In a 6,051-word article, Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) takes up the problem of “journalism’s battle for relevance in an age of too much information:

There has always been a large swath of the population that is not interested in news, of course, just as there has always been a portion that actively seeks it out. What’s interesting about the current environment is that despite an enormous increase in available news and information, the American public is no better informed now than it has been during less information-rich times. “The basic pattern from the forties to today is that the amount of information that people have and their knowledge about politics is no worse or no better than it’s been over that sixty-year period,” explains Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. …

The information-saturated environment that we live in is, unsurprisingly, extremely demanding of our attention. Modern life—both at work and at home—has become so information-rich that Edward Hallowell, a Boston-area psychiatrist, believes many of us suffer from what he calls an attention-deficit trait, a culturally induced form of attention-deficit disorder.  …

Like many businesses in the information age, news outlets have been steadily increasing the volume and speed of their output. As the proliferation of information sources on the Web continues at a breakneck pace, news media compete for attention by adding content and features—blogs, live chat sessions with journalists, video and audio streams, and slideshows. …

Our access to digital information, as well as our ability to instantly publish, share, and improve upon it at negligible cost, hold extraordinary promise for realizing the democratic ideals of journalism. Yet as we’ve seen, many news consumers are unable or unwilling to navigate what Michael Delli Carpini refers to as the “chaotic and gateless information environment that we live in today.”

You’d think after all this navel-gazing CJR would be able to describe the navel upon which it has fixed its gaze for 6,051 words. But never underestimate a journalist’s capability to miss the actual story while covering his preconceived notion of the story. So here’s the scoop from The Stiletto: It’s less that the MSM provide “too much information” than it is that the MSM provide too much useless information. A few reasons why:

† In his third Boyer Lecture to newspaper publishers worldwide earlier this month, Rupert Murdoch took journalists to task for being self-serving rather than serving their audience:

Instead of finding stories that are relevant to their readers' lives, papers run stories reflecting their own interests. Instead of writing for their audience, they are writing for their fellow journalists. And instead of commissioning stories that will gain them readers, some editors commission stories whose sole purpose is the quest for a prize.

When I started out in the business, anyone who dared parade a prize for excellence would have been hooted out of the newsroom for taking himself too seriously. But today the desire for awards has become a fetish.

This fetish carries the moral hazard of hubris, which is amongst the challenges facing journalists in the 21^st Century, according to Murdoch:

The more serious challenge is the complacency and condescension that festers at the heart of some newsrooms. The complacency stems from having enjoyed a monopoly - and now finding they have to compete for an audience they once took for granted.

The condescension that many show their readers is an even bigger problem. It takes no special genius to point out that if you are contemptuous of your customers, you are going to have a hard time getting them to buy your product. Newspapers are no exception.

† Two weeks after her admission that The Washington Post’s election coverage had been biased in favor of Obama, the paper’s ombudsman Deborah Howell (aptly named, as she frequently makes The Stiletto howl with laughter) has the gall to describe “The Traits of a Good Reporter”:

Good reporters are the heart of news gathering. If it's news, they have to know it. Without them, the public wouldn't have the news and information essential to running a democracy -- or our lives. Whether the story is local, national or foreign, it has to be gathered on the ground by a reporter.

What makes a good reporter? Endless curiosity and a deep need to know what is happening. …

Bob Woodward, The Post's most renowned reporter, believes that good reporters do not let speed and impatience hinder them. They have the discipline to go to multiple sources at all levels of a story and get meticulous documentation -- notes, calendars, memos. "You go down lots of holes that don't lead anywhere," but "in the end, what always matters is information that is authentic and can be analyzed and documented." …

A reporter's first commitment is getting the story for readers; it trumps almost everything. That's the reason they sometimes miss their wedding anniversaries or their children's birthday parties and keep on reporting until they are wheeled into surgery …  or delivery rooms.

Reporting is a calling. If reporters didn't have it (along with good editors), how would you know what was going on in your communities, the nation and the world?

† Contrary to Howell’s assertions (does she really believe the s**t she shovels?) a reporter’s first commitment is not getting the story for readers, but is getting career-enhancing access for himself. Gelf, an independent daily webzine based in San Francisco, reports that “thanks to confidentiality agreements between reporters and campaigns … Newsweek reporters received privileged access from the campaigns under the condition that they not publish anything until after the election”:

[A]greements like these pose tricky ethical questions about withholding important facts from the public. These journalists could find themselves faced with potentially election-changing information. "What would happen if there was some major revelation?" asks Andy Schotz, chair of the Ethics Committee for the Society of Professional Journalists. "Would the writers be free to report it right away?" The results of the election might not have hinged on Barack Obama's off-the-cuff remark that "we can't solve global warming because I [f***ing] changed light bulbs in my house," for instance, but what if the reporters had uncovered news of a Watergate-level scandal that the voting public ought to know about? …

What if a Newsweek reporter with privileged access had come across John Edwards's affair while he was still in the running? Would the magazine be obliged to hold back until after the election?

† The “good” reporters - and their editors - must have all been taking sabbaticals to write The Great American Novel, or enrolled in one of those prestigious mid-career academic fellowships, because the reporters covering the campaign collectively committed gross journalistic malpractice. Here is the evidence that voters did not have “the news and information essential to running a democracy”:

Only two percent of Obama voters had “perfect or near-perfect scores on a [12-question, multiple choice] post election test which gauged their knowledge of statements and scandals associated with the presidential tickets during the campaign,” while just 54 percent were able to answer at least half of the questions correctly, according to a controversial Zogby telephone poll of 512 Obama voters nationwide conducted November 13-15, 2008 for John Ziegler, who is producing an as-yet unreleased documentary, Media Malpractice...How Obama Got Elected. Some of the eye-popping findings:

Ninety-four percent of Obama voters correctly identified Palin as the candidate with a pregnant teenage daughter, 86% correctly identified Palin as the candidate associated with a $150,000 wardrobe purchased by her political party, and 81% chose McCain as the candidate who was unable to identify the number of houses he owned. When asked which candidate said they could "see Russia from their house," 87% chose Palin, although the quote actually is attributed to Saturday Night Live's Tina Fey during her portrayal of Palin during the campaign.  …

Obama voters did not fare nearly as well overall when asked to answer questions about statements or stories associated with Obama or Biden - 83% failed to correctly answer that Obama had won his first election by getting all of his opponents removed from the ballot, and 88% did not correctly associate Obama with his statement that his energy policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry. Most (56%) were also not able to correctly answer that Obama started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground.

Nearly three quarters (72%) of Obama voters did not correctly identify Biden as the candidate who had to quit a previous campaign for President because he was found to have plagiarized a speech, and nearly half (47%) did not know that Biden was the one who predicted Obama would be tested by a generated international crisis during his first six months as President.

“[T]his poll really proves beyond any doubt the stunning level of malpractice on the part of the media in not educating the Obama portion of the voting populace,” said Ziegler.

Syndicated columnist (and FOX news media analyst) Cal Thomas explains media irrelevancy in terms that even CJR ought to be able to understand (and using one-tenth the number of words):

The media rationalize their loss of readers and viewers by blaming the Internet and alternative media, like talk radio and cable. But if the big media had practiced balanced coverage, chances are that talk radio and cable news might not exist. These prosper because they circumvent the biases of the established media. …

Most people will never meet a presidential candidate so their impressions are formed by media coverage. If McCain is portrayed as old and out of touch, rather than experienced and toughened by his prisoner of war experience and Obama is presented as young, hip and "news," that leaves an impression on those voters who don't dig beneath the superficial. …

The public has already turned on big media, but big media is too into denial to notice. People are no longer buying their product; newsrooms are being downsized. "Journalists" are now left to wonder what happened to their once-great profession, as they pick up their final paychecks.

When all is said and done, perhaps this is the reason a Zogby poll of 3,472 adults conducted two days after the election for the Independent Film Channel found that the Internet is “the most trusted news medium (over TV and print combined), and Fox News is the most trusted TV news source,” reports Wired.com. Nearly four in ten respondents (39.3 percent) trust FOX vs. CNN (16 percent) and MSNBC (percent), and three-quarters of the respondents think the media influenced the outcome of the election - just about the same number who also think that the media in general is biased. “[I]t's also interesting to note that more people in the poll described themselves as Democrats than Republicans.”