Would someone please tell me why reporters don’t want to communicate more effectively?
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Look at the federal tax code. There have been many news reports on the tax code since the 1986 reforms and everyone knows that the code has been repeatedly corrupted by lobbyists and special interest groups. But the voters have never done anything to stop Congress from creating at least one new tax deduction for anyone with enough money for many large campaign contributions. So all of the hard work by the reporters was an almost complete waste of time. Their only positive accomplishment was the money they earned for entertaining both voters and politicians with gotchas. Which is why they failed to communicate.
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The same judgement can be made about the pre-recession journalism on subprime mortgages and the housing bubble. It was ignored until the economy collapsed. And nothing is ever done about too big to prosecute white collar criminals until there is an entertaining story to tell. Congress is always spending money on weapons the Pentagon doesn’t want while some soldiers are getting food stamps so they feed their families. But our popularly elected politicians won’t spend enough money on crumbling infrastructure until the voter are entertained by another story of more people being killed with another bridge collapsing. Most states won’t hire enough social workers and foster care parents to protect abused children until another photogenic child is killed in a perverted manner. Entitlement reform can only be done incrementally with twenty year intervals because voters want to avoid hard decisions. Our government is still encouraging too many students to get a college degree with student loans when everyone knows that there is a surplus of people with a college degree.
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But no one in the journalism profession wants to change the behavior of both voters and politicians by communicating like a teacher with an annual one week remedial education course for ignorant voters. It would be easy to make the week profitable. Which would also make it effective. But reporters are acting like the doctors of the nineteenth century who refused to start washing their hands after seeing the evidence that they were killing their patients. They have memorized the reasons why everyone else is responsible for the incurable problems of our country. So again, would you please tell me why reporters don’t want to work harder and smarter?
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Stanley Krauter
Lincoln, Nebraska