PressEthic

If you've been paying any attention to the world of journalism this past decade, you know that the news is changing. People are rapidly turning away from the newspaper, flocking to the The Daily Show, the Internet, blogs, whatever can get them information in as quickly and and entertaining as possible. The old format of television news, with stodgy anchors such as Walter Cronkite delivering the news authoritatively and striving for the quaint notion of "objectivity," is a relic of the past. As ratings and advertising dollars plummet, executives at the major TV organizations are scrambling for ideas. What, they must wonder, can they do to attract viewers again?

Faced with this landscape, CNN -- arguably the network most responsible for the current state of the non-stop, 24-hour newscycle -- is evolving with the times , recently introducing The Situation Room , hosted by Wolf Blitzer. Replacing long-time fixtures Inside Politics and Crossfire, The Situation Room airs from 3 pm to 6 pm, and attempts to merge the best aspects of the Internet -- its interactivity and timeliness -- with the visual prominence of the television medium. Situated in front of a a wall of up to six television screens showing live news feeds from across the country, Blitzer conducts the show as it happens, jumping from his reporters monitoring the every utterance of select top bloggers to the latest "breaking news" from New Orleans. As the host explains, The Situation Room is '...like bringing viewers inside our control room and allowing them to move through all of that raw, incoming information with us."

With consumers' attention spans seemingly at its all-time lowest point, CNN is gambling that people want a bevy of information presented to them from a variety of different sources at a breakneck speed. Yet, in their pursuit of the elusive captive audience, CNN may wind up sacrificing the most essential aspect of journalism, accuracy. As Blitzer explains

"It seems inevitable that at some point we're going to get burned and something ridiculous will come across, and we'll have to apologize for it. But we're trying to make things relevant to viewers in a new way, and that's one of the risks."

I found Blitzer's cavalier attitude toward the need to accurately report the news disconcerting. For a network of CNN's prominence and repute to embrace such values marks the triumph of style over substance, of the seismic shift in news reporting from informing the populace about the issues it needs to know about to simply entertaining. Thus far, though, it appears CNN has misread the market; early ratings returns for The Situation Room have been sluggish, and critics, such as Dana Stevens of Slate, have been nothing short of ruthless ('a colossal bore'). Yes, the media environment has changed, and the need to entertain will always be of the utmost importance. However, maybe, just maybe, viewers are starting to recognize that more news does not equal better news.