Continued Decline of TV Journalism

Recently, in the Wall Street Journal,  Peter Funt wrote about the lost art of the live interview.  Live interviews are handy time consumers especially for the 24 hour cable news channels.  Funt maintains the content of those interviews "is remarkably weak, due primarily to the personal agendas and sloppy efforts of the interviewers".  Funt also chastises interviewers for talking as much as the newsmaker being interviewed.  He points out two recent examples.  In the first, Lawrence O'Donnell of  MSNBC  was interviewing filmmaker Michael Moore.
Moore spoke 1,034 words while O'Donnell spoke 900, according to Funt.  In the second case Funt points to a Sean Hannity interview of Mitt Romney on FOX News.  According to Funt, Hannity asked ten questions, one of which was 172 words long and lasted 51 seconds.

In another opinion piece in the WSJ,  L. Gordon Crovitz recounts the results of a journalism class assignment at Yale University.  The students were asked to theorize how the Watergate scandal would be covered in this digital age.  The Yale professor who makes the assignment each year, Steven Brill, says "almost every student in the course writes that Watergate could now be reported without actual reporting", i.e. no talking to real live human sources.  Sources who are going to tell a reporter factual information in a confidential manner.  The students all think everything a source would tell a reporter can now be found out by a simple Google search.  Talk about your slippery slopes.

And then there's the problem of sloppy stupid writing.  One Kansas City TV station reported yesterday that a school bus disturbance was caused by one of the student's "female parent".  Now I submit a simple "mother" would have sufficed.


This morning another station's reporter told us that the witness who had just shown up told police the woman who lives in the house under investigation is her "female cousin".  I ask, could it be otherwise?