Posted on 11/19/2006 9:29:18 AM PST by abb
"There was a land of Publishers and Editors called the Newspaper Business... Here in this pretty world Journalism took its last bow... Here was the last ever to be seen of Reporters and their Enablers, of Anonymous Sources and of Stringers... Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization Gone With the Wind..."
With apologies to Margaret Mitchell...
Ping
I think this is the nub of it: "* How can we stop the flood of complaints we get from the public and from the blogs about bias?" They are not particularly interested in accurate,unbiased reporting, they just want to stop the flood of complaints. Their power and influence is disappearing before their very eyes. Otherwise, this whine was too long.
The number of radio stations has declined from 10,000 to around 6,800.
Oh really? The reality is that the number of radio stations, both inside and outside the United States, is ever-growing.
http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/broadcast.htm
Only the MSM could have such delusions of grandeur as to describe Thucydides as a fellow journalist.
Secondly -- and this is representative of the way liberalism consumes itself -- you have fostered a culture of irresponsible feel-goodism for half a century now, a culture of illiteracy, superficiality, and devil-may-care hedonism. Reading a newspaper requires first that the consumer can read, which is not a given anymore. It also requires that the consumer evince some desire to read the newspaper, to keep current and involved in events. That's not likely in a culture as self-absorbed as the one you've actively promoted for 50 years. And for a newspaper to be worth a newstand nickle, it has to bear at least some allegiance to Truth, forswearing its own petty agenda in pursuit of the information readers seek.
None of these criteria are met by today's newspapers. You want to respond to the bloggers and critics who accuse you of bias? Stop tolerating bias in your reporting!
And ready the lifeboats. Because anything you do at this point is too little too late. All you can hope to do is forestall the inevitable. And I for one will laugh as I watch you drown.
"42nd Institute of Ethics in Journalism "
They have been wasting their time for 42 years!!!
When these people in the media retire from their
arrogant and deceiptive presentation of what they
think we should know, they might be able to have a future.
In the mean time, my heart bleeds peanut butter for them.
The need to know is hardwired into us all, and has been because I believe it is part of our own deepest need to survive. We need to know if there is anything massing on the other side of the mountain, whether it’s a rainstorm or a gathering storm.
It takes documentations, FR, bloggers, Glenn Beck, Rush, etc., to inform the people about the gathering storm, even with the experience of 9/11 behind them.
As Walid Shoebat says, "The are cameras there for the whole world to see, yet the world refuses to see."
Here is the full quote in context from The Peloponnesian War:
And with regard to my factual reports of the events of the war, I have made it a principle not to write down the first story that came my way, and not even to be guided by my own general impressions; either I was present myself at the events which I have described or else I heard of them from eye-witnesses whose reports I have checked with as much thoroughness as possible. Not that even so the truth was easy to discover: different eye-witnesses give different accounts of the same events, speaking out of partiality for one side or the other or else from imperfect memories. And it may well be that my history will seem less easy to read because of the absence in it of a romantic element. It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.
The problem is that many (most I think at the 'elite' level) owe their allegiance to neither but to their cocktail party friends.
The traditional journalist -- as described by Thucydides -- will always be needed and providing traditional journalism is pretty much what most media owners want as their business model.
Of course, many, if not most, media types today would obect to following traditional journalism.
The second of those questions answers the first: to appeal to an audience that gets information from the 'net, you have first to respect that audience. Fact is, people who get info from the Internet are used to the Google effect - the only real limitation on their ability to get information is their ability to ask the right questions. It's not that he Internet is filtering the information, it's that it is a wide open pipe of information.That second question presumes that the journalist (still) has the ability to selectively filter the information and still have an audience. Not now. Not an intelligent audience.
Thanks abb.
The only comment I have on this one is, well . . .
PING
It's a good read about the state of journalism and journalists.
We need to tell our audiences that our goal is to serve them as citizens first and as consumers of information second.
I'm not altogether sure what he means by that, but one possible interpretation, "Trust us to decide which information is most appropriate for you". In any case, they truly can't get over themselves.....still. They are steadily losing their grip as information gatekeepers, and are loathe to deal with the reality. So be it.
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