The year is 1947...
How do you spend your days, Mr. Journalist?
Well, I spent the 1930's looking for the human angle on the Great Depression. I talked to people in soup lines. I cheered on baseball and sport heroes. I followed FDR to his rallies. I watched the battles between the President and the Supreme Court, and I kept an eye on the wire reports in Europe. When war came in the 40's, I went overseas. I landed with the troops and wrote reports from the front.
The year is 2019...
How do you spend your days, Mr. Journalist?
I write snarky comments on Twitter. Oh, and I spend my days sifting through everything Trump does to show people how evil he is... everything. He puts ketchup on french fries! Ketchup!! Who does that?! //eye twitch Oh, and I look for things to call racism. It's all racism. Even when it isn't racism, it's racism. //eye twitch
One of these things is not like the other...
How do you spend your days, Mr. Journalist?
Well, I spent the 1930's looking for the human angle on the Great Depression. I talked to people in soup lines. I cheered on baseball and sport heroes. I followed FDR to his rallies. I watched the battles between the President and the Supreme Court, and I kept an eye on the wire reports in Europe. When war came in the 40's, I went overseas. I landed with the troops and wrote reports from the front.
The year is 2019...
How do you spend your days, Mr. Journalist?
I write snarky comments on Twitter. Oh, and I spend my days sifting through everything Trump does to show people how evil he is... everything. He puts ketchup on french fries! Ketchup!! Who does that?! //eye twitch Oh, and I look for things to call racism. It's all racism. Even when it isn't racism, it's racism. //eye twitch
One of these things is not like the other...
7 comments:
One of these things is not like the other...
Yes, one of them actually is a (long dead) journalist.
That is my answer to people who ask me why I never went back and finished my journalism degree. There is no way I could live with myself if I played the game as it is played today. The number one rule I was taught way back in the dark ages of 1983 was that news reporting meant collecting the FACTS and only the FACTS and delivering those to the people so that they could read them and form their own opinions. The reporter's opinion had no business being anywhere except the editorial page.
OT... sometimes I chuckle at the things lawyers will argue. Serial criminal Chris Brown just got arrested. During his arrest, they found cocaine in his hotel room. His lawyer claims it wasn't his.
Riiiiight. Must be some strange offshoot of the Gideons, leaving cocaine instead of Bibles.
drjim, Yep.
Stacy, I am amazed how far journalism has collapsed. I wonder how much farther they can fall?
Curiously, I am not quite as amazed at the collapse. Politics has always been a bloodsport, of course, but technology, and just the amount of noise in the world makes journalism follow the rule of the jungle ... survival. Put differently, we live in a world where you can watch/stream virtually anything you want including “news” I may be wrong, but too many people do not have the drive and interest to really try and educate themselves on complex issues. Since media sources need subscriptions or ratings to survive, giving people what they want to hear or see is the best shot at survival
I sometimes wonder, if a network news department, newspaper, or online blog actually did do objective journalism, would it prosper? would it survive?
Depending on how you look at it, Twitter may be the best or the worst thing to ever happen to journalism. Twitter made it easy for anyone willing to see that what watchdogs on the right had been saying for decades was true: the so-called mainstream media has a far-left bias. Not just bias, but bias to a degree that reasonable minds can't expect to be smoothed out with a surface application of "professionalism." On top of that, it gave the media to tool to chase that bias all the way down.
I only credit Twitter minimally with journalism's recent throes. Part of it is just simple housekeeping. The digital revolution saw wa-a-ay too many bloggers get swept up into the ranks of "serious media." Not only does this pose a saturation problem, but a culture problem, as well. Rather than acculturate to the newsroom, the bloggers brought their culture with them. That said, if newsroom culture hadn't already cheapened, they'd have never made the dash to scoop up bloggers in the first place. In any case, cheap-to-free, abundant, low-quality journalism is an unsustainable model. And, unfortunately, market corrections are no respecters of establishment. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
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