Mondays with Mike: Read the news, don’t watch it

I have mostly sworn off TV news. Every once in awhile I’ll watch a local newscast but am always disappointed that there’s very little local reporting about stuff that matters. The producers never miss a chance to run some freakish footage—violence, animal antics, etc.—from San Diego, Florida, wherever.

And national cable news is a wasteland. Regardless of the network’s ideological leaning. They’re in business to keep you tuned in, and if that takes keeping you angry, appealing to your fears, or tickling your voyeurism, that’s what they’re more than happy to do.

That’s because all that is cheap. Literally. I am a student and sometimes practitioner of journalism. And you can bitch about the news media but good reporting is hard, hard work, and it costs real money.

But good reporting is still around. The Economist. The NY Times. The Wall Street Journal. BBC. NPR. The Atlantic. The National Review. And a ton of smaller, specialty pubs. All of the above have at one time or another infuriated me. But you don’t have to be in love with any of these entities’ editorial stances or love all of what they contain to learn a lot from their reporters’ work.

The problem is that consuming flashing images on narcotic phosphorescent screens full of freaky weather or crazy angry people yelling at each is easier than reading even the best-reported and well-written news article.

There’s lots of talk of how polarized we are these days. I’m convinced a lot of it has to do with screens. TVs. Tablets. Phones. To me it’s really all TV. And TV is fine for entertainment. But I still don’t count it as a serious news medium and I never will. Oh it’s fine for following breaking stuff—it just isn’t anything I’d base my opinions on.

Remember when the USA Today first came out? And how the vending boxes resembled TV sets? That was the product of a really bad trend: print news trying to emulate TV news instead of the other way around. Color images. Breezy tones. “What we eat” pie charts. Fluff.

It was, in my opinion, precisely the opposite strategy traditional print news needed to take. When TV was dumbing down, it made serious coverage more valuable, not less. But lots of print took the dumb-down route.

The Internet just accelerated that trend. Again, when there’s a ton of bad information floating around, reliable reporting becomes more valuable, not less. Most print operations made the same mistake they did with TV—emulating the worst the Internet had to offer.

Thankfully, more and more traditional news outlets have learned that people are willing to pay for a good product. And the 2016 election seemed to be a kick in the pants—the kind that good-faith news organizations needed in order to energize their reporting.

There’s a lot of good journalism out there. You just have to turn off the TV to find it.