Lack of Primetime News Coverage Is Forewarning to Future of Media

My Commentary is based on the article "TV Networks Resort to the 'Crawl' Instead of Real News Coverage" written by Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times on March 5, 2008. This article is about how on Tuesday night primetime television did not showcase the election report of the Ohio and Texas primaries. Instead they left the political coverage up to the cable networks, and continued on with their less than notable scheduled television dramas. The article criticizes that the election report did not get the news coverage it deserved, and got shoved into the background.

I agree with the article’s criticism of the under covered election report. It’s interesting that despite MSNBC’s turnout of 8 million viewers of the Democratic debate last week (as the article states) the primetime shows remained, with only sparse coverage, including crawls. Why would high viewer rating not be a good enough reason? Perhaps primetime television does not feel journalistically liable to do so.

On another note, this compares to what Jon Stewart was saying about the theatrics of the media. Last Tuesday was not news with some entertainment (the primetime shows like “Jericho” and “Big Brother”), but pure entertainment with some secondarily significant news (the election report) sprinkled in. However this secondarily significant news could easily have been the make or break it point in this Democratic nomination, therefore quite possibly deciding America’s future president.

Referring back to Jon Stewart, while researching the topic I found an interesting article (The Daily Show is as substantive as the "real" news) comparing the substance of the Daily Show’s news coverage to traditional news programs. Researchers found the content to be very similar in substance, a quite frightening discovery. Something is wrong when the news media cannot seem to outdo a show on Comedy Central. The standard of journalism has clearly fallen off a cliff. I think it’s time for the viewers to take some of Jon Stewart’s advice to the media and “hold their feet to the fire.” News media has the responsibility to report the hard news necessary to produce an informed democracy of American citizens, and the citizens need to only accept the best.