I've thrived on explaining complexity, but there's getting to be no venue for this anymore. Garrick Utley, formerly of the NBC News Division, wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs about this declining appetite for interpretive news. And that's it. It's over in 90 seconds. A recent topic of debate at the Council on Foreign Relations was about this learning gap in the complexity of economic and foreign relations and the ability of the public to understand the news.
People can understand it if it's spelled out, but the venues are drying up.
They're getting O.J.'d away. I saw Utley about a year ago, and he said he was quitting. Because the networks, including PBS, are in a blind ratings race. The networks sold the ads, the news departments produced the news. It's much more fierce today-when everybody with a video camera can make news, we'll soon have 40 million broadcasting stations.