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2) Because of business imperatives and dubious professional norms, lots of relatively well-paid journalists duplicate one another's work. The White House press corps is an illustrative example. There are reasons why so many people sit in the briefing room shouting questions at the press secretary. Some of them are where they ought to be (everyone benefits when Jake Tapper is in that room). But if the number of reporters attending the daily briefing was cut in half, and the people cut were sent out to report on some undercovered story somewhere else, the result would surely be a news media that, in aggregate, produced more information of civic value. I am not sure, however, that the new mix of stories would result in more readers -- there is a surprising amount of interest in fleeting, inconsequential statements from the White House.3) Lots of Americans get their news from television, a terrible medium for obtaining good information. The cost of producing quality broadcast journalism, as opposed to inane interview and debate segments, the obsession with ratings, and the practice of hiring on-air "talent" for their appearance and charisma more than for their intellect all inevitably result in a poor product. Every network has talented producers and anchors who are a credit to their profession. The fact that they can excel, even under the aforementioned constraints, is impressive. But their work is the exception to the rule: If you want better journalism, turn off the TV and start reading.4) American society undervalues watchdog journalism. That sounds like a self-serving thing for a staff writer at a magazine to say, so permit me to make the point in the most concrete way possible. In large swaths of America, newspapers remain the primary watchdog on local government. Hugely corrupt officials abusing their power in egregious ways is a story any newspaper ought to write about, and failure to do so is accurately regarded as missing a huge story. The city council of Bell, California, misappropriated millions of dollars of public funds, and did so in a way that any competent beat reporter should have caught. Yet thedidn't break the story until the abuse had been going on for years. Why? The problem wasn't incompetent reporters -- it was the fact that thehad no beat reporter dedicated to the city, had closed the bureau that used to direct coverage in that part of Los Angeles County, and had lost institutional knowledge of the area in the course of layoffs over the years.Oncereporters found the time to look into Bell, they quickly exposed the rampant corruption. Had a reporter been assigned full time to Bell, the city council might've felt scrutinized enough that they never would've risked what they did. At worst, they would've been caught after squandering many thousands rather than millions of dollars. Given all that, paying a competent reporter $80,000 per year to cover Bell would've seemed like a no-brainer, but despite having no watchdog besides newspapers to keep an eye on most municipal officials, Southern Californians don't support newspapers enough for them to fulfill their oversight function. We aren't unique. I delve into this complicated problem at greater length in " The New Watchdogs ."5) Having described the failure of the press to uncover impending doom at Enron or Bernie Madoff's hedge fund, Unz writes, "In many respects, the non-detection of these business frauds is far more alarming than failure to uncover governmental malfeasance. Politics is a partisan team sport, and it is easy to imagine Democrats or Republicans closing ranks and protecting their own, despite damage to society. Furthermore, success or failure in public policies is often ambiguous and subject to propagandistic spin. But investors in a fraudulent company lose their money and therefore have an enormous incentive to detect those risks, with the same being true for business journalists. If the media cannot be trusted to catch and report simple financial misconduct, its reliability on more politically charged matters will surely be lower."This is unpersuasive. As a matter of both law and prevailing norms, journalists have a lot more access to government officials and public information than to goings-on in most private enterprises. The typical journalist also understands the worlds of politics, policy, and government better than business or finance. And while almost every journalist would agree that furnishing the information a democracy needs to function is a core duty of the profession, it is unclear, at least to me, that saving wealthy New Yorkers from unscrupulous hedge-fund managers is something media outlets ought to develop a capacity to do better, even having failed. No one had a better incentive to detect the risks of investing with Madoff than his investors. If they couldn't succeed in doing so, why would journalists be expected to do better?Why would they prioritize trying?As a public company that got its share of fawning profiles before its collapse, Enron is a much more damning example. It is still false to suggest that business journalists had as big an incentive to catch the fraud as investors. In fact, my sense is that business journalists generally have an incentive to cheerlead for "hot" companies rather than questioning their apparent success, which inevitably results in push-back from powerful actors and less access granted. (I am unfamiliar with the trade press, which may well perform a lot better on this metric.)6) Journalistic outlets respond to media criticism. Unfortunately, the most visible, consistent, influential type of media criticism we have in America, the critique offered by the conservative movement, leaves a lot to be desired. As it happens, I agree with conservatives that liberal bias is sometimes present, and that the best conservative and libertarian insights often don't get their due. But the conservative movement gives the misleading impression that all bias in media is ideological in nature; and it often advances criticism that is unjustified by the facts on a given subject. Iraq is the best example. As the U.S. war effort was failing, mainstream media reporters were filing increasingly alarmed dispatches from Iraq. Back in America, conservative bloggers persuaded themselves that a liberal, anti-Bush, anti-war media was hyping bad news for ideological reasons. Thus, as Iraq descended into chaos, conservative bloggers spent years writing "good news from Iraq" posts to tell the "real" story that the media was allegedly suppressing.Other times, conservatives invoke media bias not so much because they want to improve poor coverage of a subject, but as an ever-present cudgel that helps rally the base to their defense even when they're wrong. Thus Herman Cain invoked media bias as it became apparent that he was woefully unqualified to be president, and Michele Bachmann preemptively invoked it in her recent "I'm retiring" message , as if any skeptical scrutiny would be a sign of journalistic malfeasance. A smarter, less opportunistic critique from conservatives, updated somewhat from the 1990s, or a sustained critique of media bias from another faction, ideally one not grounded in ideology, would do more to improve the media than the current conservative critique has in years.7) No one is in charge here. This is where themetaphor fails. The American media may have a pack mentality at times, but news-gathering is ultimately a decentralized enterprise. Its uncoordinated nature is a boon to its independence, but no outlet can cover every important story, and with no one coordinating, sometimes an important story is undercovered by the press as a whole, without any individual or publication bearing responsibility, or having done anything wrong. This is often forgotten when we talk about "the media," as is the fact that the audience increasingly helps to influence which news becomes a big, national story.Why does the media miss some significant stories and pay too little attention to others? Thus far, I've argued that excessive deference to government officials, sending lots of journalists to cover the same unimportant events, flaws in TV as a news medium, a society that undervalues watchdog journalism, incentives to cheerlead in the business press, the inadequacy of our most influential strain of media criticism, and the fact that no one coordinates coverage all play a part. There are dozens of other important factors too -- I can't even begin to run through them all. (It is daunting to explain why the press covered a single story as it did , never mind many of them.)The Unz essay proceeds as if the media decides what it thinks the people ought to know, then informs Americans accordingly. That's part of the story. Editors do sit around at thedeciding what is to appear on the front page of the next day's newspaper, and what package the investigative team will work on for Sunday after next. But journalists are more constrained than you'd think from the way media is discussed by its critics; and understanding those constraints helps to explain the gulf between what's important and what's covered. Journalistic reforms can and should improve media in various ways; but some flaws are better explained by business imperatives, as well as the American mainstream's patronage of bad journalism.