Posted on 07/13/2015 4:36:18 AM PDT by lifeofgrace
As a lifelong reader of newspapers, and a devoted follower of the journalism profession, although not a part of it, I am sad to write this. It's like a eulogy for a body long dead but failed to be given a proper burial. Or like the M. Night Shyamalan movie "The Sixth Sense," where Bruce Willis' character walks the earth as a dead man until a boy who can see dead people leads him to realize his own fate and depart.
Large, centralized news gathering operations are dead. The New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, USA Today--all the old-line newspapers, along with ABC, CBS and NBC are walking the earth, dead, and deluded until they complete their "unfinished business" and depart for the afterlife. Even Fox News is dead, although they've mostly realized it and departed into pundit heaven.
CNN realized it years ago but chose to morph into a huge amplifier for liberal causes, but instead of speakers, they bought just a few hundred thousand tiny little earbuds that only Democrats can wear. MSNBC is a ghost that sometimes haunts televisions like Carol Anne Freeling's poltergeists--"they're here!"
In a corpse, the definitive sign of death is "livor mortis," the pooling of blood in the lower portions of a body leading to a bluish tinge of the skin. When paramedics or doctors see this, they know there's no chance of resuscitation. And we've seen it in news. The New York Times has allowed its journalistic integrity to suffer time after time, from their decision to not publish Charlie Hebdo images of Muhammed yet print an offensive portrait of Pope Benedict XVI made of condoms, to lying about the reason Sen. Ted Cruz's book was yanked from their bestseller list, to its coverage of Reddit ex-CEO Ellen Pao's ouster.
I don't have space here to cover the Washington Post's crimes against journalism, but seeing the end, Ezra Klein and his young hipster pundit pirates defected to Vox Media long ago to establish their kingdom of digitally integrated and brightly colored falsehoods disguised as news.
Television networks have become nothing more than sound-bite processors serving as a front-end to high-traffic websites that churn out the latest AP and Reuters headlines with a censoring process that would make "Good Morning Viet Nam" seem completely unrestrained (don't even get me started about George Stephanopoulos or Dan Rather or Brian Williams). Cable news is a daily echo chamber of punditry, analysis, and endless panels of talking heads. Much of it is entertaining (and purposely so) but most of it is just banal.
If journalism has left the building at large news gathering organizations, where has it gone?
It's gone to the blogs--and to the magazines who pioneered news blogging.
The blogosphere today consists of 98 percent low-traffic blogs, and the other 2 percent are the core of journalism. Of that 2 percent, at least half are just straight news reposters. That leaves 1 percent as news breakers.
They look at the AP stories, and the daily news published by myriad small newspapers (which are still great sources of real news), local television stations (ditto), Reuters, press releases, videos, government pressers, and foreign press, then they synthesize stories into actual news.
Bloggers can't match the raw firepower that WaPo and NYT throw at a story, but you'd be surprised what Yahoo News, Buzzfeed (yes, the joke of the Internet, but they actually had a few scoops), and even legal blog Popehat can do. They're not always conducting interviews like veteran Reuters and AP reporters do, but they are looking at the story through unfiltered journalistic lenses without the crud that the walking dead newspapers and networks have stuck to their sticky keyboards.
Magazines like Reason.com are more likely to break real news stories and print less retractions than Rolling Stone. And Ace of Spades HQ has broken more than one big story, not to mention The Federalist, and Gateway Pundit. These are the keepers of the journalistic flame, because they're not scared to print real news, even if it doesn't line up with their political predispositions.
Of course, those sites serve their news with more than a heaping helping of conservative bias, but I'll even give points to liberal blog The Huffington Post for keeping journalistic standards better than NYT or WaPo. No points for Salon.com or Mother Jones though--they are just high-traffic-seeking liberal echo chambers (they might think the same of RedState, but I don't see the diversity of opinion like RedState has always championed, along with sites like National Review, where the contributors don't always agree but they are at least civil).
The biggest death knell for the "news" as we know it--for me--is simply this. I don't read newspapers anymore. I don't go to the Washington Post first thing in the morning anymore. I read the New York Times for the NYT Magazine features (which are frequently quite good and written by respected journalists). I skip the network news sites entirely except to link to their local stations' coverage.
When I read the large, centralized news gathering organizations, I see dead people who've reached the end of news, must evolve into something else (and stop printing bird cage liner).
The sooner they realize they're dead and move on to a better world, the better it will be for journalism.
This is a VERY good analysis of (and I love the phrase) the “walking dead of journalism”.
Journalism wasn’t respected in the seventeen seventies. Certainly not in the nineteen thirties either.
I was disgusted by how different journalists portrayed the early eighties conflict in Lebanon from how the troops on the ground saw it. And I have never forgiven the profession.
Anytime Journalism has ever been respected only select groups joined in on feeling the respect.
Jason Blair and Brian Williams are pretty representative of journalism as a whole throughout history.
The Framers provided protection to The Press precisely so that We The People could remain informed. An informed electorate is crucial to self-government.
Without a real, working Press (of which I was a part for many years) we are in trouble. Nothing keeps a local board honest better than a local reporter sitting in the gallery, and that applies at all levels of government.
The real value of newspapers was the swarm of reporters they sent out into the community, to report on every little they could find. Without those many objective eyes and ears watching, we are much the poorer. Nobody should trust the Big Whores of “modern journalism” today, it pains me to say.
You are correct. Journalists have always been a collective bunch of self-important navel gazers.
There was a period of time in this country where journalism maintained its “integrity” mainly by refusing to cover any story that it didn’t want to cover. So people simply weren’t told that FDR was a paraplegic, surrounded by communists; that JFK was compromised whore-monger; that LBJ was a racist, stolen honor, gas bag; the Teddy Kennedy was a KGB stooge; etc., etc., etc.
I get the idea that journalism is dead but the old media is still very much alive and will continue to be as a propaganda source and means (along with public education) of dumbing down our populace or at least helping to keep them confused. And in that area they are still doing a pretty bang-up job. There is also the idea that we are becoming more and more segregated into groups of people that have our favorite websites for news and only read those. So conservatives read mostly conservative sites and liberals read only liberal sites (or listen to MSNBC). So there’s still an audience for old media and, unfortunately, lots and lots of money to support them. The internet has helped but government regulation will take care of that pretty soon. This post seems way too optimistic in my opinion.
I’ve heard newspapers have cut back staff in recent years. So there are fewer reporters doing any sort of investigative reporting.
When I travel, I generally read the local papers. But most of what they print seems to be AP wire service stories, rather than anything original.
It’s sad that the economics of the newspaper business have changed so much, that papers are stripped down bare bones operations.
Some have predicted that actual printed newspapers will disappear in most cities in the next 10 to 20 years. They will still have a presence online, but, then there would still be issues of whether they are just linking wire service stories, or doing original reporting.
I was a Tramp printer/Linotype Operator during the ‘50s-’60s and often worked in small town weeklies. On more than one occasion I have heard the editor bawl out a reporter for injecting his own opinion into an article - a Jack Webb “Just the facts, Ma’am” thingy.
In the ‘80s I read of an Arizona Journalism professor who polled his class as to what they thought their job was. The result was (to him) horrifying: 45% said it was to mould public opinion, the 55% gave the professional Jack Webb answer.
It wasn’t long after that when, to my mind, the 45 percenters were now 99% and I started calling them “presstitutes” in every newspaper comment section I posted.
71% believe media is biased. Yet, they continue to fund the biased media.
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