Friday, July 23, 2010

The Death of Journalism

Being a journalist was once a proud and noble profession, filled with high ideals and strong ethics. In several great movies of the early to mid 20th Century reporter were real heroes battling against corrupt government and powerful corporations.

We were inspired, even in awe as we watched Orsen Welles' Citizen Kane, spellbound by Humphrey Bogart in Deadline, USA, and mesmerized by Cary Grant and Rosiland Russell in His Girl Friday.


Get the story and get it right!

Those days are now very officially dead.

We were genuinely betrayed by FOX's gross negligence in handling the explosive Shirley Sherrod video. There are many, especially in the left who proclaim we "should have known" FOX would repeat such gross falsehoods without so much as asking for a simple verification of the tape. Regardless, FOX failed to follow the most basic of journalistic standards.

But what is much, much worse in the now revealed cabal of liberal reporters who conspired, successfully, to throw an election. Barack Obama might just have won fair and square, but now we'll never know.

In an EDITORIAL today
Investors Business Daily assesses the terrible damage the JournoList cabal did to America. They are dead on-correct in virtually every word they print:

There are so many things wrong with this, we hardly know where to start. Nominally competitors, these supposedly impartial media mavens colluded in a way that would put airline or insurance officials in the dock for anti-competitive practices. They engaged in activism instead of fact-finding and mixed incestuously with activists whom they also should have been covering impartially.

Worst of all, they deprived millions of Americans of the information they needed to size up this new face on the political scene and determine if she really was a candidate who represented their interests.

That still remains to be done — and the country is poorer for it.


I'll leave you with Anderson Cooper's on air discussion of Journalism. While he himself has often failed to live up to the standards, it's till good to hear him recite then to remind us of what we've lost.

5 comments:

Judy T said...

Bill Moyers has spoken eloquently on this over and over, notably in Jan. 2007 at The National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis Tennessee, as well as many other times. Sad state of affairs.

I was interested to read your comments on Vigilante's blog and to learn of your Unitarianism. I followed the trail here because I am a UU from Columbia, SC. and blog with my husband Tom. I have enjoyed finding you and will be a frequent visitor here. Come visit us on our blog, Two Seeds on a Blog.

Unknown said...

John Stewart puts this in context.

Bob Keller said...

Welcome Judy T. I'm glad to meet you and have you read and comment here on my blog. I'll drop over on your blog later today.

Vigilante and I share most beliefs and political philosophies and we are both Unitarians. However, you'll find (like all good Untarians) we still find a lot to disagree, even fight, about.

Vigilante said...

Judy T: I feel compelled to disclose something in these pages of Metaverse which are inappropriate for my own pages.

These days, I sometimes feel I am more political than partisan. I am still Progressive in political orientation - now more than ever. But I am less and less limited to a specific party. Both disappoint me profoundly.

But when it comes to dueling & arm-rasslin' with Wizard, both of the above somehow lapse into the background. From my POV, Wizard and I are brothers under the skin. We often fight and rarely make up. But whenever I'm composing, I'm asking myself, "What will the Wiz have to say about this?".

Why is that? Because Wizard is always honest and thoughtful. He's a blogger who will never fake it.

Doc Häagen-Dazs said...

Unitarian-Universalism? Did I hear stuff about U-Uism? I just re-churched last month. Joined my 3rd U-U congregation, and boy am I ever stoked!