Is Nightly News Relevant Anymore?
Watch this news and tell me if you have any faith in the traditional news channels. By faith, I mean, if you trust them to provide any breaking investigative news that is useful for people.
Hey Brian – I love your sense of humor. I know you don’t like blog culture. Why would you? I contend that the followers of this tiny blog are 1000 times more informed than an average Nightly News follower.
Readers, what do you say?
I have watched this video couple of times and little confused with the heading and Mohan garu’s commentary. Can someone help me understand what is wrong with the video ? am I missing something here ?
Sri garu, The point Mohan garu making was about how slow these “Traditional Nightly News” ( CBS, ABC and NBC) are compared to bloggers and NPR in digging the wall street dirt or getting the news in general. The news item was little old and is already reported by blogs. These multimillion dollar news programs should get these news first , rather than wait till the others (Bloggers and such) uncover it then do a lip service. If they are so lazy and late to the game why pay them so much money was the point.
Mohan garu,
Before I jump into conclusion , I did some fact checking
NPR NPR’s annual reports are here
http://www.npr.org/about/statements/fy2009/2009_LA_NPR_Cons.pdf
If you trust what they say , here is the info from their webpage on their source of revenue (donations)
* 32.1% from listeners in the form of pledges, memberships, and other donations
* 21.1% from businesses via corporate underwriting
* 10.1% from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which is federally funded*
* 13.6% from licensee support (including colleges and universities)
* 9.6% from foundations and major gifts
* 5.8% from federal, state, and local governments
* 7.6% from all other sources.
As opposed to
NBC Universal is 80% owned by General Electric and 20% owned by Vivendi. (from their NBC website)
NBC makes 4 billions each quarter (Go to the page 8 ) of
http://www.ge.com/pdf/investors/events/04162010/ge_webcast_presentation_04162010.pdf
How about comparing the NBC’s four billions with 35 some millions NPR revenue (152 million Annual revenue).
Now ask a question how much Brian Williams make ? 10 million , that’s like 7% of NPR revenue ( donations as we call).
And how good Williams is compared to the NPR guys ?
The free market at work here.
Mohan garu, The news channels can never beat the blogs in terms of covering everything. There is a certain level of strict double even triple checking process of the content in mainstream media (except for Fox 🙂 ). Most of the time they do the original investigation (yes that vanished lately). The blogs just aggregate the news never really do an original investigation. Besides blogs have the freedom to write about anything. The risk of business empire crumbling down based on a crappy post is not going to happen to blogs. I still trust the mainstream media a little more than the blogs.
That diligent process of checking facts and such is slowing down the nightly news and mainstream media in general. They just have to be more innovative innovative on how they do business or else they will become dinosaurs soon.
Good reasoning. I agree on almost all points about blogs. But not entirely on corporate news networks.
Contrast nightly news by mega corporates with that of nightly news and news shows from NPR. Corporate networks do not cover negative news about their advertising base. Imagine NBC taking an investigative piece on wall street banks – which are the advertising lifeblood of CNBC. How come NPR give us more objective news stories and NBC can’t?