ADD

I realized last week while we were watching Micheal Jackson’s Thriller, most people, at least that I know, would want to sit through a 14 minute long music video. Throughout the video, people kept leaving class. Most music videos today typically go for no more than 4 minutes. Songs in general use to be much longer, Janis Joplin’s “Son of a Preacher Man” is 12:26, Carlos Santana’s “The Calling” is also a 12 minute song. The Allman Brothers even have a 33 minute song called “Mountain Jam”. Their contemporary counterparts have songs that are considerably shorter. Weezer’s “Space Rock” is only 1:23, and Ratatat’s 2:27 long “Bustelo” isn’t much longer.

With “Hit” TV shows and new Platinum artists being paraded about the media, and constantly being replaced by the next hottest thing, people have become fixated on what’s next. On television, we’re bombarded with half hour, or hour long segments, one after the other, and during the commercials, the subject changes every 30 seconds.

Is it just me or…

During the movie in class today, it occurred to me just how much the state of journalism has fallen in just a few decades. During the Vietnam war, Journalists covering and photographing showed people back in the states what was happening there and just how awful the war was for both sides. The knowledge of what the US was doing and what was happening to American soldiers made people take to the streets in protest, which eventually forced the US to end the war. However, in the video, they showed us a photo of caskets on a plane about to be transported back to the states, and that the Pentagon did not authorize the photographing of those caskets. They were worried that the American public would react the same way to those photos as the public did when they saw and read what was happening in Vietnam. Throughout the various military campaigns in the middle east in recent years, the information available through mainstream media has been very restricted and filtered.

For example, on April 22nd, 2004, a soldier named Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan. He was allegedly killed by enemy fire, but he had actually been killed by  friendly fire. Brig. Gen. Gary M. Jones had known that this had been the case days after Tillman’s death. However, this fact had been kept from his family for months, leaving them and the public to believe a complete fabrication.

Once upon a time, American Journalism had the power to end wars. Now…?

Newspapers, a knife to a gun fight.

I think that, as a whole, society and democracy would be largely unaffected by the failure of the newspaper industry. Newspapers are to news on the internet, television and radio, as snail mail is to email. There are much faster ways of getting information out. With newspapers, the stories have to be edited and arranged to fit along with all the advertisements, then printed, then distributed, and as we saw in the video clip from the Daily Show, news in newspapers aren’t as current as the news you could more easily get from turning on a tv or radio, or going onto the internet. Also, provided you already own a television, radio, or computer, they’re also a free source of news.

Google news is a great source of news. There are articles just minutes old, and from smaller papers, like the Daily Californian, to much larger institutions, like the San Francisco Chronicle, BBC news, and The Wall Street Journal to name just a few. I have yet to find a newspaper as current or with a large amount of sources as diverse as can be found on Google news. And that’s only one website. For people like me, there’s just no incentive to have to pay for a subscription.

The fact that I could go for months without picking up a newspaper and still be apprised of local and global events is not a good sign for the newspaper industry. Paper in an increasingly digital age…