www.registan.net/index.php/2007/03/26/the-dumbing-down-of-america
In other words, while it might be nice to learn about how American policy is failing in the country that actually attacked us on September 11, the mainstream glossies seem to think we're more interested in lesbians who photograph celebrities and the Kansas Board of Education. At this point, I don't even want to critique the article (esp.
narcogen Time: 3/26/2007, 9:01 pm I don't think they hate America. It occurs to me that discussions of America's foreign policy failures probably sell pretty well in Europe and Asia. Probably not so well at home- or perhaps it is believed they will not sell so well at home.
Vincent Time: 3/26/2007, 9:29 pm Is this a chicken and egg issue? True, magazines like Time and Newsweek are shirking their responsibility to inform the public - but these corporations, being corporations, are just giving the American public what they want to read... or not giving the American public what they -don't- want to read. If Americans at large (as ascertained by the profit analysts at Time and Newsweek) don't give a crap about our intervention in Afghanistan, the onus for fixing this sorry state of international awareness extends farther than the magazine corporations. It certainly does includes Time and Newsweek, but perhaps they're responding to a state of affairs that needs to be worked on more intensively elsewhere. Comment from Disha Time: 3/26/2007, 10:26 pm Fox News anchor recently got upset at people who were upset at the fact that there was wall-to-wall coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death.
org/2007/02/26/gibson-iraq-media/ "GIBSON: My complaint about this is what you're listening to when you hear that guy lecture the audience, is you're listening to news-guy snobbery. I know what you want to hear about, but I'm better than that story. People want to hear about the Anna Nicole story, I'm happy to tell them.
Nathan Time: 3/27/2007, 10:20 am Thanks for the credit, but it goes to Josh on this one. I think these magazines give their readers what they want. Newsweek is not so much a news and issues magazine as it is a People that focuses on current affairs. Comment from Brian Time: 3/27/2007, 12:21 pm There's all this talk about the death of print news because internet based news providers are a more convenient, and often better, alternative. So I don't understand how paper magazines can compete in the long run with fluffy stories since the internet is the ultimate domain of fluffy stories. I'd think that the people who would buy a paper magazine would be those who believe that there's some in-depth analysis inside that you can't find online. So it strikes me as weird that they would go after the sensational story rather than the intelligent one. I noticed that The Economist has been making inroads to America lately. It's probably one of the most content-heavy weekly magazines out there, and based on how much I've seen it spring up over the past few years I think they got it right.
And check the bylines on these things: I do write about things that aren't Afghanistan! The success of The Economist, the Financial Times, and even the WSJ, all show that there is a sizable market for profitable, hard news publications. Similarly, I'm not renewing my subscription to The Atlantic because of how they fawned over Andrew Sullivan in the midst of an editorial decision to move away from "dry, hard stories" to softer, more humanistic ones. As for the revenue issues, I think rags like the New York Times have it backwards: they decided their true value is their opinion columnists, and they use their hard news as the hook to get people wanting the latest identical Kristoff or Friedman fluff. The WSJ, on the other hand, knows the values of its opinion columnists and gives them away for free, asking people to pay for access for its reporting. And amazingly, it's doing okay, in stark comparison to the NYT and almost every other American broadsheet. The lesson I draw from this is that, rather than abandoning actual news reporting to the Axis of AP (the AP, Reuters, UPI, AFP, Xinhua, and so on), doing original reporting creates value in a news publication, while running fluff makes it generic. Who would buy Time for its celebrity gossip, when the market is virtually saturated with such things? Good foreign reporting, on the other hand, is increasingly in the hands of a few American papers (the Post, NYT, WSJ, and CS Monitor), and the generic newswires. It is a question of value, but most of the rags in this country are getting the answer wrong.
Nathan Time: 3/27/2007, 2:43 pm There's a backstory to the NYT navigator thing. I can't share it, unfortunately, but it could be much more than it is and add quite a bit of value to the paper's website.
Nick Time: 3/28/2007, 2:20 am If I can add my twopennethworth, the NYT is a far superior publication than its British equivalents (Guardian, Times, Daily Telegraph, Independent), if a little dry in its reporting style, and the columnists are somnambulists. By way of comparison, a subjective survey reveals the NYT's coverage of, say, Andijan, to be far more exhaustive than anything the Guardian did. Of course, you can't exactly precisely the national newspaper culture in the UK with that in the US, but from what I can tell, by having broken out of its purely New York metropolitan area mindset and adopted a nationwide strategy, the NYT has set itself up to take a lot of punches from all over the political spectrum. It's perceived liberal bias is accentuated by the lack of alternatives (USA Today? It's impossible to read a British newspaper without feeling like you're being coralled into voting for one party or another. I appreciate that nothing in this comment pertains to Central ASia. This is the first I've seen of your site - I was linked here from Andrew Sullivan's column!
If so, it's kind of funny because I was just looking them up today. They operate a bit outside of the area that I normally cover, and the bulk of the posts over the years have come from me. Also, since we tend to deal with policy issues, organizations like that sometimes slip through the cracks. Comment from luisalegria Time: 3/28/2007, 8:20 pm Time and Newsweek address a very different demographic slice in their foreign editions than in the US. The foreign audience of these magazines is often very upmarket in their local societies (top 5% maybe), whereas in the US these are mass-market middlebrow. A lot of these class discrepancies in marketing targets and media consumption are behind various foreign misunderstandings of the US. This in addition to the general disinterest in foreign affairs by the US public of course. Frankly, if the US public really were interested in foreign affairs, and foreign opinion, much of the world would have a great deal to worry about from the justified outrage of the US public.
David Time: 3/28/2007, 9:52 pm At this time the US is in a funk over a failed administration and it's policy's. In 1973 and 1974 Both Time and Newsweek nearly faltered because of public exhaustion over Watergate or the war in Vietnam. Truth is, Americans, even the less educated or seemingly disinterested have native intelligence and intuition. All of us are terribly aware of the Vice Presidents absurd comments. The presidents idiotcy at times and the tragedy of Iraq. Thus there are times when fluff gets one through a dark season. Remember, the news junkies have access to online sites plus access to international editions by Internet or better news stands. are out of office, the national angst will come alive and the media will be full of recriminations. The after effect of this wretched presidency will linger for years. Enjoy the fluff, because it will pass and we will all miss it! Comment from Andrew Time: 3/28/2007, 10:22 pm This complaint is almost entirely without merit. All one has to do is look further back in the cover archives, and you'll see that on February 19th the US and South Pacific regions have a cover dealing with Afghanistan, and the Europe and Asia regions do not. At no point did they use that Afghanistan cover in those two regions either. To me it seems likely that Time didn't want to run another cover dea...
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