Tired of Sensationalist News Coverage? There are Plenty of Alternatives

My article and blogpost questioning Jon Stewart's claim that the news media are rife with sensationalism drew a lot of comments, mostly from people who disagreed with me and who, I suspect, are avid Stewart fans. There's nothing wrong with that (I like Stewart's show myself) but it would be instructive here to consider some facts:

• There are roughly 1,400 newspapers in the U.S. The vast majority are NOT sensationalist tabloids.

In fact, there are only a handful of large-circulation tabs left in this country, including the New York Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times and a few others. And even those are not in the same sensationalist league as the tabs that are at the center of the phone-hacking scandal in Britain. (Indeed, the Daily News, my former employer, has won several Pulitzer prizes.) In short, the vast majority of U.S. newspapers are traditional and even staid, but certainly not sensational.

• Of the 10 U.S. papers with the highest circulation, only one - the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post - could be considered really sensationalist. The highest circulation paper in the country? The Wall Street Journal.

• NPR, which is far and away the dominant news radio network in the U.S., is about as anti-sensationalist as you can get.

• The big three networks - CBS, ABC and NBC - still provide evening newscasts that draw tens of millions of viewers. Some may disagree, but I wouldn't consider those broadcasts sensationalist.

And don't forget the "PBS News Hour."

• Anyone with an Internet connection has, with the click of a mouse, access to literally hundreds of millions of websites; a large percentage of those are devoted to sober presentations of news and information.

In short, the vast majority of news media in this country are not sensationalist, and yet the perception persists that we are awash in sensationalism. Why is this?

Cable news. To varying degrees, the cable news networks lean toward sensationalism (CNN to a lesser extent, Fox News and MSNBC to a greater degree). This is especially true in prime time, when tabloid-style shoutfests like "The O'Reilly Factor" draw millions of viewers.

I'm not going to try to counter this perception. Cable news can seem sensational, especially compared to the rest of the news media. But that's my point - cable news is the exception, not the rule. Like the man who lives in a box and thinks the world is composed only of right angles, those who rely solely on cable news for their information will invariably have a very skewed picture of the news media universe.

Stewart furthers this skewed perception by focusing most of his media criticism on - you guessed it - cable news. It makes sense; Stewart runs a TV show whose goal is to entertain, and on TV it's much more entertaining, if you're poking fun at something, to show a clip from a news broadcast than to read a few paragraphs from a newspaper article.

But if you're sick of sensationalism I have a recommendation: Read a newspaper or a good news website. Listen to NPR. Watch the "CBS Evening News" or "PBS News Hour" or "BBC World News."

In other words, be an informed news consumer, and choose to peruse the news outlets that you prefer. If that turns out to be the serious and sober New York Times, PBS or BBC, great. If the racy tabloids and Fox News are more your style, that's fine too.

The point is, in a news universe with so many choices, no one has to watch sensationalist news coverage, as Stewart seems to imply.

And if you think cable news is sensational, turn it off.

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