News' fate in today's corporate culture

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http://www.calendarlive.com/cl-et-rutten22jan22,0,6516312.column
REGARDING MEDIA
News' fate in today's corporate culture
Tim Rutten

Jan 22 2005

More than a rhetorical tic is at work when people use the term "Rathergate" to refer to the scandal and turmoil that have followed CBS' broadcast of unverifiable charges about President Bush's military record.

The impulse to locate a news organization's institutional failure — now amply documented in a 224-page report by outside investigators — in the person of a single individual, even one as outsized as Dan Rather, is one clue to why CBS and the other broadcast networks are floundering toward irrelevance.

Collectively, the networks' nightly newscasts still command a national audience of more than 30 million viewers — 11.4 million for NBC's "Nightly News," 10.6 million for NBC's "World News Tonight" and 8.3 for CBS' "Evening News," according to the latest available figures. Those are numbers any other serious news organization can only covet. Even CBS' last-place audience far outstrips that of the cable news networks, of any American newspaper and of the most popular Internet news site.

So what's the problem?

It isn't simply that the networks' collective audience for news is aging and in decline — which it is — but that the journalism on offer seems increasingly beside the point and, as in the case of the now notorious "60 Minutes Wednesday" segment, sometimes alarmingly slipshod. The consequences are a crisis of legitimacy among viewers and a crisis of confidence among the corporate managers who now are the arbiters of broadcast journalism's fate.

If that seems disquieting, it's probably because you're one of those people who have come to understand that only a great white shark on speed is more frighteningly, mindlessly ruthless than a profit-challenged corporate executive in search of a new idea. It is, in fact, virtually suicidal to place yourself between the average media company CEO and a dollar. <snip>

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1. Interesting Story -- Thanks For The Link

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