Questions for Shelby

I guess my main question for Mr. Shelby is this: when was the shift from providing the information that the viewer needed to know to entertaining the public and giving them what they wanted to know?

My favorite example is simple: Outside of studio executives and investors who really cares what the weekend box office was for a new movie? Just because millions of people went to a given movie doesn't make it a worthwhile story. It's reading a scoreboard without providing context or meaningful information.

This is a hugely simplistic example, yes, but it is indicative of the problem. Having a movie critic on staff is expensive. It's too specialized for most local stations. Carrying syndicated critics is also expensive, repeating box scores is cheap. Is that practice so prevalent because it appears to give the viewer unbiased, unfiltered information? Is it the assumption or fear that by providing educated, experienced, critical judgment (i.e. criticism) means the media is elitist? Or worse, speaking down to the viewer? Or is this because the American public really has lost the ability to think critically and the dialog in general has broken down to the point that any viewpoint is now suspect?

Yes, of course, all of this applies to much grander questions than movie box office results. But this silly little 10 second blip on the Monday news represents, to me anyway, so much more that is missing both in its coverage and because it is being covered. What isn't getting mentioned because those 10 seconds went to that "story", the time wasted in broadcasters' banter, etc.

After writing the above comment I went looking for an article to link to. I found this: http://www.newslab.org/articles/changetv.htm
This is a response to a News Lab research project on the loss of local television news viewers: http://www.newslab.org/research/bringback.htm

The first link is a commentary/response by Joe Barnes, a former news director. I think his points are dead-on and his arguments are well articulated and succinct. Granted the research project is 8 years old, I think is very possible that the findings are still accurate and I believe news directors should be paying attention to what Barnes said.