All the News That’s Fit to Sell

[BridgeTheGap]

Save for the country’s top executives, almost everyone working in American business is doing more with less. So when serious journalists—an inherently cynical lot in the first place—grumble publicly about budget cuts, story quotas, and the pressure to blog or tweet, it makes sense that people outside of the industry aren’t moved to sympathy. Not only that, but we are bombarded with so much information online, in print, and over the airwaves, that it sometimes feels as though the world would keep spinning if, in a worst-case scenario, a few reporters had to find another way to make a living.

The problem is, more and more journalists and college graduates are forgoing the trenches to pursue a different career path. Instead of reporting the news, they’re working to help manipulate it as public relations specialists. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in fact, in 1980 there were .45 PR people and .36 journalists per every 100,000 workers. As of 2008, that number had shifted radically. There are now .90 PR people per 100,000 workers and just .25 journalists. As Columbia Journalism Review reports in its May-June 2011 issue, that’s a ratio of more than three-to-one, better equipped and better financed to influence what the public sees and hears.

“I don’t know anyone who can look at that calculus and see a very good outcome,” communications professor Robert McChesney, who recently co-authored The Death and Life of America Journalism, tells the bimonthly magazine. “What we are seeing now is the demise of journalism at the same time we have an increasing level of public relations and propaganda. . . . We are entering a zone that has never been seen before in the country.”

Read more: http://www.utne.com/Media/Public-Relations-And-The-News.aspx#ixzz1PHMJvPnX