Old school curated and investigative journalism is expensive.
New school journalism is a tiny professional choke on the shotgun blast of biased, crowd-sourced raw material available on video distribution sites and editorial blogs.
The public interest is now measured after the fact rather than predicted in advance. Stories are steered rather than excavated.
In the olden days of newspapers, the available, verifiable facts of a story might not be sufficient for even one column-inch of print. That left plenty of room for embellishment and editorializing. Later, the quantity of facts might have exceeded the attention span of the reader. Stories adopted the "inverted pyramid" form, to place the most interesting, salient facts first, and fill in lesser details later on.
Now, there are so many available facts for each story--pictures being worth a thousand words, and video worth a thousand pictures--that editorial bias can be introduced merely by selecting a particular set of facts as the important ones. If the story has a preassembled narrative, and only facts that fit into the framework are presented, an entire week of 24-7 television news channel can be filled with sensational material without once including a single contradiction or suspicion.
No one seems willing to pay for muck-raking, in-the-trenches journalistic investigation, because no one with the appropriate capital is selling it. It is more expensive than parrot journalism, and does not make proportionally more money for the company.
In short, news companies are dying because they are not doing the one niche thing that the general wire services and small-time blogs cannot. They are not finding and breaking the difficult stories.
There is no need to invoke conspiracy. The government is not feeding anyone stories. The news distributors are practically begging anyone willing to listen for completed, polished segments that they can air without editing. The prepackaged propaganda could be from a government agency with a media relations budget, or from a corporation wanting to do some stealthy advertisement. Watch your local television news tonight, and try to spot the paid advertisement dressed up like news.
It really pissed me off yesterday, watching Baltimore-based footage, that none of the questions I had were answered by the reporting. It was, as parent mentioned, all dumb camera-pointing and bloviating into microphones.
Does anyone else think there might be less rioting in these situations if people had more trust in their institutions? What if someone could actually count on the fourth estate to keep the government accountable long enough for justice to finally prevail? Would you riot if Respectable G. Newsanchor (the G is for gravitas) solemnly swore to you on air that no stone would remain unturned, until all the worms in the story were revealed and illuminated by journalistic sunshine? I would at least wait until RGN broke that promise, by which time more viable options might become apparent.