In the past decade, a great deal of expansion has occurred in the media, especially in terms of a broadening of its communication channels. Much has been made of the development of the World Wide Web and the capabilities of satellite technology to disseminate messages instantaneously across the globe. When speaking of these recent strides of progress, commentators have coined terms (such as "information-based society") that emphasize the vast possibilities that new aspects of the media can spell for our culture. Yet, despite these widely-hailed advances - and the future that they promise - we must ask ourselves, are we better informed by them?

Edward R. Murrow famously stated that television, then a relatively fledgling medium, was little more than "wires and lights in a box" without the necessary element of human responsibility in the form of programmers and anchormen who would pledge to provide worthwhile content and serve the public. Today, it is possible to survey the recent landscape of media - marred most conspicuously by seemingly interminable "blitzes" of coverage such as that afforded the O.J. Simpson trial and Clinton impeachment - and be greatly disappointed. (A repeated lament of the public:"Aren't there more important things going on in the world?")

However, we can hope that the evolving capabilities of the internet and high-tech TV - whether the two will fully mate remains to be seen - will eventually bear fruit and outgrow what some could describe as a difficult adolescence. Most recently, coverage of the 2000 election has indeed made good use of new television and online capabilities, even if it has contained some satellite-feed-for-its-own-sake dross, such as live footage of a Florida ballot truck that many said echoed O.J. Simpson's infamous non-event Bronco chase. The future remains uncertain, though many surely hope that it does not continue along the course set during the decade, one of increasingly lightweight content geared towards a "channel-surfing" nation: programming that wants to get your attention but fails to inform you.

Throughout the 1990s, it became clear that with technological progress came acceleration. As CNN rose to increased prominence with its coverage of Clarence Thomas' hearing and live feeds from the Gulf War, the reportage of news stories developed an increased urgency, traced back to the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 and the emergence of Nightline's crisis-based reports.

The import placed upon a new set of values, best represented by the goal of appearing on air with high-impact "instant news" before one's competitors - culminating in an "if they're doing it, why shouldn't we?" sensibility that led to preordained editorial decisions upset what had been the accepted order of things. As standards continued to erode, Richard Salant's approach to broadcasting, with its emphasis on careful deliberation, seemed clearly to be at its end.

Today, reading Salant's posthumous memoir, one may be surprised by his rigorous idealism. In his purist insistence, as well, upon keeping news separate from entertainment - even going so far as to stress an absence of musical cues taking place in newscasts - Salant seems rather eccentric in this age of sound bites and fast-paced montage, to say nothing of the increasing influence corporate ownership's interests have upon the content of broadcasts. Today's news has become a profit center, not a public service. The standards Salant pioneered in the world of TV news now seem to have evaporated when they are needed most: with technological advances seem to come greater influence upon the public and, thusly, greater responsibility.

In Salant's era, news, even when surrounded and supported by entertainment programming, was not subjected to a micro-management of its ratings. Today, TV news' audiences are monitored on the average of every 15 minutes, and a good deal of energy is devoted not only to attempts to grab their attention but to the process of courting continually desirable younger audiences.

This has led to the neglect of viable news events, such as those taking place in Africa - in class, guest speaker Alexandra Zavis, an AP African correspondent, stated that it's often difficult to "sell"important stories to the mainstream press, so often preoccupied with covering what is popular. This is true in the world of newspapers as well:the Christian Science Monitor is reputedly the only print medium that boasts decent coverage of Africa.

Programs have also been restructured, even "dumbed down," in hopes of attracting more viewers, at cost to their integrity. A program that might have chosen not to report on the sordid matter of Monica Lewinsky's stained dress soon had no other options: the "everybody does it" credo seems most damaging in these circumstances.

The lack of standards seen in the absurdly protracted Clinton/Lewinsky scandal is analyzed in Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel's Warp Speed. They explain that because the story (most notably the impeachment process) progressed so slowly, news media sources found themselves with little to report, yet desperate to keep the public's attention. With a shortage of content, the amount of airtime devoted to commenting on the news - as opposed to reporting it - escalated dramatically.In this process, the journalistic practice of keeping fact separate from opinion (here offered as the analysis of occasionally dubious "experts")is often discarded.

Here, many would offer that rather than trying to engage in the broadcasters' equivalent of filibustering, be it commentary or "empty footage," networks would serve the public better by dedicating time to more worthwhile matters. But Richard Roth, another guest speaker,explained that his program dealing with the potentially important subject of diplomatic affairs has been placed in an extremely undesirable time slot (4:30 a.m. on Saturdays, funded by low-rent ads); Ralph Begleiter's show, which dealt with similar aspects of international news, was taken off the air in favor of the arguably vacuous Talkback Live - which, with its selling point of pseudo-interactive "live online chat," seems a waste of the Web's purported potential - at the onset of the Simpson trial.

While alternative programming to the media's de rigeur story fights for airtime, there exists a similar lack of diversity among different media outlets: locked in competition, they often begin to feel as though reporting on a story differently from one another may lead to ostracism by viewers. Thusly, a sense of homogeneity persists. In another sense, the prominence of satellite feeds has had a negative effect on a diversity of viewpoints in that networks no longer send their own crews and correspondents to locales in which news occurs: because they no longer have to fight to find interesting stories, the public usually suffers,forced to accept bland coverage.

Though live-via-satellite feeds can be effective and exciting,they sometimes aren't, demonstrated by an in-class video comparison of CNN's coverage of Kostunica's election versus ABC's. CNN's rather muddled,noisy stand-up report - as opposed to ABC's skillfully-edited and well-written distillation of the same events - from Yugoslavia seemed to get by merely on the sense that the audience was somehow meant to find it thrilling in its immediacy.

Perhaps, it could be said, CNN was trying to duplicate its landmark coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall; in the post-Cold-War era, it seems that not much has gone on to attract viewers. News audiences have declined throughout the 1990s, largely due to the absence of a unifying element to draw viewer interest. Other contributing factors include the proliferation of "infotainment," as well as economic prosperity: popular culture, especially in terms of the reemergence of lowbrow entertainments, such as wrestling - which, topping cable news ratings with its viewership of 40 million, draws viewers away from the news - seems to be at a point echoing that of the 1980s, before the early '90s recession arrived and, with it, the higher-profile appearance of "alternative" culture and views (such a feminism, ecology, and a "P.C." ideology) into the mainstream. A highly segmented audience, too, has had the effect of weakening TV news' viewership.

Ultimately, we can hope that this current identity crisis faced by the news media has at its end a bottoming-out, instead of continued acceleration and fragmentation. Rather than being flooded by an entropic barrage of information, the public should be served by the news. Though their importance has perhaps been diminished by today's cynics, I believe Murrow's words of caution and Salant's pared-down approach made sense: who needs to know the barometric pressure, the phase of the moon, or the wind-chill in a flurry of show-offy computer graphics on the weather report, if they don't know if they'll need to take an umbrella the next morning?