The Death of Journalism, 2008

UPDATE; October 28, 2008 8:00 am: ABC News columnist Michael Malone has updated, edited and expanded the essay discussed below and ABC NEWS has published it on the flagship ABC NEWS Website. This searing indictment of the election coverage of 2008 is a must read essay. Link over to ABC NEWS and read the entire essay now: Media's Presidential Bias and Decline

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ABC News columnist Michael Malone, curiously writing in Pajamas Media, has a must read essay that documents the death of journalism in the United States during the 2008 election. Please link over and read the entire essay, even though it is rather long. Here are just a few of his key points:

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...... .....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...... .....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 Afflicting and Afflicting the Comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

What frightens me the most, Mr. Malone, is that my fellow liberals cannot see or simply refuse to see what is happening right before our eyes. Believe me, this will come back to haunt us all.