U.S. Media and British Journalists

The big rage in mainstream U.S. media right now is to hire British journalists as the voice of the news. What's up with that?

The main media force is the BBC, which has outshone the U.S. media in every way, with its objective, worldwide news and guests of various perspectives, especially non-American perspectives.

The U.S. media, meanwhile, has diminished its own credibility tremendously by cutting back on overseas reporters, replacing news with opinion, and only offering an American-centric view of the world.

Now the U.S. media is trying to fake someone out - - who they are trying to fool is unclear - - by presenting American-centric opinioniated and biased news, only with a British accent.  Trying to substitute objective, worldwide news with a British accent won't work.  Why even try? 

Photo: LERN has had REAL British journalists from the BBC keynote our conference the past two years, bringing that great BBC journalism to our audience.  Bill Thompson of 'Click' keynoted our conference this month.

Comments

[D. P. Lubic]

A parallel comment from California, in regard to a high-speed rail project there:

Reality Check
Dec 21st, 2011 at 14:17

The SF Chronicle ran another anti-HSR cartoon today:
Dec 21: He doesn’t want a train set anymore

Some other recent ones:
Dec 9: Things that seemed like a good idea at the time
Nov 24: So what do we have to be thankful for, again?

A reply:

joe Reply:
December 21st, 2011 at 3:11 pm

Funny, I had not seen any of the editorial cartoons.

On October 26, 2009, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that the Chronicle had suffered a 25.8% drop in circulation for the six-month period ending September 2009, to 251,782 subscribers, the largest percentage drop in circulation of any major newspaper in the United States.[17] The Chronicle publisher, Frank Vega, said in response that the drop was expected as the paper moved to a business model that focused less on advertising, and hence less on high numbers of subscribers, and more on increased subscription fees. The paper claimed that the new strategy had produced significantly improved financial results.

Hearst strategy seems to really on subscriptions by legacy readers who pay more; crazy kids with phoney-thingys can get lost. Same ones who auto industry reporters acknowledge are less interested in cars and more interested in public transportation.

As of March 2011, Daily circulation is down to 235,350 and Sunday 292,459.

My own addition to the crowd:

D. P. Lubic
Dec 21st, 2011 at 17:35

“Hearst strategy seems to [bet] really on subscriptions by legacy readers who pay more; crazy kids with phoney-thingys can get lost. Same ones who auto industry reporters acknowledge are less interested in cars and more interested in public transportation.”–Joe

Is it me, or does it seem that Hearst is sacrificing its future for current revenue?

Perhaps Hearst thinks the time to get out is now, while the getting’s good?

Full page on which this appears is here:

http://www.cahsrblog.com/2011/12/how-are-california-voters-like-gilded-age-robber-barons/#comment-132745

[D. P. Lubic]

Sounds like the management knows it's in trouble, but can't bear to do what they really need to do--provide useful information and analysis. That's hard, and it requires good people to do it, and you have to give them the resources of money and time to do such a job. Unfortunately, the people needed for just that work have been run off by the bean counters.