[uptown]

The American mainstream media is severely dysfunctional. Cable "news" networks are biased outlets for each political party to deliver their message. Even more-traditional network news outlets like NBC News have sacrificed the appearance of a separation of the reporters from the politicians they're supposed to report on by hiring family members of recent and current political figures. On NBC's current payroll are Jenna Bush Hager, and Chelsea Clinton. On CNN's payroll is Chris Cuomo - brother to the Governor of New York.

It seems that above all else, mainstream news craves access. Hiring the presidential daughters provides a network like NBC access to those presidential families in a way other networks may not have. Attending the annual White House Correspondents dinner provides reporters access to celebrities and a night out of dining and drinking with the people they're supposed to hold to account for their actions. And being complicit with the military's approach towards how a war should be reported ensures they retain their access to the war "story" - be it factual or massaged.

Recall the story from the NYTimes about the military analysts that networks always put on-air whenever a military story is being covered? If not, it's worth a read: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html?pagewan...

Real reporting is hard. And when media organizations elect to go along with how a story is presented rather than providing raw, unbiased accounts of things, it does an injustice to the public. And it's made even more difficult when an administration chooses to take an aggressive stance towards journalists regarding how they source and report their stories.

It's never been easier to be a reporter and disseminate information to millions. I can only hope that the public seizes that opportunity and fixes the ways that news is currently broken.

[lifeisstillgood]

I believe pbiggar of CircleCI might comment on that - his (failed) YC from a few years back was a "new news" take. Apparently it is far from clear what is going to come next - technology has provided the opportunity but not the solutions

[eli]

Soon most people will get their news online, not from TV. The audience for TV keeps getting older and the market share for digital news keeps growing.

[brownbat]

There was a panel at a summit in Colorado where someone was talking about their plans for fact based journalism on a new Al Jazeera America, and someone from MSNBC or one of the other cable networks was there.

It was a really wrenching exchange as the existing cable mogul defended the status quo, saying something like, "We'd love to have sophisticated news consumers tune in, but those people have complex lives and interests, they don't watch news every night, they just read it quickly online then go to things like the ballet. We run the market experiment with sober, deep, fact-based news every night against PBS. It doesn't win."

It's helpful to realize that even when Fox is top of the ratings, the viewers it has as a percentage of the American population are exceedingly tiny.

In a Gallup poll in 2013, TV still leads, in surveys. But surveys overstate things, because people want to look like they actually consume news. http://www.gallup.com/poll/163412/americans-main-source-news...

On a strong weekday, Fox is looking at maybe 2 million viewers for the entire day: http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2014/06/10/cable-news-ratin... (ie, under a percent of the US population).

It's easy to credit TV news with a larger cultural impact than it actually has.