Mitteldämmerung

It's a known thing that the increasing media conglomeration has resulted in decreased focus on hard news coverage, but I think that it has been useful in proving one very important thing: the much-vaunted "invisible hand" isn't always the best solution. In this case, the blind appeal to ratings was a rather inevitable result of a bill that amounted to the enabling of a news monopoly. After all, when the various news agencies were forced to coexist, they had to compete in terms of actual quality, and if one failed in this duty, the others would outperform them. Now, though, there's an emphasis on sheer speed and sensationalism. This appears to stem from the new rules, where media outlets compete through buyouts and attempt to corner the market, simply squeezing out their opposition.

This wouldn't be a major issue, except for the fact that in our culture, the average person is less than adept at doing their research. We're a little different, since this is our field, but for the general public... Well, just picture us trying to keep track of all the latest chemistry journals and you'll get the general idea. As a result, people tend to treat whatever the media puts out as important and relevant, regardless of how silly or distracting it really is. (Let's face it, when a network owned by Rupert Murdoch claims that the big, faceless, monolithic media is somehow biased against them, it lacks the ring of truth, given how many outlets he personally owns.) Further, this dumbing-down is nothing less than a death spiral: as the main news sources appeal to the lowest common denominator, the public gets less informed, the denominator drops even lower, and the media dives down after it.

Some people have proposed blogging as an antidote for this, allowing for a more varied outlook on events. This seems to almost affirm an emerging business trend called 'crowdsourcing', but corporate strategy is WAY outside my department, so I can't really comment there. Still, Sturgeon's Law is always important to remember, and with blogs, it appears in full force. After all, with absolutely no quality controls in place, people can make any claim they please, about any topic, and have no real evidence for any of it (case in point, yours truly). Still, there is one very major upside to independent sources such as blogs: they get people engaged. It's been said that you can't get rid of problems, only trade them, and if temporary insanity is the price to pay for a more aware, a more informed, and a more inquisitive populous, that's a worthy trade indeed.