The sad state of journalism

And another of the rapidly fading number of actual journalists bites the dust. Today Laurie Garrett of Newsday departs. Her departure is explained in a memo to colleagues dated February 28, that's reprinted at Poynter.org (scroll down the page there to find the full item. Highlights:

The leaders of Times Mirror and Tribune have proven to be mirrors of a general trend in the media world: They serve their stockholders first, Wall St. second and somewhere far down the list comes service to newspaper readerships

[snip]
The deterioration we experienced at Newsday was hardly unique. All across America news organizations have been devoured by massive corporations, and allegiance to stockholders, the drive for higher share prices, and push for larger dividend returns trumps everything that the grunts in the newsrooms consider their missions. Long gone are the days of fast-talking, whiskey-swilling Murray Kempton peers eloquently filling columns with daily dish on government scandals, mobsters and police corruption. The sort of in-your-face challenge that the Fourth Estate once posed for politicians has been replaced by mud-slinging, lies and, where it ought not be, timidity. When I started out in journalism the newsrooms were still full of old guys with blue collar backgrounds who got genuinely indignant when the Governor lied or somebody turned off the heat on a poor person's apartment in mid-January. They cussed and yelled their ways through the day, took an occasional sly snort from a bottle in the bottom drawer of their desk and bit into news stories like packs of wild dogs, never letting go until they'd found and told the truth. If they hadn't been reporters most of those guys would have been cops or firefighters. It was just that way.

Now the blue collar has been fully replaced by white ones in America's newsrooms, everybody has college degrees. The "His Girl Friday" romance of the newshound is gone. All too many journalists seem to mistake scandal mongering for tenacious investigation, and far too many aspire to make themselves the story. When I think back to the old fellows who were retiring when I first arrived at Newsday – guys (almost all of them were guys) who had cop brothers and fathers working union jobs – I suspect most of them would be disgusted by what passes today for journalism. Theirs was not a perfect world --- too white, too male, seen through a haze of cigarette smoke and Scotch – but it was an honest one rooted in mid-20th Century American working class values.

This is terrible for democracy. I have been in 47 states of the USA since 9/11, and I can attest to the horrible impact the deterioration of journalism has had on the national psyche. I have found America a place of great and confused fearfulness, in which cynically placed bits of misinformation (e.g. Cheney's, "If John Kerry had been President during the Cold War we would have had thermonuclear war.") fall on ears that absorb all, without filtration or fact-checking. Leading journalists have tried to defend their mission, pointing to the paucity of accurate, edited coverage found in blogs, internet sites, Fox-TV and talk radio. They argue that good old-fashioned newspaper editing is the key to providing America with credible information, forming the basis for wise voting and enlightened governance. But their claims have been undermined by Jayson Blair's blatant fabrications, Judy Miller's bogus weapons of mass destruction coverage, the media's inaccurate and inappropriate convictions of Wen Ho Lee, Richard Jewell and Steven Hatfill, CBS' failure to smell a con job regarding Bush's Texas Air Guard career and, sadly, so on.

What does it mean when even journalists consider comedian John [sic] -- "This is a fake news show, People!" -- Stewart one of the most reliable sources of "news"?

Garrett is 100% on the money here. The news business is now SOLELY about the business...what sells. And what has sold over the last four years is scandal and fearmongering. It's no longer about disseminating information, it's about shaping public opinion and supporting the existing power structure's agenda.

Most people I know who still get their news from mainstream sources ask me "Where do you find out about this stuff?" It shouldn't require a huge investment of time to obtain the truth about what's going on around us. Americans are more ill-informed than ever about things that actually matter, because all they get on their evening news is either right-wing propaganda, or toothless puff pieces.

Nothing was too insignificant during the Clinton years to be harped upon, whether it was Hillary's haircuts, Secret Service leaks of arguments in the presidential quarters, or what Bill Clinton ate that he shouldn't have. And yet George W. Bush lies us into a war, approves torture as a method of interrogation, and is about to dismantle the one federal program that works, and all we get is all Martha Stewart and Michael Jackson, all the time. Or we get Joe Scarborough screaming about how Hollywood is out to destroy America. Or Bill O'Reilly is screaming that the ACLU is a terrorist organization. Or we get Sumner Redstone of Viacom, admitting without trepidation that he's voting for George W. Bush because he thinks he'll be better for business. Is it any accident that the spin of CBS news became more sympathetic to the Bush Administration in the aftermath of the election and the Dan Rather debacle?

Congress is about to enact legislation that will put Americans in the hock to credit card companies and hospitals forever if they happen to run into a spate of bad luck; and that may force many workers who rely on tips to work for free, with only tips as compensation. Are we hearing about this in the news? Hell no, because we're fed a nonstop diet of Paris Hilton and Martha and Jacko and bullshit, in between accolades to George W. Bush, the King of the World.

I can't fault people like Laurie Garrett for quitting. But who's going to tell the truth now, and how will it get out there when only 7% of Americans even know what a blog is?