Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I think I disagree with you on this one, David. While I think "coverage" as it currently manifests itself within MSM is badly broken, the concept of "coverage" - i.e., a set of world events that we need to know about, whether we think we're interested in them or not - is an idea I'm reluctant to let go of.

Research I've worked on over the past few years suggests that MSM coverage focuses heavily on developed nations and radically underfocuses on developing nations and failed states. It's tempting to blame this bias on the internal workings of media companies - who wouldn't rather set up an international bureau in Paris instead of in Brazzaville? It's cheaper and easier to find news in Canada than in Turkmenistan.

But that's an oversimplification. MSM overfocuses on the developed world because its customers - viewers and readers - tend to change the channel when they focus on developing nations. Ask the international editor of any MSM publication and they'll echo this point. Or look for evidence of widespread western interest in developing nations on the Internet. There's less, proportionally, in the blogosphere about the developing world than in MSM. We don't buy books on developing nations. We don't blog stories from developing nations. If MSM were solely concerned with entertaining us and not with providing some basic global coverage, we'd literally never hear about sub-Saharan Africa.

Unfortunately, this isn't just a question of global social justice - it's a question of national security. The people who attacked the United States on September 11th trained in two media dark spots (Sudan, Afghanistan). There was brief public interest in radical Islam in Central Asia right after the attacks... it evaporated as the US shifted military focus from Afghanistan to Iraq. Think all the militant Islamists disappeared from Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan? Or is it more likely that, armed with money from the best poppy harvest in history, that there continues to be a threat to American security in Central Asia, hiding in a blind spot of media coverage?

Pathetic as MSM coverage of international news is, it's better than the alternative. Moldova is holding parliamentary elections this weekend. The bloggers aren't covering it, because most bloggers can't find Moldova on a map... which is too bad, as the breakaway republic of Transdniester is rapidly becoming an arms market to the world's terrorists, selling everything from cheap AK-47s to leftover Soviet missles and nuclear material. MSM is forced to cover the election because parliamentary elections are something responsible newspapers have to cover... if they weren't covering it, I suspect we'd hear nothing at all about events in that nation.

MSM is critically useful for three reasons:
- They've got lawyers, which occasionally allows them to ask hard questions of people with money and power without fear of being thrown in prison or sued into oblivion.
- They can pay for plane tickets, sending smart reporters into areas of the world where important news is occurring. At some point, these parts of the world may "cover themselves" through blogs and wikis, but we're far away from that future in places like the eastern DRC
- They can tell us what we should be paying attention to by using some of their valuable intellectual real estate to point us to key stories.

I don't think MSM does those three things especially well, but I think - at the moment - they do it far better than bloggers - motivated by what we care about, not what we need to care about - would do. I'd like to see MSM rethink "coverage" in terms of stories, everywhere on the globe, that we need to know about, rather than the stories they've historically covered. But I think giving up the idea that there are stories that we desperately need to hear, even if we're not already interested in them, is a terribly dangerous direction for media - mainstream or citizen journalism - to move in.

Challenging concept, whether MSM has an obligation to cover certain stories that are important but not popular.

A fundamental problem is MSM's structure as a for-profit venture. The drive to create and increase profits is a disincentive to cover necessary but financially undesirable news, and a incentive to reduce diversity of coverage since consolidation yields economies of scale. Both of these factors work against the public's need for a breadth of viewpoints in order to make fully-informed decisions, both in purchasing and voting.

These factors also push feed outlets like the AP to serve up commercially viable news rather than news that is needed; if the AP can only serve a decreasing number of corporations, it must tailor its content or risk losing a substantial portion of its business.

There's a crying need for more diversity so that media cannot be gamed. The current for-profit business model simply doesn't work to assure diversity, becoming instead an enormous risk.

Unfortunately, it serves for-profit MSM's interest to paint all other outlets as less-than-acceptable (whether legitimately or not) since they cut into profits. Citizens have no choice but to view *every* outlet with skepticism and demand increased diversity through alternative outlets.

Open Source Press Association (OSPA), for example, is one such alternative. We should be looking at ways to encourage development of alternative feeds to the AP -- and decrease consumption of existing commercial feeds by reducing our reliance on them and their for-profit clients. If we take the money out of play and redeploy differently by funding alternatives, what can happen?

To put it in a few words - what is popular is not the same as what is important.

Too many people confuse these two concepts. There's a multitude of incentives to consider them as identical.