The Failed Media

Correspondent Mark Knoller said Sunday on "CBS Evening News" that the misleading information and deception were understandable, but that he had been "filing radio reports that amounted to fiction."

"Even as President Bush was addressing U.S. personnel in Baghdad, I was on the air saying he was at his ranch making holiday phone calls to American troops overseas," Knoller said. "I got that information from a White House official that very morning."


This is an example of what I think is a failed media. No one checks or challenges stories. They get fed information and just parrot what they're told. To a degree thats ok if they check and verify. But I think the media is just lazy anymore.

I started college in 1982 with the intention of getting a journalism degree. Two perfectly good journalists who taught me while in college affected my attitude about the field so dramatically, I dropped out in '84 because I saw this shitrain coming in the field and didn't want to play a part in it or be relegated to the garden club beat if I chose not to kowtow. I was told, if not in so many words, that idealists might as well go off and write novels, because there wasn't likely to be much room for us -- and to some degree, that was a pretty accurate call on the part of my instructors.

Admittedly, this discouraging of idealistic people from the field may well have contributed to the mess that's been made of professional journalism, I don't know. I do know that for the most part, people who rock the boat behind a VDT or on the TV or the radio often are 'disappeared' to the production staff or suddenly become nonfiction authors. The big money turned news into a product of uniform shoddiness over a decade and a half, and consumers didn't make a sound because they didn't understand the process, and didn't know anything about the veracity of the information they were getting, or its decline.

There's no benefit for anyone in rocking the boat, anymore. One of the key triumphs of the Reagan Administration was to make people mistrust, if not outright hate, investigative journalists -- especially, ones who were anti-administration. I remember polling back in the eighties that seemed to indicate people trusted journalists just a hair more than they trusted attorneys. Not to slag on attorneys, mind you -- I know enough of them to know that it was probably somebody's shouting campaign against them, in part, that made them so mistrusted.

Now, I'm not going to pretend that people in the news industry didn't do some of the work themselves -- there is barely any 'serious journalism' anymore in the mainstream; that didn't happen overnight. The network news is tabloid junk and administration press releases; local news is a schizophrenic melange of 'happy talk' and scarelore; most newspapers are owned by enormous syndicates that just run the same empty columns and bland writers over and over; the newsmagazines all parrot each other, if not the Rove press releases.

Investigative journalism engraved its own tombstone during the Clinton years by turning everything into a circus. Honest anti-administration investigative reporting went right out the window -- a juicy scandal was what was demanded, and unfortunately, Clinton provided it. Did anybody find anything on Whitewater that indicted the Clintons? Hell, no, but they found a young woman who'd given Clinton a blow job -- and that was more important than a story that was too convoluted and had no sufficient basis in fact, that would have required people to think to become outraged -- and that might not have outraged them anyway, since there wasn't, apparently, any 'there' there.

After threats and punishment from the Reagan dynasty any time they actually did real investigation that didn't please the administration, they opted for fluff pieces and toeing the line. It was safer, after all, and it sold just as many papers/magazines/ads as doing what journalism was supposed to do. And ultimately, wasn't the bottom line really the most important thing? Why, of course it was! We may not be making history, but at least we're making money! Greed is good when it raises the value of your stock options!

People like Rupert Murdoch, who never gave a shit about journalism or news or telling the truth -- but who desperately loved watching their bank accounts burgeon -- took advantage of the opportunity to twist reportage to their objective ... which was making the world safe for rich, white men. They've done a nice job, too, don't you think?

It's all a big clusterf*ck, now. Those who were in it before the Reagan/GOP pogrom of the eighties have either gone off to write non-fiction books, or drunk the Kool-aid and opted to go the tabloid route and keep their jobs until they can retire and pretend they were machinists for thirty years. Anybody with any investigative skills who refused to drink the Kook-Aid now works for a (deliberately) marginalized left-wing publication like The Nation or In These Times for half the money or less. You sure ain't gonna see many of them on television or hear them on the radio. Hell, even NPR reporters seem to self-limit their behavior (probably at the behest of underwriters like Archer-Daniels-Midland).

Sorry it's so long -- I've been chewing a lot of this around in my brain since I dropped out of college almost twenty years ago. It's sad. Sadder still that the best ostensible news show on TV right now, The Daily Show, is an intentional parody of existing news shows. And frankly, it's about as accurate in the information it conveys.

in the 1990s when they went after President Clinton day after day about a sticking land dail 25 years ago and a BJ in the WH!