Newsweek (and media's) problem: Too timid

[scoopmeister]

http://www.pnionline.com/dnblog/attytood/archives/001865.html

And yet, with so many brave defenders of journalistic purity out there, you would think that newspaper circulation would be soaring. Instead, readership is dropping like a stone, the biggest plunge in almost 15 years. Does anyone truly believe its from a lack of "context?" Of course not.

It's from a lack of cojones, of not only not afflicting the comfortable but knuckling under the first time anyone complains.

Newsweek did make some mistakes. But its biggest one was retracting the story, instead of going back and building on the existing reporting from a half-dozen papers -- that there really was Kopran desecration at Guantanamo, that the real damage to America's image came not from an aggressive and free press but from official misconduct.

[bpilgrim]

1. The have FAILED US, utterly and repeatedly...

http://images.globalfreepress.com

peace

[cyr330]

2. You got that right

Newsweek has been an utter failure; just look at some of their "front page news items." What's even worse is that goddamned shit rag, TIME with that whore, Ann Coulter on its cover. And they wonder why we don't read their magazines?

[ugarte]

5. Time and Newsweek are dinosaurs

I can't figure out who buys them. Maybe people over sixty...

[JDPriestly]

7. Not this one. That's for sure.

I thought it was the under sixty people reading those rags.

Somehow, I got a free subscription to U.S. News & World Report. It is just awful. I don't read it. I just throw it away, but somehow I haven't bothered to cancel. I'm waiting for them to publish a really, really, really unbearably bad story, and then I'm going to write them and ask them to cancel my nonsubscription.

[ugarte]

8. US NEWS & WORLD REPORT'S Mortimer Zuckerman

used to be out there on the screaming far right. Now he's representative of basically the entire 'mainstream' media.

Just goes to show you how journalists have raced to the bottom to curry favor with Bush's crowd.

[billbuckhead]

4. Bush propaganda is so ubiquitous that almost every outlet is the same.

It's like commercial over the air radio, they kinda play all the same stuff. A dozen TV outlets giving marketed versions of the same Bush propaganda. Why pick one over the other? Read one and there is no need to read any others. all that is different is how they're presented. NPR gets presented one version of the shit a college level, Fox is aimed at rabble rousing grade school level bullies who never grew up and all the other media is somewhere in between in audience. But at the end of the day even not so smart or distracted people figure it's all the same bullshit and become cynical. It's a win-win for the fascists. They get away with murder and poison the well for future investigations.

[Ksec]

3. Yes, but it took attention from Memogate.

I think Bush made the story so he could do what hes doing.

[kenny blankenship]

6. timid? they're practically peeing on themselves in contrite submission -nt