Should the National news coverage be made redundant?

The Agogo

Here's just an opinion I formed one night, wanted to see what kind of reaction I get out of it. So please tear my argument to shreds:

‘What’s the point in the press at all?’ –is a question asked more frequently in the 21st century. Many (mostly press officials) have defended this questioning of their career by answering with: “To hold political figures accountable for their actions” and “to keep the public in-the-know” and et cetera.

At least we can learn that the British know when to kill something after it has peaked, unlike the Americans, who insist on dragging the bloated corpse that used to vaguely represent programmes such as Scrubs and the Simpsons out of their mudded imaginary graves.

The same treatment should be given to current national papers who are suffering financial woes, for two reasons. Firstly the Nationals, like any other major and commercially-driven entity, are printed with a majority target audience. Since the majority is not in-fact a majority but rather a loosely based demographic supporting a broad base of appeal, it is safe to say that most people read only a minor proportion of any particular newspaper.
Not to procure the image of a tree-hugging hippie, this obviously leads to a massive waste of paper, not to mention time, energy, money, and needless page-flicking. As a Dubliner with no blood-ties to my non-Dublin patriots, does it really affect me that there were floods in Cork?

Not really. It wouldn’t have mattered to a proletarian like me in the Medieval Ages, so why would it affect me now? I would only have genuine concern for the tragedy of the severe weather in Cork if I knew people living there; otherwise it really does not concern me.

However, for reasons given that I live in the 21st century, and that news is available to me within minutes of any incident happening miles from my locality, I somehow am expected to care – and in great detail. This brings me to my second point.

Nationals bring far too much information into an article than is necessary, and sometimes with far too much emotion (but we can avoid the emotional factor by buying the Irish Times instead of the Daily Mail). I hope to explore this using the above example.

If I buy the Times/Mail/Sun/NationalRag in Dublin, all I need to know about floods in Cork is just that: that there are floods in Cork. Unfortunately for me, people in Cork buying the same newspaper need to know much more information than that. This is how the national media are filling the role of the local, and in the process displacement occurs.

As stated before, I am somehow suspected to unashamedly care about Guantanamo Bay and the Iraq War and paedophile priests in Listowel among others which deep down I couldn’t care less about for the few seconds after I find out about them. Most news hits people’s consciences like a tramp that has just walked into a pile of fresh dog excrement. It is at most momentarily displeasing, but once removed can be easily forgotten about.

But the most distasteful thing is the press’ treatment of it. They somehow brainwash people into thinking that they should automatically neckpunch the nearest person who does not genuinely care. Which leads to people pretending they care.

This then leads to crappy newspapers paying crappy newswriters to venture into politically crappy areas of the world to crap Crap all over the local’s opinions while getting shot by crapping soldiers who provide crappy material for the newswriters to crappily write about to a crappy public who probably read it while taking a crap when they shouldn’t give a crap in the first place!
To that point, in order to sell such unneeded excess information, the newspaper needs advertising revenue to curb costs for getting said unneeded information (say by a Dublin reporter needing to travel down to Cork, or having to pay someone already down there) - not to mention that other government-subsidised Television and Radio media has already beaten them to the chase.

With the advent of advertisers comes the conflict of interest. Recently, the Irish Daily Star trashed TV3’s pre-ejaculation of Finance Minister Brian Lenihan’s unfortunate health. Did TV3 react to this trashing? No. Did the webpage featuring the ‘breaking-news’ have an Irish Daily Star advertisement? Yes. How convenient. They’re effectively rubbing each-other’s backs with knives.

Incidentally, if I own a business in Kerry, and seek advertisement in the nationals for a national price, what good does it do for those papers to be read by people living nowhere near me, effectively making my advertising redundant?

All I am trying to illustrate is the need for print media to localise. If I want to learn about the latest and most remote rape case to me, I’ll Google it. Until then, I do not need my eyes to glaze fleetingly for a short time over it, wondering if I’ll have to feign condolences to someone who afterall, may just be pretending to care.

not bakunin

So are you arguing for local media exclusively? I think that you are really discounting the genuine value that a journalist brings to holding those in power and other parties responsible for their actions. A local media is one thing fair enough, but Government is not as local. Back to the target audience thing then, what would there be in it for small media outlets around the country to report on and investigate large political events in Dublin? I give you the grand example of the Watergate scandal. As far as I'm concerned, the Anywhere Tribune of west Iowa would not have been able to break that story. It was in the public interest, and the Washington Post and other large national media outlets were the only ones able to bring it to its final and bloody conclusion. Investigative journalism is important in a functioning democratic society, like free speech.
If you don't care about these stories, that's fine, don't care about them. I think you'll find that many don't anyway, and read them purely out of natural curiousity as to what's happening in the world.

The Agogo

That's a fair point. I guess since there is a market for both national and local news, the consumer has a choice in what they read. It's not like we're forced to read it.