Journo sentiments
April 27th, 2007
OK. OK.
I don’t have the blog ‘habit.’ some of us will just come to it slowly, what can I say.
But trust ol’ Bill Moyers (the Jiminy Cricket of journalist ethics) to cut to the heart of the spectre that’s been haunting free speech, and get me back on the GUI page. Put differently, quo vadis you journalists? Can’t keep blaming your funk on cable comedy and bloggers forever, particularly when they’re beating your time.
Just got done watching the second Moyers PBS episode this week, and: (a) the Jon Stewart interview captured everything that makes The Daily Show worth watching; (b) the Josh Marshall (talkingpointsmemo.com) interview gives me hope that actual investigative reporting is still possible in the U.S.
OK, right, Marshall’s talkingpointsmemo.com (go look at it! as if you hadn’t already) is already known by zillions. I was certainly aware of their role in connecting the dots on the U.S. attorneys story. But Moyers’ program tells us why we have to get over the idea that the city newspaper is necessarily the soul of ‘real’ journalism, in the speaking-truth-to-power sense. The dailies were done when it became possible for “competing” papers in the same city to occupy the same newsroom (somehow I still don’t get that), when “objectivity” (aka cult of the single true account) made multiple papers in a single market rendundant.
[Heck, who needs more than one paper in a town when all the papers are objective? Who was it that said when two parties always agree, one is unnecessary?]
But anyway for the last couple of years I’ve been fretting about the prospects for U.S. journalism, not overly sympathetic to the pros who want along with going public, complained that stockholders wanted profits first…and then have carped about the ‘threats’ to all the classic journalistic norms posed by online chatter and observation.
Well, I’m feeling much better now. Journalism (at least its online form) has gone back to basics — reporting, legwork, skepticism, logic — and a good thing too.
Entry Filed under: MediaNouveau, CulturlStudys
1 Comment Add your own
1. Alden Begleiter | July 7th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
Who was it that said when two parties always agree one is unnecessary?
That would be William Wrigley Jr. – the chewing gum guy. He was talking about business partners. I suspect his own.
The pure external objectivity you talk about, I believe, assumes a classical Newtonian view where reality is separate and apart from the observer. If we take a post-modern view where (whether a piece of art or a reported event) reality takes shape partly based on the observer (reader as well as reporter) then perhaps the reality of an event will continue to evolve as more people write, read and talk about it. I am not talking about bias or revisionist history but an actual shift of reality. I know this sounds strange or even absurd but no more so than the kind of existence/non-existence reality based on observation that Schrödinger talked about.
The cat is dead, long live the cat.
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