Why the news is failing

Frank Rich has a scathing column,  They Don’t Report. You Don’t Have to Decide on the NYTimes.com in which he criticizes the mainstream media for it’s poor coverage of the Times Square bomb scare, where they were yucking it up with the President  at the White House Correspondents Dinner instead of breaking to report on the breaking news event. There are a number of indirect criticisms in the column, but the overall impression is that Rich thinks today’s journalists are so busy celebrating themselves that they can’t be bothered to actually do their jobs. At first I thought it was a bit unfair, but then I came across this photo from the blog Sunshine + Design:

Then I thought: Frank Rich, as he always does, has a point. It reminded me of this photo from another great blog, Iconic Photos. It’s of nine European kings, taken in 1910, at the funeral of the English King, Edward VII:

Also at the funeral was an Emperor, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. By the end of the decade, most of these Kings were swept away. The same may be true with the Media Kings above, and the media empires they represent. Especially if they don’t smarten up and deal with the changes that are coming along and threaten to sweep them away as well.