Is it just me or does the mainstream media seem obsessed with a handful of sensationalized cases? While watching Scarborough Country last night I decided to record the amount of time spent on each topic. Last night's show had five topics of discussion. Three of the five topics I've lumped into a category I call "milk carton", which were: 1) Natalie Holloway, 2) Olivia Newton-John's missing boyfriend, and 3) the missing cruise ship honeymooner. Topics four and five were: 4) a segment on great white shark habitat near San Francisco and 5) Hurricane Katrina. The show also had a one minute break for a "news update". The pie chart shows the percentage of time the show dedicated to each category. Certainly there is a public interest in hearing about missing persons and criminal cases. I'm not trying to minimize or play-down the seriousness and tragedy of those cases, but it seems to me that there is a grossly disproportionate amount of time being spent on those topics. I know what you're probably thinking; my tiny sample of one show on one night of the year is hardly representative of the overall content in the vast sea of media sources in America. Well I'm a bit of a news junky, and although I don't have the time or patience to collect a larger, more scientific sample, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you'd be hard pressed to find a cable news channel with a content distribution much different than the one shown above. I know there are media sources that are less sensationalized and tabloidesque, but television news is a pretty big slice of the overall pie. This is my primary frustration with the mainstream media (MSM). Where's the discussion of issues that impact the daily lives of all Americans? How can important topics like education, healthcare, social security, the environment, the economy, etc... get so swamped out by two or three criminal investigations? If the MSM is going to get so wrapped up in one or two cases I expect it to be something really crazy, like Dick Cheney disappears without a trace while vacationing in Aruba and was last seen at a night club in the company of three young men. Now that's a story where I'd understand the MSM setting up camp outside the secrete service headquarters and demanding answers.

It's all about the ratings and what sells, and the MSM have bills to pay, right? I don't buy that argument. I think quality, informative news programs would sell. But that type of programming is much harder to put together. It requires research, investigating, thoughtful and intelligent staff, talent and creativity, all of which requires time and money. Analyzing a complex world and presenting the hard choices and trade-offs that we face is a daunting undertaking. But rather than stepping up to this challenge, the MSM have largely cowered under a facade of fake news, tabloidism, and nauseating repetition. The mainstream media are apparently too cheap to spend the resources to get the job done right. In the process of cutting costs, and increasing the return to their investors, they're cheapening and cheating the American people. In the end I think they may end up undermining their own interests of staying in business. As the quality of news coming from the MSM deteriorates, people may turn to alternative sources, to the technologies that are enabling less centralized and more distributed forms of mass communication. And when the big stories do break, people may have become so used to tuning out the static and chatter that the MSM will be obsolete and irrelevant. Or at least I can dream...

Now to somewhat contradict myself, there is a part of me that is glad that the media is rushing to the aid of families like the Holloways who are enduring a heart-breaking tragedy. I feel terrible for those families, and I hope they get the help they need. I admire Joe Scarborough for committing so many resources of his show to helping. But to keep things in perspective, there must be more than one American teen that has gone missing over the last several months. There is a glaring disproportionality in the way these things are covered in the media. I intend to continue tracking this disproportionality and lack of common-sense.