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Even people who are in the news every day can’t be arsed with the news anymore.

Public trust in the media has been declining for the past twenty years, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Their 2004 report on the state of American journalism is full of grim stats. Only 49 percent of the respondents in their study thought the press was professional, down from 72 percent in 1985. And 36 percent thought the press was actively immoral, while 67 percent thought the press try to cover up their mistakes. Twenty years ago, 55 percent figured the press had their facts straight; now only 35 percent believe this.

There was, however, a brief period within recent memory when these trends reversed, and the public trusted the press again, if only for a couple of months. After September 11, ratings for the news and approval ratings for the media soared. The disaster inspired many in the media to declare the end of the rule of the frivolous and the scandalous. Before September 11, the media spent the summer gabbing about Gary Condit and sharks. After September 11, the Gary Condit story became the standard example of the kind of sensationalistic, tawdry tale that the media would no longer stoop to tell. Media culpa, media culpa, media maxima culpa, cried the press corps, beating their breasts and packing their bags for some old-school front-line reportage, live from foreign hellholes. From here on in, it was just the facts, ma’am. No more sleaze and fluff, like Condit and sharks. We were going to get real news, war news, hard news.

Hard news is news about public policy issues and foreign affairs, and it’s the kind of news that has been on the wane lo these past twenty years. In the seventies, foreign affairs coverage made up about 45 percent of TV news. As of 1995, that was down to a trifling 14 percent. Even during January 2002, when the War on Terror was shifting from Afghanistan to Iraq, foreign affairs coverage only made up about 21 percent of the nightly news, and less than 1 percent of the morning news. Moreover, that coverage tended to be disaster coverage, simply delivering the death tolls for the latest Israeli/Palestinian skirmish or Third World famine, earthquake, or drought, rather than explaining what was up with the rest of the world. By 2002, people had drifted away from coverage of international events, since they lacked the background to understand the stories, felt they were too far away to be relevant to them, or had tired of talk of war and violence.

News outlets, from broadcasts to broadsheets, have increasingly favored soft news over hard news. Soft news is all that fluff that has nothing to do with foreign affairs or public policy. Celebrity reportage, human interest profiles, and scandal reporting have ballooned and floated from gossip columns to the news proper. Crime reporting has more than doubled since the eighties, even though the overall crime rate has steadily declined. The time devoted to human interest stories, and the lifestyle and consumer reporting that falls under the category of “news you can use,” has also more than doubled. The vocabulary of journalism has changed, too, with a shift in emphasis from the collective nouns of hard news to increased usage of personal pronouns.

At the same time that the coverage has skewed from hard to soft, the way people get their news has changed as well. Broadcast journalism has continued to trounce the grimy old newspaper as most people’s primary source of information. Only 42 percent of the Americans who follow the news do so by reading a paper. Almost twice as many people, 83 percent, watch TV news. But broadcast news has changed, too. It is no longer the exclusive province of the stodgy old nightly newscasts on the big three U.S. networks. CNN, founded in 1980, inaugurated a whole spectrum of cable news networks, providing round-the-clock coverage. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a decade ago 60 percent of viewers used to tune in to one of the big three nightly newscasts. Now less than a third of the audience gets their news from CBS, ABC, and NBC. Cable news claims a third of the audience, and most of those people are watching CNN or Fox News, which are locked in a bitter struggle for ratings supremacy. I will get to this battle of the 24–7 news titans in a few pages, but first, let’s look at why the news has gotten all squidgy on us.

Hard news isn’t cheap. It’s much less expensive to cover the latest Beltway indignity or Hollywood murder than it is to schlep a crew to war-torn wherever, or fund a time-consuming, potentially litigation-inducing series of investigative reports. The switch to soft news is also an attempt to improve ratings and please advertisers. This drive to cut costs while improving ratings is a significant shift in the way networks think about the news. In the heyday of the big three, the nightly news was seen as a sort of public service. ABC, CBS, and NBC have never been charities, but they saw their nightly newscasts as an obligation, a way of saying thanks for all the free airwaves granted to them by the FCC. Legendary CBS chief William Paley told his news division not to worry about making money. That wasn’t their job. They had stars like Jack Benny to make the money.

Today the news is a moneymaking enterprise, a product that, like all the others, is expected to produce perpetual profit. The news has become just another part of the wonderful world of content. Content is the buzzword for all the media products people consume, from blockbuster movies to best-selling books to hit singles to Web portals to your news. The term
content provider
was originally an Internet term, but now everyone from the aged hosts of
60 Minutes
to the latest prepubescent novelty rapper is a content provider. And the term
content
has become popular because media companies have become more consolidated, with fewer players selling more entertainment, information, and infotainment, and, let us not forget, copious quantities of advertainment. The only way to explain those madly diversified holdings is to lump ’em all under a term like
content,
as though books and music and news and movies were of a piece, information units to be marketed and moved.

In 1984, there were more than fifty companies in the U.S. that held a controlling interest in newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, and book and magazine publishers. By 2002, that number was down to less than a dozen. Media theorist Ben Bagdikian estimates that the number of companies controlling the global media is somewhere between twenty and six, the big six being AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann, News Corp, Vivendi, Viacom, and Disney. If I wanted to bulk up my relatively modest volume, and make it nice and hefty like an edition of Proust, I could spend pages galore just listing the media products produced by these six companies. The big six own pretty much every set of letters in the alphabet soup of broadcasting, like CNN, TBS, WB, AOL, BMG, RCA, FOX, MTV, CBS, and ABC, to name but a few. Suffice it to say that if you live on this planet, and have ever turned on your TV, read a magazine or book, or enjoyed pop culture in any form whatsoever, you have beheld the mighty works of the big six. Six! Their respective CEOs could hold an evil cabal in the cozy confines of a minivan.

We may have more channels than ever before, but centralized ownership, by a handful of companies, means more of what they like to call synergy and cross-promotion. And more synergy and cross-promotion means samey-style blobbiness, entertainment in your news, and news in your entertainment. Screwy bran-and-jujubes combinations ensue, and the next thing you know, a divertissement like
Survivor
turns up on the morning news and in the paper. And then blockbuster schlockmeister Jerry Bruckheimer starts talking to ABC about producing a mini-series about the War on Terror. Or you get absurdities like
Saving Private Jessica,
the movie, like the news story wasn’t a movie to begin with. The news has become more like entertainment, with fast editing, flashier graphics, and prettier people. Meanwhile, entertainment wraps itself in the gravitas of news. Box-office totals for weekend movie openings are now a standard news item. Every major network has at least one prime-time newsmagazine, which features extended coverage of gruesome crimes or amazing trials, intimate chinwags with the stars, and exposés of the horrors lurking in your own home, alarmist shit like “Bath Towels: The Fluffy Killer!” Then there are all those shows like
Entertainment Tonight
and
Extra,
the news’ dimwitted, hyper little sisters, squealing at shiny people.
ET
was a flop at first, until a passing news director told the producers to sell it as news. Didn’t matter if it was just publicity—which is all celeb coverage is—so long as it looked like news.
20/20
suffered from similar wobbly ratings early on, until an ABC vice president offered the one-word suggestion that saved the fledgling newsmagazine:
entertainment.

One of the most frequently invoked reasons for the increase in sensationalistic semi-news is that the media marketplace is simply giving the people what they want. People aren’t interested in the tedious intricacies of the new farm bill. That stuff is seriously snore-making. The people want sex and violence and scandals and scares. The people want live coverage of car chases. That’s what gets the ratings, not blah-dee-blah about policy or lengthy expostulations about unstable foreign countries. Or so they tell us. But when we viewers are asked what we want in our news, without fail we value things like timeliness and accuracy over entertainment value and attractive talking heads. Soft news isn’t entertaining enough to lure viewers away from entertainment programming, but it’s fluffy enough to piss off the folks who like a little news in their news. Contrary to the corporate catechism that the dumber, lighter, and flashier stories always mean better ratings, there is a market for hard news.

In the first few months after September 11, hard news made a roaring comeback, comprising 80 percent of U.S. television reportage. The media didn’t just talk more about what happened yesterday, they started to talk about why it happened. They also reinvested in foreign bureaus, used more sources, and named their sources more frequently. Even the morning shows, which were basically product-pushing lifestyle infomercials before September 11, started devoting more than half their segments to hard news. The result? Ratings for the news and the press in general improved appreciably, after years of steady decline. People watched the news, talked about the news, and read books to learn more about the things they heard about on the news. Sure, some of that interest was fueled by terror. But it was fed and sustained by reporting, until the Bush administration clammed up and clamped down, and the networks realized they were spending way too much money.

After a few months of enthusiasm and effort, viewers started to get tired of the complexities of hard news. Two decades of increasing fluffiness meant that it was awfully difficult for the audience to get up to speed on their -stans, and the other fine points of international affairs. As the
Onion
headline put it, a shattered nation longed to care about stupid bullshit again. The public trust that the media had gained in the months after September 11 leaked away, and returned to pre-9–11 levels, in less than a year. Once Afghanistan was in the can, bullshit stories, stuff like the Robert Blake trial and the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping, came crawling back to their customary omnipresence. Kidnapped kids were the mainstay of Connie Chung’s much-hyped show on CNN, which also featured occasional palate-cleansing forays into frivolous litigation. Chung’s show was one of the first victims of the War in Iraq, postponed and then canceled to make way for constant coverage. However, even constant war coverage didn’t totally preempt the Laci Peterson mini-series, which was a little bit Court TV, a little bit Lifetime, and a sneaky way to advance the pro-life cause of fetal rights as well, via Laci and Connor’s Law.

The war in Iraq has been the lead story in the news for the past couple of years. When major combat operations began, the administration came up with a wonderful way of accommodating the public’s desire to know, and aiding and abetting their friends in the press. Enter the “embedded reporter,” which, as many folks have noted, sounds an awful lot like “in bed with.” Embedded journalists traveled alongside the troops in the Persian Gulf. While this might seem like an unprecedented level of openness and access, what this really meant was that the military controlled every aspect of embedded reportage. Many of the justifications the administration offered for the war, like Iraq’s ties to terrorism, or possession of weapons of mass destruction, have since been proven utterly bogus by the media. But the Bush administration greets every criticism with the same deflecting defense: We must move on in the war against terror, we must never forget 9–11, we must punish the evildoers, we must spread freedom and democracy, may God continue to bless America. When journalists have the temerity to pick at the propaganda and platitudes in search of the facts, they usually find themselves deflected on the grounds of national security and classified information. If they keep it up, and run stories critical of the administration, they find themselves exiled to source Siberia, denied access to information and interviews on account of their nitpicking. The “you’re with us or against us” rhetoric of war and foreign affairs also extends to the media.

The Bush administration may well be the most secretive, press-repelling one since Nixon. In his first term, despite presiding over a national crisis, a recession, and steady warfare, Bush held fewer solo press conferences than any modern president. Bush did eleven press conferences, and only three of them aired during prime time. Eleven! Clinton held thirty-eight press conferences over the course of his first term. Bush the Elder, though he may have been the grand poobah of the sentence fragment, spoke to the press seventy-one times. Dubya is not a big fan of taking questions from the press, and it shows. He becomes visibly surly when the media tries to drag him off-message. In the April 13, 2004, press conference, one of the prime-time ones, Bush got rattled when a reporter asked him about his mistakes. What did the president think his biggest mistake was? Had he learned from his mistakes? The president bristled and said: “I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. John, I’m sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way. You know, I just—I’m sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn’t (sic) yet.”