In honor of David Halberstam...

Media not living up to their potential


David Halberstam, Nov 1999

Excerpt:


I thought that with the end of the century approaching, it might be a good time to take stock of where this profession is. Obviously, it should be a brilliant moment in American journalism, a time of a genuine flowering of a journalistic culture...


But the reverse is true. Those to whom the most is given, the executives of our three networks, have steadily moved away from their greatest responsibilities, which is using their news departments to tell the American people complicated truths, not only about their own country, but about the world around us...


What I think is happening is something extremely serious,nothing less than a change in the value system in a very important part of the news business.


At the core of the old value system was a belief on the part of the men and women who worked in journalism that this was an uncommonly privileged life, that we did not do this for the money -- almost all of us could have made a great deal more money in some other field, but we were uncommonly privileged, free men and free women working for a free press in a free society, beneficiaries of exalted constitutional freedoms, willing, if need be on occasion, to report to the nation things which it did not necessarily want to hear.


What has changed is not the talent and idealism and passion of the journalists out there, but the value system which governs the way they work, and finally what gets in the paper or on the air...


A number of things stand out in the change of values which has come about in the last decade or so. Because of its growing power and influence and because of the ever-greater competition, not just network against network, but network against cable show, the television executive producers have redefined what constitutes news -- often going for stories that television likes to cover, stories which are telegenic, because they have action or are sexy or are tabloid- or scandal-driven.


We have morphed in the larger culture from a somewhat Calvinist society to an entertainment society, and that is reflected in the new norms of television journalism -- where the greatest sin is not to be wrong but to be boring. Because boring means low ratings. And so altogether too many people at the top in the television newsrooms have accepted the new, frillier dictates of the men and women above them in the corporations.


But the quantum change had come with the coming of cable, and the fierce new competition generated by cable news shows, which were primarily about sex, scandal and celebrity. Or celebrity, sex and scandal. Soon, we began to see a willingness on the part of the networks -- their own audience fragmenting, their ratings down -- to embrace, particularly in their magazines, these tabloid values as their own.


Magazines which were essentially tabloid were inexpensive to produce, more so than sitcoms, seemed to have acceptable ratings, and so they proliferated under the guise of being news. And a great many of our colleagues went along with it -- for immense salaries and a great deal of air time, of course...


Somewhere in there, gradually, but systematically, there has been an abdication of responsibility within the profession, most particularly in the networks.


Television's gatekeepers, at a time when a fragmenting audience threatens the singular profits of the past, stopped being gatekeepers and began to look the other way on moral and ethical and journalistic issues. Less and less did they accept the old-fashioned charge for what they owed the country.


The viewpoint seemed to be -- from their testing and polling -- that the American people did not want to know what was going on, so why bother them with unwanted facts too soon? So, if we look at the media today, we ought to be aware not just of what we are getting, but what we are not getting; the difference between what is authentic and what is inauthentic in contemporary American life and in the world, with a warning that in this celebrity culture, the forces of the inauthentic are becoming more powerful all the time.

Who was David Halberstam?

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Folks, this cuts the very core of why our democratic republic is failing. The American experiment is in danger as a result.

We have lost a good man.

I read an article today about his death. A bureau chief under whom he worked in Vietnam related an anecdote about him.

After a brutal defeat in which many Americans were killed, DH called a general and got permission to visit the site of the massacre in the morning. The general then tried to intimidate him by saying something like "I can't believe you lowly journalists have the nerve to call my home at night..." DH who was very young at the time replied. "I'm not one of your corporals. I will call you at your home any time I please if it helps me do my job to serve the American people."

DH personally answered one of my letters several years ago. He will be missed. :-(

The Making of a Quagmire

The Best and the Brightest

The Powers That Be

many others, but those are the ones that shed light on the things that are turning us into a fascist state:

corrupt military; corrupt, hubristic government; powerfully concentrated, corrupt media

just look at what this has wrought. Just look.

we have no Halberstams anymore, except for some bloggers like Josh Marshall.

Its a sad day to losse Halberstam and its a sad day to know there is no replacement

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