This is a good move by cnn. 80% of FoxNews sucks and now only 80% of cnn will suck.
Upon Receiving Freedom of Speech Award From The Media Institute Friends & Benefactors Awards Banquet Washington, D.C. October 16, 2007
“Now, I’ll conclude with good news and bad news. First, the bad: The public hates politics and the press. People don’t trust either institution, even though they sustain our system of free intellectual enterprise. Those of us involved in either profession - or in my case, both - shouldn’t complain. We need to ask how things reached this state, and how we can fix the problem. Now the good news: I don’t think any of the weaknesses I have cited are inherent or irreversible. I have spent nearly 30 years of my life in the business of journalism, and with luck, I’ll get 30 more. I love the business and the people who work in it. My experience as White House press secretary confirmed what I always have known: Reporters are curious, aggressive, eager to learn, and interested in ideas. They share many of the frustrations I have mentioned this evening. They want to range wider, dig deeper and explore more broadly than they can today. They hate censorship. They love what they do. They see it as a noble calling. They want to get better at their jobs, and they want to grind their competitors into dust. They know the public has become sick of vicious political discourse and the media who pass it on. They know the country teems with new kinds of stories, incredible innovations, novel ways of attacking the problems we all confront. But everyone needs to realize that the days of the old-fashioned newsroom are over. It’s a different world out there - wilder, more competitive, and much less predictable than even a decade ago. Rather than cursing innovation, journalists need to embrace it. They need to get out of their cubicles and plunge into the task that drew most of us into the business in the first place the challenge of engaging a chaotic world filled with willful fellow human beings; a world of joy and agony; of triumph and crushing failure; a world united by love and atomized by hatreds and aggression, The democratic media provide new tools for examining our world, new competitors for reporting about that world, and new reminders to the press establishment that markets really do work - and people want better than they’re getting.
I come not to bury journalism, but to celebrate and challenge it. It’s a cliche that every crisis presents an opportunity, but it’s true: The democratization of the media is a good thing. We now face competition from all quarters - including from people who have specialized expertise that journalists lack. We ought to welcome the new participants in the game and learn from them. They should do the same with us. There’s an old boast in the business - that the job of a journalist is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The thing is, we never realized that we were becoming The Comfortable - with good pay, job security, and access to movers and shakers all around the world. We need to cast off our coziness, venture away from safe stories and presumptions and into the wilderness of new topics, new ideas and new sources of information. In that quest lies the possibility of fulfillment and joy - and the hope of keeping alive the text and the spirit of the First Amendment.”
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- And the LORD said to Moses, "Go, get down! For your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt have corrupted themselves.
- 8
- They turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them. They have made themselves a molded calf, and worshiped it and sacrificed to to it, and said, "This is your God, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt!"
The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day. Now the power to determine each day what shall seem important and what shall be neglected is a power unlike any that has been exercised since the Pope lost his hold on the secular mind.
Ben Bradlee (Washington Post editor of Watergate infamy) joins Lippmann in worshiping the false god of man.
JIM LEHRER: Ben Bradlee is one of America's most famous newspaper editors and he believes the practice of journalism is more than a job.
BEN BRADLEE: I don't mean to sound arrogant, but we're in a holy profession.
JIM LEHRER: A holy profession?
BEN BRADLEE: Yeah and the pursuit of truth is a holy pursuit.
50 percent of journalists [say] they have no religion, and some 80 percent rarely ever [go] to church.