In my How To Save The Newspaper post I promised I’d get to TV. I’m still working on it. But where I’m going is hinted at in a Jeff Jarvis Buzz Machine post today:
Journalism and TV: an oxymoron? Well, not always. But often. Local TV news has sucked for years – that horse is out of the barn, over the horizon, and in the glue factory already. Fluff and fires, that’s most of local news on TV. So what is [FCC Commissioner Michael] Copps lamenting?
The local broadcast business is going the way of newspapers, only a bit behind and more slowly and without all the attention of self-obsessed print reporters. So what’s to protect?
Local TV news still has, amazingly, the trust of its audience. And it still makes money. So there is a business there. Too bad there’s just so little journalism there.
Do we really consider what local TV news stations do journalism? Do we really trust TV news that much? Those numbers are impressive. Higher than newspapers or the Internet.
The Jarvis post is about a report hinting that the FCC may be moving towards requirements for stations to provide journalism in the public interest and possibly with government support.
Says Jarvis:
I don’t want the FCC to do anything that has anything to do with journalism, news, and speech. It’s a bad idea.
That before moving on to saying that the FCC could “get ubiquitous broadband throughout the country.”