A missionary once asked President Harold B. Lee, “What is the most important commandment in the gospel?” President Lee thought for a moment and then gave this profound, personalized response to the missionary. “Elder, the most important commandment of all is the one you’re having the greatest difficulty in living.”
The mainstream news media are being undermined by bloggers and citizen journalists offering a wider variety of local and niche coverage. But they are also regularly beating the pros at the networks to some of the world’s biggest stories. This is happening because journalism doesn’t work quite as it should anymore. As bloggers dig deeper and wider, the mainstream news networks are becoming increasingly shallow.
In June 2005, the major U.S. network and cable television stations ran 6,248 segments on the Michael Jackson child molestation trial. There were 1,534 segments discussing Tom Cruise, and 405 on a runaway bride from Georgia. Dramatic fighting broke out in eastern Sudan that June, an intensely newsworthy event, especially when one takes into account the largely ignored steady-state genocide in Darfur, which had killed more than four hundred thousand people in the previous two years. A total of 126 segments ran mentioning Sudan. Michael Jackson got fifty times more coverage than what was fast becomeing one of the largest humanitarian crises of the decade.