from concentrate, i have to tell people. If i manufacture my sparkling wine in brooklyn, i can't call it champagne. Perhaps there's a public good in someone saying, "it's not news if it's for-profit", or "it's not news if there's any commercials", or something like that.
It doesn't solve the problem, but it does highlight the phenomenon. Anyone?
god is just pretend.
His point was not that there was no media coverage, but that for Alexis it was very localized, while for Elizabeth Smart it was highly covered nationally.
Oh, and by the way, how did you find out about Alexis Patterson? Doing an internet search about missing kids in the recent past and running across some media coverage of the story
You make a valid point, but if you go over to CNN.com, and look on the front page, I can find all of the info I want for the Smart kidnapping. That is the coverage issues he is referring to.
Random Musings
While this article is very true, what else can we do? Do we give control of the news media to the government? Not in my lifetime, I hope. We criticize other governments, ie. Cuba and Afghanistan for filtering news and distributing the propaganda they want their citizens to hear. Do we want to be subject to this more than we already are?
Do we make news organizations strictly non-profit groups? Would this work in the T.V. and radio markets? If the stations were making no money running news, would they bother, or just re-run Seinfeld episodes so we could hear about "nothing". Easier to do in the print and internet larket, but still not easy. Those entities need to make enough money to keep the presses running and the data lines live.
In the end, news as a free market entity means that we can all get it. If it weren't for advertisers in a newspaper, the cover price would be quite significantly more than $.50 or so. It may be manipulated by corporate America to a certain extent, but it is also flowing with idealistic people that want to tell us something. Until we can come up with a cheap system that doesn't need sponsorship or government intervention, this might be the best system on the planet.
It's hard to add to the pile, but here goes:
About 4 years ago, during the height of the Clinton hate pander, a 12 year old kid called the on-air host of an MS-NBC program. I was watching: it was about a minute before 1 PM. The kid got through the call screeners somehow.
The kid asked why the immense coverage of so inconsequentual an act as Clinton-Lewinski, when so many more imporant things were happening -- especially the 24/7 coverage of the MonicaStain-NBC network.
The host, John Gibson, who is on FoxNews now (of course), looked the camera straight in the eye, and said:
Kid? (disbelieving shake of head) You're watching this show right now, aren't you? We put on the air what you want to watch. If you didn't watch, we wouldn't show it. We have to make a profit. We have to make money, and this makes money. We have to go to the news now.
(exit, with kid trying to respond as he was drowned out by Gibson).
--
I knew news was dead in the U.S. when I heard that said so blatantly on the air.
I respect the old guard at CBS news. They still hold the line on credibility. The others have become, as Katz said, magazines to sell stuff to rich people. And to impress their neoconservative bosses, the news journalists are censoring themselves every day. It's the only way to get promotions, and money.
News, as a profession, used to be low-paying work, with the ownership separate from the editors. Now the head of GE wanders into the NBC election coverage headquarters on election night to make his wishes known. Journalists are being canned for criticizing the president, and need I remind you all that criticizing the President was a 24/7 religion 3-10 years ago?
As for the kidnapping cases, you bet. Here in Chicago, kids are kidnapped every month on the south side. News will not cover that, not the innumerable shootings, stabbings, and rapes that occur. But a single beautiful white teenage girl from the suburbs, if SHE'S hurt, there is endless concern. It's so obvious.
My 5-year-old daughter was abducted by my ex-wife over 2 months ago. I have sole custody, and my ex has some pretty serious mental health problems. Sabrina is in a dangerous situation.
The media is not very interested because she's with her mother. That's not sensational enough. Obviously they don't know the history.
Please mod me up, and please visit my website: FindSabrina.org
Please help find my missing daughter: FindSabrina.org
The girl in Milwaukee vanished while out of the house. Sadly, that happens all the time. A story in the same vein was the Molly Bish story two years ago - a teenager was snatched right after being dropped off for her summer job as a lifeguard outside of Boston. it got big play in New England, nowhere near as much nationally.
The Smart story strikes a vein that makes it especially newsworthy. She was taken from her house in the middle of the night. To have someone stolen in your own home like that strikes a nerve in virtually everyone.
Whenever I hear a "vanished child" story, regardless of the details it bugs me. But my wife and I just had our first child a little while ago (ask gorbie, he's seen the pics). The Smart story is the kind of thing that creates a primal fear in every parent. The home is supposed to be the one place that's secure. When it's not, that, sadly, makes it more newsworthy. I don't relate to what happened to Alexis Patterson the way I relate to Elizabeth Smart. It's not because Alexis is black, or because she's from an inner city. It's because I have a home, and I have a child. And one of the biggest fears I can imagine is waking up in the middle of the night to find your child missing and a window open.
To get much scarier than that, you'd need to be living a Steven King novel.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Yup, because she's a cute little blonde-haired white girl whose parents have footage of her up on stage doing something cute a la Jon Benet Ramsay (q.v.)
If, on the other hand, Smart were a homely little black girl with crooked teeth and a left eye that just kinda pointed out into space, a band of wandering perverts could abduct, violate and dismember her, and get only a small fine for littering when they disposed of the corpse.
Kids go missing every day. The cute ones get press.
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
Profoundly pragmatic and opportunistic, they'd be happy to exploit blacks as well as whites, if the demographics worked. They don't cover Alexis Patterson's abduction because poor viewers in Milwaukee or elsewhere have nothing to do with ratings, ad revenue or profit margins. Blonde kids from wealthy families in Salt Lake City do.
A quick search shows populations of these areas:
Milwaukee, WI (city)
Population (1990): 628088
Per Capita Income (1995): $25,906
Salt Lake City, UT (city)
Population (1990): 159936
Per Capita Income (1996): $19,995
So what exactly is the point of comparing crimes in these cities? Milwaukee is poorer than Salt Lake City? Hmm. Demographics? Money? Race? What exactly is Jon saying here? Sadly, nobody (including him) knows. I found the above information in about 10 minutes on the net, I am sure a "professional" journalist could come up with some better facts to back up his opinion. What was that opinion again?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Do you live in Milwaukee? Have you ever been to Milwaukee? Do you realize that for the past two months (or however long she's been missing) it's been on the news almost every day in Milwaukee? There are flyers in most local businesses with her picture. There are tons of things in the paper.
I've never said anything, JonKatz, about your unwarranted rantings, but this is too far. Oh, and by the way, how did you find out about Alexis Patterson? Doing an internet search about missing kids in the recent past and running across some media coverage of the story?
Err...I don't live in Milwaukee. I haven't the slightest clue who Alexis Patterson is, or rather I didn't until she was referenced in this article. This is the first that I've heard of her or her abduction.
Neither do I live in Salt Lake City. I live in Ohio. I've heard of Elizabeth Smart. I not only know who she is, I can tell you exactly what she looks like and what she was wearing when she was abducted. I can tell you what her abductor was reportedly wearing the night of the abduction.
Not only that, I can name each of Elizabeth's siblings, her parents, and even her uncle. I can tell you what suburb of Salt Lake City they live in. I can tell the name of the handyman who has done construction work for the family and is now a chief suspect. I can tell you what he was paid for his work. I can tell you what kind of car the handyman drives. I can tell you that the handyman lives in a mobile home nextdoor to his in-laws who also live in a mobile home. I can tell you that he has pet cats.
I can tell you that Elizabeth's younger sister has told two different stories of what happened the night that Elizabeth disappeared. I can tell you that there was a statewide search during which someone claims to have seen a suspect matching the abductor's description acting strangely in a wooded ravine area, but that further investigation turned up nothing. I can tell you that police have investigated false sightings of Elizabeth as far away as Texas, and that there was also a nationwide manhunt for a material witness who was found after a week in a hospital in the eastern US.
I have no interest whatsoever in either of these abduction cases. The chances of me ever needing to use any of this information is so far beyond miniscule as to be laughable, but it has all been imprinted in my head, and I don't even watch the news that much.
Milwaukee may be saturated with news of the abduction of Alexis Patterson, but that saturation doesn't even touch the surface of the nationwide saturation of news regarding Elizabeth Smart. This is in addition to the local saturation in Salt Lake City that I'm sure is every bit as bad as that in Milwaukee. Your post is seriously off base when considering the vast difference in the scale of media hype.
Just to make it on-topic: there was a flurry of media attention paid to these two girls back in May, but it seems to have died out in the wake of the Smart case. Perhaps no new clues means no new press attention.
Finding God in a Dog