News Optimization

“For almost 40 years BRITA has been among the leading experts in the field of water optimization.” This term, ‘water optimization’ is a fantastic one! Think about it, you’re not just drinking water anymore, after running your tap water through a Brita filter, you’re drinking ‘optimized water’. It sounds amazing, wonderful and completely unnecessary. What is wrong with just drinking water!?! In New York City, officials launched a campaign last year to try and convince residents they can drink the water from the tap and no longer have to purchase bottled water. Actually, many studies have proven and guide books have quipped, that the water you get from your tap in Manhattan is better than the water Coca-Cola gets from its taps and then bottles as “spring water”, with added sodium “for taste”. Now of course there are areas of the country where you should filter your water and Brita serves a need there. But why do New Yorkers continue to purchase bottled water, despite the expensive overhaul the water system received years ago and is continually being built? They imagine it is optimized for their drinking… Not just good for cooking and cleaning with, but made specifically for drinking.

Well, what about your news? Daily consumption over the past 30 years has grown to the point of saturation where there are now TV networks who do nothing but optimize the news for your viewing pleasure, 30 seconds at a time. With a couple of exceptions on the fringes (PBS’ Frontline comes to mind first), TV news programs have been watered down, condensed, filtered, edited and spit out again as some semblance of that which was formerly known as news. CNN, FOX News, MSNBC and others feel the need to pump out more and more “breaking” news in every available 30-second spot between commercials, that the art of “reporting” was lost on them years ago. Have you ever stopped to think about whether or not what you are watching is actually news or just made to look like news, with sodium added for taste? As mentioned in a previous post, there is a vast majority of Americans who get a taste for this way of “reporting” the news and can’t get enough of it. They continue to go “tweet-tweet” for more and the networks oblige.

Worse still, the newspaper industry is falling right into line with this whole new way of group think. Thinking the American public buys this crap has led once respected newspapers, journalists and editors down the path to news optimization as well. Not only are staff and budgets being cut across the country, but these same people are continuing to try and follow the model created by the networks. Instead of digging deep, perhaps offending people in the process and really reporting a story, so often now print journalists are doing the safe thing and just typing out the line that was fed to them by whatever source was quickest to give it to them, at the lowest possible cost.

In Denver on Monday morning, Jon Stewart spoke over breakfast to a select group of print journalists about their profession and what can be done to save the newspaper industry. Dennis DiClaudio, from ComedyCentral.com, was witness to this discussion and posted a great, if lengthy description of this discussion. Here, Stewart questions the reporters’ unwillingness to break away from the cozy relationship they hold with the politicians on whom they report:

“I can’t believe that, as reporters, you would walk into a ’spin room’,” he said, amazed at the journalists’ willingness to swallow the bullshit that the campaign and candidates spoon feed them. “How can you keep talking to people who are lying to you?” he asked. “This loveless marriage [between reporters and politicians] has to be unconsummated.”

And here is the line which grabbed me the most:

“The antidote,” Stewart responded, “is to push back. The antidote is to create filters” to remove the muck from the information fish tank, so we can clearly see what’s truth and what’s political spin. Take the ball away from the cable news networks and do what they’re being paid to do. “You’re not on anyone’s team. You’re on our team, clearing our tanks.”