My point was that the "news" is so sloppily packaged, spun, and dumbed down it usually contains little useful data - often it's partial or worse flat wrong. Do a little research and you can get key data (almost) directly. I see plenty of links to FRED charts for example. That's data, not really news. The latest point might be news.
When I want to know the CPI - I go straight to the bureau of labor statistics. I know their schedule - that's easy to find out. When I want to know what the Fed is doing I look up their meeting and notes release schedules. I sometimes read their statements. I certainly read their presentation of how they were going to be doing the unwind. I may read a couple of articles that cover what they are doing lately.
Lots of economic articles are written and published that aren't actually "news" - I go back to stuff written several years ago all the time - a lot of it is still relevant and I can look up current data if needed.
Journalism comes on a bunch of different levels. If you want "the world in 30 seconds," tune into your radio at the top of the hour. If you want sophisticated reporting on a specialized topic, you may have to subscribe to a newsletter for hundreds of dollars a year to get what you want.
I spent 20 years as an editor at a metropolitan newspaper. While I like to think we were far out in front of TV and radio news in terms of detail and nuance, we did seek clarity and simplicity in composition so the stories were digestible for someone with a 9th-grade reading level.
That's a basic fact that media deals with (and sometimes exploits): the average American is a bit dim, and half the country is even dumber.
Since commercial news outlets run on ratings, they aim low. Their goal is to attract the maximum number of eyeballs. While Brian Ross' somewhat reckless (IMO) reporting is a hot topic today, quite a few broadcast journalists have gotten the boot not because they did anything wrong, but because their Nielsen ratings didn't measure up.
When I was a lad, commercial TV networks broadcast documentaries that lasted 30 minutes, an hour or even more. Those have gone away in favor of the news "magazine," a series of pieces 15 or 20 minutes long. There's no way most of the leading issues of our time can be dissected in an hour, let alone 20 minutes. But the networks found that that's about how long it took for viewers' eyes to glaze over.
Frontline on PBS took an insightful look at health care costs in an hourlong documentary a couple years ago. A network could do a weekly series of hourlong documentaries on health care and perform a great public service. But inevitably, the questions: Who will watch it? More importantly, who will pay for it? It's all about the Benjamins.
In my former arena, newspapers had a lot of years where they enjoyed broad economic moats, particularly after major markets were winnowed down to one daily. That enabled them to devote a lot of time and money to investigative beats, usually in pursuit of that elusive Pulitzer.Where I worked, a reporter to this day spends nearly all of his time focusing on the environmental condition of the Great Lakes. He does a pretty good job, although I don't always agree with what he writes. Like most investigative journalism, his work has a point of view -- he writes on the assumption that pollution and invasive species are bad. I can go along with that, but I'm sure that somewhere, a reader considers him biased.
When I was on the job, that reporter's work always got reviewed by three desk editors, and the editor in chief would often look in on it too. A lot of copy doesn't get that kind of attention anymore because copy editors were laid off as the revenue stream dried up. These days, generally speaking for newspapers, a fair amount of news gets posted on the web without any editorial oversight at all. Since people are fallible, that makes for a sloppy presentation. I don't even like to look at my old paper or its website today.
?!!! None of them affect the price of tea in China, nor would I waste the watts to watch them.
