By Dr. Michael J. Economides and Art Horn in the China Daily

The Beijing Olympics came and went spectacularly, as most of us China watchers had expected, and most Chinese are understandably proud of their country and pleased with how it came through during the Games. But some Chinese cannot resist the temptation to shout to the world, to all those doubting pre-Olympic Thomases: Where were the terrorists? How many people died from our food? How many athletes were impaired by the smog with more world records broken than at any other Olympics in recent memory?

Surely many Chinese and perhaps even government officials may attribute the pre-Games adverse publicity to agitators or to people that hate China or racists or even those jealous of the country’s recent achievements. But that would be too simplistic and the entire sordid affair may be too hard to understand across cultures. In fact, China’s recent headache may actually translate into a cancer and, surprisingly, not in that country but in the West. It says a lot about the press and how it can be relied upon for many things, not just the Beijing Olympics.

It may shock many people but the major television networks, newspapers, magazines and other media in the West are not in the truth business, they are in the news business. This is not to say they are in the habitual lying business but what they consider to be news and truth is blurred due to the need to produce a profit in a “climate” of shrinking revenues. “If it bleeds it leads” meaning if the story has blood and drama it will be the first one on the news. For example, global warming stories are now bleeding all over the headlines. So you are telling me all those stories about drowning polar bears, bigger hurricanes, more droughts, increased wild fires and melting polar caps might not be true? Right.

News as a money-making private business is by its very nature a compilation of dramatic, captivating and often tragic events. Without those events a newscast would be rather boring to a great many people. Dramatic pictures of life and death events make news exciting and compelling. All of these events are bad news for humanity and the planet but good news for the news business. News organizations are in the bad news business.

Ever since the early 1980s the numbers of people watching the major networks, especially in the United States, have been dropping. The introduction of cable TV was a double-edged sword. It gave the networks a better, more consistent, picture to viewers but on the other hand helped introduce competition from smaller channels like CNN, the Weather Channel and ESPN. Then came the Internet allowing people to go even further away. The result is fewer viewers and lower revenue.

Disasters real or, especially imagined, are just too good a hook to throw away with objective reporting. Crisis is a word used over and over again. There is a real crisis developing but it is not in AIDS, global warming or the Beijing Olympics. It is in the credibility of magazines, newspapers and television. The tragedy is that presumably responsible politicians and leaders in many Western countries become hostage of alarmist news and thus some outrageous nonsense becomes indistinguishable from reality. Read full story here.

Michael J. Economides is the editor-in-chief of the Energy Tribune, and Art Horn is a meteorologist who has worked for CBS, ABC, NBC and PBS