Howard Kurtz writes the Media Notes for the “Style” section of WaPo. He often makes useful observations about “the state of the media.” Sometimes a little late.
In a 6 October story titled “Press May Own a Share in Financial Mess” he summarizes the views of several in MainStream Media – including WaPo’s new Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli “who was The Wall Street Journal’s top editor” – about why they were late in breaking the “news” of economic turmoil ahead.
Readers of Bacons Rebellion were not kept in the dark.
EMR has been profiling the negative impact of transportation and land use decisions on future prosperity for nearly four decades. It has been a constant theme since 1973 when the future trajectory should have been obvious to anyone, even those who were riding the tiger of Mass OverConsumption.
From 1973 until 1988 EMR’s focus was on building better, more Balanced places “to live work and play” at the Village and Community scale. From the mid 80s more and more of his writing focused on the economic impact of settlement pattern dysfunction – in the early days it was called “patterns and densities of land use.”
In the late 80s and through the 90s there was a lot of MainStream Media coverage of these efforts – the Disney’s America location, Nissan Pavilion, The Shape of Loudoun County’s Future, The Shape of Charlottesville’s Future, the Subregional Activities Centers effort, Restructuring METRO, METRO station area settlement patterns, etc. Media staff who cut their teeth reporting on “land use and transportation” issues were Lancastered to “national” and “international” beats that paid more and sold more advertising.
As the realities that became the basis for “The Shape of the Future” became more clearly articulated, those who profit from Business As Usual became more concerned with obscuring the drivers of settlement pattern dysfunction. The lack of comprehensive information from MainStream Media made it easier and easier to nit pick details and ridicule overarching ideas than to try to understand what was happening. Advertisers started to provide back pressure and publishers and editors filtered out coverage that hurt advertising. Everyone focused on the details of the busts – REIT, Savings and Loan, Dot Com, Office Overbuild and then Housing but they all enjoyed the ride up on the “more-‘growth’-is-good”, “who-cares-where-it-is,-we-can-always-drive-our-new-car-to-a-bigger-house” bubbles.
EMR was not alone, for decades – long before there were Ezines – Jim Bacon was focused on many of the same themes in surveys of “Autocentric” settlement patterns, speculation-driven land development and damaging Agency policies.
Since Bacons Rebellion appeared six years ago these themes have been explored repeatedly. EMR has prepared 131 columns and half of the first eight note the economic impact of bad transport and shelter decisions. A quick check suggests that Bacon / Bacons Rebellion first examined the housing bubble by name in 2003.
EMR has been harping on the unsustainable trajectory of recent governance decisions for the past three years. EMR’s 24 March column “Good News, Bad Reporting” (with the Jim Bacon supplied lead “As the economy weakens, you can count on MainStream Media to defend Mass OverConsumption and Business As Usual in a desperate bid to keep the advertising dollars flowing” ) laid out the MainStream Media dereliction of responsibility to prepare citizens for the coming crash and more important to prepare them for the need to support a sustainable level of consumption.
MainStream Media has not provided information upon which citizens could make intelligent decisions in the market place and in the voting booth. Some in MainStream Media are now beating themselves about the head and shoulders for not doing more. Why did they not do more? It was not in the best interest of the Enterprises that now own MainStream Media. In a sense, MainStream Media had no choice, they could not do more for the reasons spelled out in THE ESTATES MATRIX.
Defying citizens from the left and from the right, MainStream Media keeps supporting Business As Usual in editorial after editorial and column after column. Why did they not blow the whistle on credit-default swaps and derivatives with no value? For the same reason they keep running ads for Autonomobiles that insure sexual satisfaction and Wrong Size Houses in the Wrong Locations that insure family bliss.
Citizens cannot believe politicians because politics is broken. Citizens are learning they cannot believe advertising and have no funds to spend even if they did.
Citizens have not been getting the information they need from MainStream Media. One wonders how MainStream Media will cover its tracks when citizens find out that dysfunctional human settlement patterns are a root cause of most of the reasons they are concerned about the future trajectory of civilization. For years the MainStream Media has refused to acknowledge that dysfunctional human settlement patterns is even a cause for concern because to do so will hurt their bottom line.
EMR
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