Tune in to the nothing news

You just can't get away from it. Radio! Television! Talk! Music! Internet! Cable! Videos! Movies! DVDs. CDs! Tapes! Newspapers! Magazines! Books! Live performances! Come on, tell me. What did I leave out?

We're inundated by media and most of it is drenched in advertising or propaganda. Yet while there's so much "media," the content is so thin as to be non-existent. It's like a chocolate cream pie with no chocolate. Just fluffy cream. It looks good, but there's really nothing but air.

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Media is so ubiquitous that the average American has no idea that, little by little, he's being starved of information. Oh, he's getting lots of glitz, but in the area of news and important facts citizens need to make reasoned and logical judgments about issues, you can just about forget it. In fact, the amount of real news gets smaller and smaller as the media outlets get bigger and bigger.

Underlying all this is media consolidation: one company in a market owning 6, 8 or more radio stations. What that means is there's just one news department for all those stations, and sometimes it's not even a local news operation. For listeners needing local-issue information or political background – forget it. It just won't be there.

On the face of it, you might not notice. After all, liberals have mainstream radio and television and cable news as well as all of PBS and a whole slew of newspapers and magazines. Conservatives have made inroads with Fox News on cable, as well as talk radio and a variety of websites and print outlets.

With that variety, it appears anyone who wants to become informed can do it with the political flavor they prefer. Wrong!

The problem is that most people don't read newspapers and magazines. The operative word is "read" – they may check out the cover, scan the contents for the latest scandal and move on. Newspapers get readership for the sports, entertainment, gossip and astrology. News? Well, for many people, that's optional and not attended to, much beyond pictures and headlines.

Television on the national level is so bland and dependent on sound bites and some video that grabs you, the viewer doesn't come away with much useful information.

Local television is bad and getting worse – if that's possible. Much of that is because consultants have so infiltrated the business that every newscast looks and sounds alike.

There's nothing more disconcerting than traveling across country and turning on the news only to hear the same music you hear on your hometown station and see a set that looks the same. Indeed, even the people look and sound the same!

It's as though the whole newscast and the people on camera were mass produced in some news factory somewhere and then scattered across the country, taking root at stations everywhere.

If the truth be known, the sets are designed to be eye-catching and the anchors, for the most part, are merely decorative props who move and talk.

Not that there aren't some serious journalists in the business, but they are fewer and fewer – and management really doesn't care. The only things that matter are ratings because they equate to advertisers, which equate to profit. It is a business, after all.

Nothing wrong with that – without profits, there'd be no jobs. What is wrong, however, is that too many stations – radio and television – have forgotten their primary job: Deliver the news to the public. Not surveys, not man-on-the-street interviews, not a close look at how homeless people live, not why Muslims are wonderful people, not why fallen-away Catholics left the Church, not what the first day of school is like in kindergarten.

News is also not regurgitating press releases from organizations with corporate or other motives, not presenting political points of view disguised as being unbiased, not playing favorites with local politicians.

If TV news is bad, radio news is pathetic. Fewer and fewer stations have their own news departments, and even those that do fall victim to the down-and-dirty coverage of stories: Get it done fast, cheap and short.

Imagine an assignment to do a story about an issue and it's to be no longer than 40 seconds. That goes on all the time. Ask any reporter, when the boss isn't around!

Do you wonder why lousy politicians get elected? People get brainwashed by the advertising and get virtually no news information.

Somewhere our free press got corrupted, and aside from the Internet and talk radio, the business of news is too much business and not enough news. With that recipe, we all lose.