Los Angeles Times: Bombs away on television news

Why broadcast news often isn't. Serving two masters is difficult. And in our culture, the master that involves money will usually trump the master that represents "the true, the good, or the beautiful." So, what is a young journalist to do? Perhaps it is time to migrate to online and look to Open Source economic models?

Moonves, a businessman rather than a journalist, lives on one side of an ever-widening contradiction between journalism as a profession and as a commercial venture. His responsibility is not to the public interest but to maximize CBS' bottom line for Viacom's Wall Street investors, who expect television to earn between a 40% to 50% return on capital. (Newspaper chains are expected to make only 20% to 30%.) These rates of return impress someone on the journalistic side of the divide as excessive, especially for businesses exploiting airwaves that belong not to them but to their viewers. So the Moonves' vision leaves us with a dilemma: How will the public-- which still gets most of its news and information from broadcast -- learn what it needs to know? The reality is that it is increasingly less realistic to expect commercial broadcast outlets to effectively serve two masters: the public interest and corporate bottom line.