Wait, what?

"[T]eaching people to be better shoppers instead of investigating the dangers of the marketplace"? Is that wrong, or am I misunderstanding? (I have neither the time nor the patience to read that entire four page article.)

To me, a "better shopper" is someone who shops wisely, aware of the risks and benefits in a purchase. It's someone who reads that tapping home equity is a wise personal finance tool, then researches the risks before doing it.

So to my feeble mind, being a better shopper is a good thing.

@nsv: I think they are saying teaching them to buy as much as possible. That's what I feel they are trying to do. Too much emphasis on "here's how to get this cheap" and not enough on "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is"

The journalism industry is beholden to business interests - ie: advertising sales and influence from advertisers (targeted ads to stories on same or opposite page). It probably is a result of the media consolidation - less media outlets competing for advertisers with more money total to invest and more influence.

It went from promoting a consumer movement to promoting consumerism, teaching people to be better shoppers instead of investigating the dangers of the marketplace, e.g. stories that tell you that tapping your home-equity is a wise personal-finance tool, without telling you that you could end up losing your house.

Has this person never watched the news on TV? If I'm not assaulted once a night by the news telling me what in my home can/may be/will kill me and my family, I'm not watching TV. The same people also go after scammy businesses, chasing the owner/employees down the road. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the article.

@nsv: To draw an analogy, its like covering critically film by solid reviewers, versus covering which celebutards are flashing their shaved naughty bits when visiting Area. "Wal-Mart has this GREAT special on baby food" versus "Wal-Mart's haphazard quality control risks your child's health, thanks to complicit, lax gov't regulation", if that helps.

@econobiker: Also when reporting transitioned to journalism industry, product and sales became 1st and actually reporting became 2nd.

Why else would Britney Spears have far more tv, internet, newspaper coverage than worthy alternative political parties in 2008?

Why else would the media NOT report on the biased Commission on Presidential Debates which self limits debates to the two business owned political parties?

Decades ago, journalists (and professionals in general, aside from the medical profession) didn't have specialized degrees - some didn't even have a high school diploma. What real journalists did have was drive, curiosity, and a willingness to rock the boat.

Anyone who has a "journalism degree" isn't a journalist. "Journalism students" are stenographers and beauty contestants who edit sound bites, nothing more. They "think" the Fourth Estate is the third summer home of a Wall Street executive and that W5 is a misspelling of the World Wide Web.

OT but is there any way that you can not post dead animals on your web page?

It turned this way because of journalism, yes. Journalism isn't writing treatises and propaganda to move the masses. It's entertainment. They must write what people want to read, and people really don't want to do anything about the state of consumerism. They'd prefer it either fix itself or someone else worries about it, while in the meantime they save money and get more and more stuff. Journalism doesn't promote this, it feeds on the already existing desires of its audience.

Even The Consumerist itself exhibits this. Among its many helpful and enlightening posts, there are paragraphs and paragraphs on the shrink ray, signage mistakes, and just plain funny consumer-related nonsense. That may be unhelpful from the perspective of someone looking here for ways to better their situation, but most us appreciate the humorous, more entertaining side of the site.

A lot of the stuff seems to be rehashes of press releases. That works with the model of corporate ownership, since it means the journalist doesn't have to do much work.

@P_Smith: harsh, but I have a journalism degree and it's most useful function has been to get my foot in the door. And past that, it's every person for themselves and it's a cutthroat area for recent grads. I encountered a lot of people in other majors who tried to work with the college newspaper, and it never worked out for them because there's a type of training and attitude in j-schools that you can't get in other majors.

Honey, how much time do you have to investigate everything you buy?

@P_Smith: Pardon?

As someone who graduated with a journalism degree (as well as a degree in sociology and anthropology) last June, I take offense at your blanket characterization of us all as "stenographers and beauty contestants who edit sound bites, nothing more." Stenographers and beauty contestants are not people who discover that a sub-contractor whose employee died on a job at a local school had numerous safety violations that the contracter who hired him didn't know about.

Most of the current and former journalism students I know are people who truly believe in what they do.

As the previous commenter noted, the degree gets your foot in the door; you're on your own for the rest. It's especially difficult now because they're firing more journalists than they're hiring. Someone who can't do his or her job doesn't last long, whether it's from the pressure or something else.

I'm afraid I can't sympathize with the article. It's hard for me to believe that a shift in emphasis from hard-hitting consumer legislation (government control) to informing the individual consumer (market control) is a bad thing.

I understand that the latter has its dark side, like those idiotic top-ten lists that adorned the Consumerist before its sale, that seemed to be cribbed directly from Stuff Magazine - but it has a positive side too. To use the cited example, if a magazine tells you how to easily and inexpensively get organic tomatoes, it's simultaneously taking a whack at the agribusiness monoliths that sell you the pesticide-laced round red plastic things you usually see at the grocery store.

Furthermore, personally, I would much rather work on improving my own buying habits (carrying less debt, saving more, buying more durable products) than dip my toe into the murky waters of corporate regulation.

@nsv: Part of the problem much?

Isn't the problem really something with a two-pronged solution? Clearly, for all consumers it's more efficient to cut off all the problems at the source (i.e. the corporate level) but individual consumer awareness -- "buyer beware" -- is a prudent complement to that since ultimately it's the individual who has control over what he/she buys.

Journalism itself is more of an advertising medium these days, so it's difficult to find much that isn't spun or loosely investigated to begin with. And honestly, I'd prefer to read things put out by experts who know things and not writers who interpret things for us.

@rdm: No.

@lucidpsyche: As a J-school grad myself, I agree with the above statement (that being the one DIRECTLY above mine).

@Triborough: Exactly.

@Thorny: Problem happened when that mega corporations started to own media. The local or regional newspaper owner went away.

Reporters began to be talking heads due to TV with the focus on fast sound bites and looking good.

"individual consumer awareness -- "buyer beware" -- is a prudent complement to that since ultimately it's the individual who has control over what he/she buys." That is the corporate spin on personal responsibility and consuming/purchasing. Why were there usury laws, why consumer protection laws, etc? Because businesses are not moral and will only do the legal thing but not necessarily the right thing. How is the individual supposed to know that a company is putting melamine in its milk to stretch the quality, etc???

Reporters were supposed to report on issues that affected us all not just parrot press releases from companies.

@rdm:

It's not dead, it's sleeping.

@rdm: Is that even a real animal? It could be a stuffed something that looks real.

@nsv: The point they're trying to make is that journalism has transformed from exposing pitfalls in business (muckraking) to talking about personal interest, usually written as attention grabbers and a lot of time based by faulty information from the very sources that would be exposed by the muckraking (this would be yellow journalism). I like how the Consumerist (even explaining where the term is derived from) fits the description of what we desperately need right now.

In a nutshell, she's calling out that we have less The Jungles and more things on 'eating healthy for less.'

More bans.

Problem solved.

@Writer, TheNinjaReport: "I have a journalism degree and it's most useful function"

That is so ironic...

I agree with this, which is why sites like the Consumerist are important. Consumer Reports, the Consumerist, they need to be around so that we can be careful with our purchases, look for things we wouldn't notice otherwise and be better shoppers.

@econobiker: I believe that much of the slow success for progressive/liberal talk radio programming can be attributed to this as well. It is harder for both national and local shows to get needed advertising. It's not so much that people on the left are viciously anti-business or anti-capitalist, which was never true to begin with. It's more that liberal hosts and their callers aren't very afraid to openly complain about corporate involvement in the news of the day. If you lobby for iffy bills, skirt taxes, cheat workers or average buyers, or crony up to politicians (albeit Republicans), you're going to get called out.

Much of what Trudy Lieberman talks about gets discussed on the Thom Hartmann and Rachel Maddow shows.