Media Miseries

Howard Kurtz, writing for the Washington Post, has a good article about the current state of journalism and the news media: mainstream and otherwise. He tries for a degree of balance and, I think, mostly achieves it. He really tries to understand the root causes of the present state of affairs. Kurtz says:

No media person is perfect, including me, but I cling to the belief that facts matter. That, however, is in danger of becoming an old-fashioned view, along with the virtue of calling people for comment before you unload on them.(snip) All the incentives these days -- for ratings and circulation and Web hits and just getting noticed -- lie in the direction of running and gunning. Many news consumers are sending a message that they simply want their own views echoed and amplified.

We could be accused of these shortcomings here at COTTonLINE if we claimed to be a news site. We are an opinion site, the equivalent of a newspaper's Op-Ed pages. Facts matter here but so does point of view.