COMM 150: Wednesday, March 31

For next week: Read Chapters 14-16 on entertainment, research and "media effects."

Here are a couple of stories that have a bearing on what we've been taling about - whether the news media contribute to a "broken society" or political culture.

One is about CNN's continuing decline in the ratings while more opinionated cable TV nets - Fox and MSNBC - hold onto their viewers.

Another is a piece by media critic Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post on Sarah Palin's latest assault on the media ... Kurtz says:

As a potential candidate, Palin has done nothing to show that she's boned up on the issues that often tripped her up in 2008. As an emerging media star, she's played her cards just right. She makes news with a couple of paragraphs on her Facebook page. Can [GOP presidential hopefuls] Tim Pawlenty or Mitt Romney say the same?

And this:

For now, Palin takes an obvious delight in tweaking the very media establishment that is fueling her fame. At a rally in Nevada, she took aim (sorry) at news reports that she might be encouraging threats against Democrats by calling on her followers to "reload" against lawmakers whose districts were marked on a map by crosshairs ...

Let's read on.

Ezra Klein, who blogs on economics and politics for the Post, has a tongue-in-cheek list of what a political journalist fears most. In this case it's Politico, a popular website put up by an inside-baseball print publication. His money graf:

Politico isn't afraid of being known as the most sensationalistic, horse-race-oriented, controversy-focused news outlet. That's their business model, or at least the business model of the front page (the stuff inside Politico is a lot better, presumably because it's aimed at lobbyists and Hill staffers). What Politico -- and other campaign-obsessed outlets -- fear are the narratives that expose much of their work as simple distractions.

I especially like No. 5: "The media is a political actor, not an observer." But the others are worth discussing, too. Especially No. 6: "Pretty much no one watches cable news."

Got that? Let's follow Klein's link, to a a blog on the Mother Jones magazine website that looks at the demographics. Klein's conclusion: "This stuff isn't done in bad faith, but it's still bad."

Finally, here's something I wrote a couple of years ago about presidential campaign coverage and medieval morality tales in which "political questions [were] reduced to stories of adventure.”