Dearth of political reporting:

Dearth of political reporting:

An additional part of the reason for emotional detachment is that many of the top stories in the local paper aren’t anything that people can do anything about, specifically crime stories and roadway accidents. There is very little one can civically do in most of these stories, barring the formation of a neighborhood watch in high-crime areas or installing a traffic light at a treacherous intersection. Many crime and accident stories are, however, not something that immediately calls for action.

While studying the Blogosphere in related work, I came across something I found quite unusual. The vast majority of Blogosphere stories were political in nature. Bloggers, supposedly, according to journalism luminaries such as Jay Rosen, journalism professor at NYU and Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media, represent citizen journalism. There should be, supposedly a pretty clear match between what the public wants news about and what blogs cover because blogs are the public. If this is true, then the very existence of the Blogosphere implies that people, rather than caught up in lurid, sensational details, tend to want more political information than provided.* This implies that there isn’t enough political information from other news sources to suit the public’s taste.

If I’m right, the move to increase the amount of entertainment coverage in order to retain readers for political coverage is actually counterproductive, and is doing the very opposite of what those who engage in this hope to do.

This is not to say that crime and accident stories shouldn’t be part of the news – it just means, perhaps, that “if it bleeds, it shouldn’t lead.”