David Carr is bang on assigning a share of blame for the Wal-Mart Black Friday death under the feet of a shopping mob to news media. I will disagree in degree about business vs. editorial responsibility. He sees the creation of Black Friday – and that horrible coinage itself – as a cynical business conspiracy to pump advertising. I wouldn’t disagree except that I’m never a conspiracy theorist, especially inside newspapers, which only conspire against themselves. I think there is also an editorial responsibility – importantly in local TV news, too – to do the same damned story everybody else is doing and everybody else did last year. Black Friday walk-up stories are in no way whatsoever informative; they are not news. They fill time and space. We thought they were just pap. But as Carr points out, their unthinking inanity can also be dangerous.
Byline
by Jeff Jarvis