I smiled cynically at the news this morning that around 55% of the editorial content in newspapers–actually the results are only for Aussie papers, but I’m willing to believe they’re representative of The West in general–is actually repurposed PR.
I say cynically for two reasons: 1) because the article has a tone of shock, as if this fact weren’t something that anyone who’s paid any attention didn’t already know, and 2) because that number, 55%, is the percentage of editorial content, not the percentage of the paper’s content–people like me who were exposed to the best documentary ever made in Canada
So, at best 40% of the paper is editorial content. That 40% is 55% (or more) rewritten press releases–so you’ve got 22% of the paper composed of unlabelled PR and no way for the casual reader to determine the actual source of it or the agenda of the source. You’ve got 18% of the paper left that could theoretically represent ‘reporting’. Now, bear in mind that this includes all that lifestyle garbage, all the sports results, etc, and think about how much of a paper is actually something you can reasonably call “news”. (And that’s without even getting into the follow-on question of how much of that news is just reprinted AP wire stuff, or follow-on from that about and how that whole syndicated model is rendered ridiculous by the Internet.)
Of course, in defense of newspapers, as bad as those numbers are, I suspect they’re better than TV news.
(This is where I would get all nerd triumphalist about the Internet as news source, if I weren’t so depressed about the polarizing and bias-reinforcing effect of user-selected news sources.)
