I was just reminded the last couple days about the good and bad of journalism. For some reason, while channel surfing, a 20/20 John Stossel story caught my attention. I detest Stossel, but the subject was the US Education system and he just happened to say something that sucked me in as I surfed by. After about 10 minutes I was fully reminded how pathetic most television news has become. The gist of the story was how the US Education system underachieved (I turned it off as he made it clear that he was only pushing vouchers with the story - not that I agree or disagree with that). You would think finding facts to back that statement up would be easy since the US is one of the richest countries in the world and students score fairly low compared to other industrialized nations. But even when facts are easy to come by, TV news generally prefers to go for the 4th grade reading level audience and use extremely deceptive, ambiguous, and emotional references and statistics. Nothing in the story was really put in context, so you are constantly left with just enough information to duke it out on a Sunday morning political talk show, but not enough to actually make any informed judgments. Contrast that with Will's most recent article for Slate that is packed with facts and statistics, all documented above and beyond journalism standards (even a lowly intern gets credit). A primary duty that journalism can provide is fact checking politicians and public policy, and it seems that duty gets overlooked more and more in favor of being fast and breaking a story first. Every local news broadcast in Austin has opening sequences that play bad music and flaunt that they, "Bring you the breaking stories first...." as if that means something. Teacher's Pets What is journalism for? Surely not as a mouthpiece for politicians and to keep us updated on a missing teenager in North Dakota.
Will is an example of what journalism should be, and is more often in print, than on the tube. Although the mainstream print media has declined badly, and Will's gig is not in the mainstream, yet, print journalism (I'm talking about what we read, obviously, wherever that may be) shines compared to the banal tripe coming from the major news outlets on the networks, and on cable. My mother found a stack of old Time magazines in the attic of the family seat, recently. She said I had asked her to save them, and they ended up there for 39 years. Apparently, I was going off on an adventure, and wanted to catch up when I returned. We all forgot about it until she poked around up there. Why someone in their 80's climbed a pull-down stair to go up into that attic... well, let's just say I'm glad she made it down in one piece. They go from December of 1966, to October of 1967. The first December issue has a cover of Bennett Cerf, "Books by the Billion." It is stuffed with news articles. The last issue is a photo of an American GI in a foxhole, hunkered down, his hands covering his helmet. The title is, "Rising Doubt About the War." It is stuffed with news articles. That seems to be a pivotal period. The intervening issues are filled with coverage of the war... more and more as the year goes on. Time is a husk of what it was then. The difference is truly shocking. Food for thought. It's a kick reading the ads, by the way. Keep D&D Civil.
The title of this thread has, unfortunately, been made an oxymoron by the majority of available examples. I'm not sure I believe there was ever a golden age of journalism though - the examples of quality journalism were highpoints at the time, not representatives of the time. That being said, I don't have direct experience of the 'golden era' of journalism since it was before my time. The problem now, I think, is that the blatant bull****ters have the loudest bullhorns and the biggest bankrolls. Journalism isn't rewarded for quality, it's rewarded for ratings, because ratings are rewarded with revenue. And the revenue has become the motive - resulting in an 'only in it for the money' truism that also happens to be true; if it pays your bills, won't make you wealthy, and you still want to do it, either you really want to do it or you don't have better options. In a field like journalism, the poor saps who lack better options likely wouldn't make it to a position of prominence or, for that matter, any position at all. But now, if you're good at generating ratings, no matter how inept, manipulative, or just plain stupid you happen to be in your chosen profession, you can still (especially if you're either attractive our loud) be 'successful' as a 'journalist' (a phrase that can be generalized; "You can still get rich and famous as a television personality.") There are few media personalities who have answered to a higher calling than consulting the guidebook for giving the demographics what they want. Finding people in any field who aren't simply 'in it for the money' is just as difficult in medicine, law, and politics as it is in journalism. This is the profit principle coming back to bite a chunk out of our collective ass - and the masochists who still believe in the beneficience of the profit principle have apparently mistaken that ass-bite for erotic foreplay.
