Hey, young adults, why are you so turned off by the news media?

of some 20- and 30-somethings in my office about why they don't read the newspaper. It was very enlightening. I wrote it up on my blog. Maybe take a look at that. http://www.thegeminiweb.com/babyboomer/?p=1326

I stopped paying attention to mass media outlets when it started to become painfully obvious that they had shifted from "wanting to bring me the news" to "wanting me to watch" (whether that was a development on my part or their's, I don't know).

Watch or read nearly any news channel/paper/outlet today and they are overtly in competition with each other to grab the greater market share, thus improving their profits via ads/etc, and therefore they attempt to appeal the greatest common denominator of their potential audience. Rather than ask the in-depth and/or difficult questions and demand accountability and answers, they peddle whatever they are given so that they can go back to spoon-feeding celebrity "news" and other generic pablum to us because enough of the general public is willing to watch it just to chat about it the next day. The general public doesn't *want* to think about hard topics these days, they are willingly led into appeasing their short attention whimsies and not concerned with deep thought. Thus, that's what the mass media outlets are willingly tapping into in order to attract the most viewers and push the most product...thus, further shortening the length people are willing to think about a topic. It's a vicious cycle and self-fulfilling. On top of that, many of these outlets choose to partition the total viewer pool by some specific polarization (e.g. Fox News caters to a conservative PoV). Often the story is skewed to appeal to a specific demographic, giving up on appealing to everyone with all of the facts and letting the viewer/reader decide the truths of the matter and simply feeding half-truths to those who want to hear that side of the story. Of course, if they become good enough at it, they develop the Howard Sternian "I listen because I want to hear what he says next (because I love/hate him)" demographics too...becoming so polarizing that they actually wrap back around the spectrum to grab those they originally pushed away.

I choose not to follow this downward spiral and so I am forced to find either better (or simply more) outlets to satisfy my requirements for understanding and absorbing a current issue. This often means multiple different sources discussing the same topic in order to piece together enough of these short and stupid summarizations to get a fuller picture. Since I need such a wide range of sources to get any sort of value from my search, I choose the internet...home to nearly all sources these days. I will often learn firsthand of a story by an aggregator, like Digg or Fark or UniversalHub (for local info), but then I will start to do my own searching and reading up on the relevant information that I can find (and I've gotten quite good at find some really obscure information when desired). I don't need major sources any more because they don't give me what I want, I can not trust what any one says, and so I have found ways of coping in this "News brought to you by the Vice President in charge of the Entertainment Division" mass media that we appear to be stuck in currently.

I blame the media for stoking many of the problems that we have today because they no longer inform us of the facts or reveal the truth behind spin and rhetoric so much as "market the news" in the current cultural climate.