Profit motives create decline in news readership, credibility

Ashley McLean / Associate Editor / The USD Vista

Looking at Yahoo!’s most popular and viewed news stories for the day, a few headlines stand out: “Ohio grandma gives birth to daughter’s triplets,” “Peru offers bald dog of Incas to Obamas,” “Maurice Greene ran off ‘Dancing with the Stars’” are just a few and this isn’t a rare sight. Although the stories are sensational, are they really news?

In a report released this past August, the biennial news consumption survey from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press determined that “over the last 10 years, virtually every news organization or program has seen its credibility marks decline.”

The FALL of good, credible news is hardly a recent phenomenon. The days of Woodward and Bernstein’s investigation into the Nixon scandal are gone. “If it bleeds, it leads” has become a true expression in regard to what makes front page stories as media emphasizes violent crime even though these rates have decreased. And looking at coverage after 9/11, it is easy to see that most journalists during this time failed to play watchdog over the government and instead took on nationalist coverage.

Two factors that contribute to this decline are decreasing readership and the need to maintain a profit. Newspaper readership and nightly news viewer rates have dropped significantly. The same survey sites that Americans who say they read the newspaper on a typical day has declined by about 40 percent since the ‘90s while those that watch the nightly network news has fallen by half.

It seems like a vicious cycle. With readership down, advertising revenue drops, profits decrease, journalists who are already paid little end up unemployed and good news becomes a thing of the past as the medium tries every way to keep viewers by leading with stories that interest readers while maintaining low production costs. In essence all these things contribute to an increase in infotainment and packaged news stories, which are not necessarily good news.

The media is meant to challenge and inspire readers. Journalists are supposed to inform the public, set the agenda for what is news and watch over the government. These important functions are part of how democracy works.

Although media determines what is newsworthy, they base this off of what is most profitable. With the increase in popularity of social networking sites, crime entertainment shows and celebrities’ private lives, it is no wonder that news feels to be profitable, they must include these types of stories as news. One has to wonder if news will continue to decrease in credibility and readership and one day become all-together extinct.

This could be detrimental to our society. Although it’s hard to imagine a world with no good news, it’s certainly not impossible and not that far off.