I'm of the age when journalists were once viewed as heroes. Edward R. Murrow was an icon in our home even with my Republican father. Our family watched Person to Person together in the living room around our RCA television, which had been built in the United States of America.
Walter Chronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, and of course, as played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Our family was friends with Ralph Morse, the photojournalist at Life Magazine who followed the first astronauts into survival training and into space.
And now? We aren't getting investigative reporting from newspapers anymore with their publishers cutting news room staffs, closing bureau offices, and isolating America to its major cities. And television news is merely entertainment.
Investigative reporting seems to be limited to the internet site ProPublica.org. Funded by the Sandler Foundation, the family behind the fall of Wachovia Savings when it purchased Golden West Financial, and JEHT Foundation, tumbled by the Madoff ponzi scheme, somehow ProPublica is still doing some of the best investigative reporting around. Check out what the bank bailout is really doing, pain killer mills in Florida, psychiatric care in Illinois public hospitals. This might be the future, links between newspapers, radio stations, and well-funded nonprofit websites. This isn't the Drudge Report or The Daily Beast. This isn't just opinion writing, but real old-fashioned investigative reporting. Take a look.
Because we aren't witnessing much reporting unless hyping Obama's trip to Europe and Turkey is still considered reporting. It reminds me of Beatlemania. OK, we want to feel some optimism, we want Obama to succeed, but we have really serious restructuring issues: we have to undo the privitizing of governmental functions that Bush took to new heights, we have to transform our economy, we have to examine our health care, education, and retirement systems. We need critical thinking not cheerleading.
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1 comment:
I'm of your age too. I work int eh media in Canada & constantly bemoan the "infotainment" culture that news reporting has become. One reason is that the "news" is a set length, ie an hour, so...if there isn't an hour's worth of "real" news, we get peoples' opinions on what you just saw/heard reported. And the ratings are higher if you report on Britney Spears or the latest octuplet births. Many young reporters are more interested in being rockstars, than in bringing stories to the fore.
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