[Rhodes22-list] The End of the Press?

[petelargo]

like I said last week, prepare for the "blame the media" backlash. it's gonna
be big. you are right on schedule.



Brad Haslett-2 wrote:
> 
> The "old" press is dying -
> 
> http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003877601
> 
> Unless, they can get the "fairness doctrine" passed into law, and with
> an O/P/R triad (Obama/Pelosi/Reid) running the show, it could happen.
> 
> There are still a few honest voices left (see below).
> 
> Brad
> 
> -------------------------------
> 
> Editing Their Way to Oblivion: Journalism Sacrificed For Power and
> Pensions
> 
> October 24, 2008 - by edgelings
> 
> By Michael S. Malone
> 
> The traditional media is playing a very, very dangerous game.  With
> its readers, with the Constitution, and with its own fate.
> 
> The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election
> campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling.  And over the last
> few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the
> obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my
> television and my laptop computer.
> 
> But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I've begun — for the
> first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for
> a living.  A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did
> for a living, I replied that I was "a writer", because I couldn't
> bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist.
> 
> You need to understand how painful this is for me.  I am one of those
> people who truly bleeds ink when I'm cut.  I am a fourth generation
> newspaperman.  As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a
> newspaper editor in Abilene, Kansas during the last of the cowboy
> days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the
> Oregonian).  My hard-living - and when I knew her, scary - grandmother
> was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times.  And
> my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in
> intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and
> spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer.  I've spent
> thirty years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to
> magazine editor.  And my oldest son, following in the family business,
> so to speak, earned his first national by-line before he earned his
> drivers license.
> 
> So, when I say I'm deeply ashamed right now to be called a
> "journalist", you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.
> 
> Now, of course, there's always been bias in the media.  Human beings
> are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably
> colored.  Hell, I can show you ten different ways to color variations
> of the word "said" - muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly
> replied, responded, etc. - to influence the way a reader will
> apprehend exactly the same quote.  We all learn that in Reporting 101,
> or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.  But what we
> are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to
> recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and
> develop built-in alarms against their unconscious.
> 
> But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even
> though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in
> reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that
> ideal as closely as possible.  That means constantly challenging our
> own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views, and never,
> ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge
> people or institutions we admire.  If we can't achieve Olympian
> detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty - especially
> in ourselves.
> 
> For many years, spotting bias in reporting was a little parlor game of
> mine, watching TV news or reading a newspaper article and spotting how
> the reporter had inserted, often unconsciously, his or her own
> preconceptions.  But I always wrote it off as bad judgment, and lack
> of professionalism, rather than bad faith and conscious advocacy.
> Sure, being a child of the '60s I saw a lot of subjective "New"
> Journalism, and did a fair amount of it myself, but that kind of
> writing, like columns and editorials, was supposed to be segregated
> from 'real' reporting, and at least in mainstream media, usually was.
> The same was true for the emerging blogosphere, which by its very
> nature was opinionated and biased.
> 
> But my complacent faith in my peers first began to be shaken when some
> of the most admired journalists in the country were exposed as
> plagiarists, or worse, accused of making up stories from whole cloth.
> I'd spent my entire professional career scrupulously pounding out
> endless dreary footnotes and double-checking sources to make sure that
> I never got accused of lying or stealing someone else's work - not out
> any native honesty, but out of fear: I'd always been told to fake or
> steal a story was a firing offense . . .indeed, it meant being
> blackballed out of the profession.
> 
> And yet, few of those worthies ever seemed to get fired for their
> crimes - and if they did they were soon rehired into an even more
> prestigious jobs.  It seemed as if there were two sets of rules:  one
> for us workaday journalists toiling out in the sticks, and another for
> folks who'd managed, through talent or deceit, to make it to the
> national level.
> 
> Meanwhile, I watched with disbelief as the nation's leading
> newspapers, many of whom I'd written for in the past, slowly let
> opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the
> front page.  Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in
> my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest
> copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York
> Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town
> paper in the U.S.
> 
> But what really shattered my faith - and I know the day and place
> where it happened - was the War in Lebanon three summers ago.  The
> hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia only carried CNN, a
> network I'd already learned to approach with skepticism.  But this was
> CNN International, which is even worse.  I sat there, first with my
> jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field
> reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on
> Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah
> missiles raining down on northern Israel.   The reporting was so
> utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching,
> assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of
> the story . . .but it never happened.
> 
> But nothing, nothing I've seen has matched the media bias on display
> in the current Presidential campaign.  Republicans are justifiably
> foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press
> coverage of the two candidates and their running mates.  But in the
> last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass -
> no, make that shameless support - they've gotten from the press, are
> starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the
> long run when we don't have a free and fair press.  I was one of the
> first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan
> Rather - not because of his phony story, but because he refused to
> admit his mistake - but, bless him, even Gunga Dan thinks the media is
> one-sided in this election.
> 
> Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm not one of those people who think the
> media has been too hard on, say, Gov. Palin, by rushing reportorial
> SWAT teams to Alaska to rifle through her garbage.  This is the Big
> Leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov.
> Palin better be ready to play.  The few instances where I think the
> press has gone too far - such as the Times reporter talking to Cindy
> McCain's daughter's MySpace friends - can easily be solved with a few
> newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha Bureau.
> 
> No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is
> the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side - or worse,
> actively serving as attack dogs for Senators Obama and Biden.  If the
> current polls are correct, we are about to elect as President of the
> United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost
> no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk)
> and has entire years missing out of his biography.  That isn't Sen.
> Obama's fault:  his job is to put his best face forward.  No, it is
> the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative
> media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has
> systematically refused to do so.
> 
> Why, for example to quote McCain's lawyer, haven't we seen an
> interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer - when we know all
> about Mrs. McCain's addiction?  Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that
> hard to interview?  All those phony voter registrations that hard to
> scrutinize?  And why are Senator Biden's endless gaffes almost always
> covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?
> 
> The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have
> two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.  Middle
> America, even when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as
> the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the
> temerity to ask a tough question of a Presidential candidate.  So much
> for the Standing Up for the Little Man, so much for Speaking Truth to
> Power, so much for Comforting the Afflicted and Afflicting the
> Comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used
> to believe we lived by.
> 
> I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to
> behave in a manner that seems to be entirely against their own
> interests, it's because we don't understand what their motives really
> are.  It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting
> everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is
> trying to commit suicide - especially when, given our currently
> volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama
> presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50:50.
> 
> Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever
> their political bias, are human torpedoes . . .and, had they been
> unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as
> much as they did McCain's.  That's what reporters do, I was proud to
> have been one, and I'm still drawn to a good story, any good story,
> like a shark to blood in the water.
> 
> So why weren't those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the
> Obama campaign?  Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream
> media betrayal?
> 
> The editors.  The men and women you don't see; the people who not only
> decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn't; the managers who give
> the reporters their assignments and lay-out the editorial pages.  They
> are the real culprits.
> 
> Why?  I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I
> could have been one:  Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where
> you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of
> power . . . only to discover that you're presiding over a dying
> industry.  The Internet and alternative media are stealing your
> readers, your advertisers and your top young talent.  Many of your
> peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared.  Your job
> doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your
> started your climb.  The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you
> any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before
> you cross that finish line, ten years hence, of retirement and a
> pension.
> 
> In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -and desperate times
> call for desperate measures.  Even if you have to risk everything on a
> single Hail Mary play.  Even if you have to compromise the principles
> that got you here.  After all, newspapers and network news are doomed
> anyway - all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can
> retire.
> 
> And then the opportunity presents itself:  an attractive young
> candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he
> offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix
> everything that has gone wrong in your career.  With luck, this
> monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media
> via a revived Fairness Doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid
> of secret votes, and just maybe, be beholden to people like you in the
> traditional media for getting it there.
> 
> And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country . . .
> 
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