News Obesity or News Smorgasbord?

The widely reported findings of the annual report of the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) warns, "The real crisis may be news obesity, consuming too little that can nourish citizens and too much that can bloat them." I beg to differ. The study documents surging readership of blogs -- up 58% in six months, with 32 million Americans now getting news from blogs -- which has surely enriched the American news diet.

This is as it shoudl be, since the PEJ report also found that on the most important story of the year, the Bush-Kerry election, MSM were blatantly biased. As the LA Times story reports:

Days were randomly selected from throughout the race to profile the equivalent of one month of coverage. Two hundred and fifty stories were then dissected. Any that had twice as many positive comments as negative ones were deemed "positive" and the reverse for negative references. The review found 36% of the stories about Bush to be negative, compared with 12% negative about Kerry. It found 20% positive stories about Bush, compared with less than 30% positive about his Democratic challenger.

Despite this, PEJ's advice to MSM is to ballyhoo their research, sources and fact-checking. Have they missed the mark by just a tad? If the advice were, instead, to purge themselves of bias, MSM would eliminate the need for blogs. The fact that PEJ doesn't recommend such a tactic says something about the Columbia-based Project, and something about its understanding of what can and can't be accomplished in newsrooms.

Advice to MSM

Just accept blogs. Acknowledge that they can't exist without you because you do the reporting that is one of the primary source feeds of the blogosphere. And accept that, increasingly, you can't exist without them, because they drive readers to your Web pages, where revenues have increased 30%, to $10 billion. Much of that revenue comes from hits generated by blogs, so learn to love us.