If you crack open a newspaper, odds are you may end up just putting it down and returning to social media. Granted, I may just be projecting here, but the fact that print news is tanking at the moment suggests that my projection may not be fallacious. As time goes on and the internet grows more prolific, news has become accessible at just the tap of a touchscreen. There are hundreds, even thousands of options for internet users to get their news for free and with no paper to throw away. As a result, print journalism is fading away as the concept of supply and demand has led both the readers and the advertisers online.
At face value, this sounds completely benign, just another stage in the evolution of how the people get their information. I emphasize the first three words of that last sentence, though, as the effects of this transition are beginning to erode journalistic integrity as a whole. What I mean is if South Park has done practically an entire season (and likely several more with the recent arrival of Season 20) on something, it certainly has some sort of relevance in the public sphere.
I first noticed this issue during a marathon of Robert Redford movies in my government class my senior year of high school, specifically while watching "All the President's Men." That movie is a grand example of what journalism is capable of—in this case, the exposure of the Watergate scandal. It got me thinking, though, what has happened to modern journalism? I mean, look at BuzzFeed. That website, in my humble opinion, is the physical manifestation of one of the many nails in the coffin of journalism: banality.
Websites like BuzzFeed seem to exist solely in order to gain views. Admittedly, every single business in the world has to uphold their bottom line. Obviously. But let's be real here, BuzzFeed does not mean anything. It's just a means for people to fill in some empty space in Facebook or YouTube feeds. Looking at BuzzFeed's social media pages, you can see what I'm talking about. While writing this article, which would be on September 25, the first 100 article links on BuzzFeed's Facebook page contained only eight articles that I could see that might constitute legitimate news—ranging from starving children in Yemen to a potential 14th Amendment case on discrimination to Brad Pitt's child abuse investigation. Eight. The remaining 92 were all a menagerie of useless lists and softly disguised sponsored content. I did the same thing on BuzzFeed News' page and got only 37 out of 100 legitimate stories. My estimates may be a little bit cynical, but still, it's almost sad. The banality of the modern media is starting to get a little bit depressing. Sure, websites like CNN and BBC still, to some extent, have their journalistic integrity intact. But it's slipping away.
That is not to say that BuzzFeed is, truly, the one at fault here. After all, they are just playing the game very well. In the modern world, it's all about the advertisers.
Advertisers are the ones who are responsible for the exponential increase in tabloid-style journalism being the most popular category nowadays. It's not just the banality. Thanks to their bottom line being the top priority, the media has basically morphed into a walking advertisement. Again, I understand that journalists have to make money in order for their stories to be seen. As a college student, I completely understand the money struggle. But that's no excuse.
With all of this in mind, I would modify the title a bit: investigative journalism is doomed, not journalism as a whole. That was me being a bit too cynical again. It does, however, break my heart to have to write this. The story of "All the President's Men" was captivating, something I had never seen in my eighteen years of life. I was not used to it and it left me wanting more. Yet I cannot find any. Investigative journalism—the kind that weeds out government corruption or exposes corporate greed—seems to be dying out because it just isn't in demand anymore.
If the people don't want it, it is going to wither away. The intense amount of manpower it takes to produce exposés like the Watergate scandal is just too vast for companies to actually engage in. Now we are left with what the people really want: useless quizzes and lists that literally mean nothing in the grand scheme of things.
I'm not for nostalgia but is just a bit more integrity in journalism really that much to ask?
