"They’ll leave people out who need good-quality news the most. They will probably cater to older, wealthier men who (for now) make up the demographic most likely to pay for news. There will be idiocy and the enablement of rich idiots. But there will also be new generations of journalists willing to leap into an unsteady industry because they think explaining the world around them is worthwhile, if not particularly remunerative. The sanctimony that Brown sniffs at certainly exists, but a little bit of the holy spirit is probably necessary to report on contemporary America. Even if past experience has taught journalists that change is often a destructive force, the crisis is here, and it needs solutions if we’re going to keep recommending, in good conscience, that promising young talent join the media’s ranks."
"The sanctimony that Brown sniffs at" — Tina Brown (once the editor of The New Yorker) said that British reporters see journalism "as a job" and "They don’t see it as a sacred calling," and she added "I think there’s something to be said for that."
Posts
70 comments:
Oh no
Anyway ….
Journalists don't "explain the world" and have not done so since the 1960s. Journalists are activists promoting their pet progressive causes as an adjunct force supporting all other prog activism. And that is all they have been for most of my life.
Just ask yourself: When was the last time you read a news article that answered all the 5 Ws of Who, What, When, Where, Why? An even then, DID NOT TELL YOU WHAT TO THINK ABOUT IT? Getting the 5 Ws is rare enough, usually one gets two or three at most - Who, a partial What, at most. Essentially no articles occur without directions about how you are supposed to react to the "news" presented.
Journalism has been dead for a long time now. What this post is about is the death of activism in the form of printed newspapers.
"sacred calling" What a load of nonsense. They are rich kids who want to be admired and courted for the influence they can wield as so-called journalists who set the narrative. There is a good reason why intelligence agencies have agents as journalists, it is all propaganda.
The British system is also far from perfect, but it is at least a little bit more honest. Talk about setting a low bar though...
Did it ever occur to them that their industry might die out completely? That there is no "rethink" that is productive or possible? History is full of paying jobs and services that no longer exist.
(We'll if we're not paid, who will take care of all the horses during the opera? No! No! You're not getting it. There won't be any more horses bring people to the opera.)
"If there aren't paid journalists, where will people get their accurate information?"
Just typing the question makes me laugh.
What drugs is Brown taking? Every single journalist thinks they're on a sacred calling. It's ridiculous. Their inability to impartially report the news has ruined the business.
Survival of the fittest to print.
It’s actually good for us.
Reporting the news is a job, and a worthwhile one. Supporting the Narrative is a sacred calling; don't expect to be paid much for that one. It's not exactly a niche specialty.
here's An Idea..
MAYBE IF journalists Tried to report the news, instead of the DNC opinion; people would read them.
If all there is going to be; is a reiteration of the liberal talking points,
Why pay for it? Why read it? Why read it again in Another paper? Why pay to be in an echo chamber?
Actual Information. Actual independent thoughts.. Just an Idea
A BA in Journalism comes with a certain degree of sanctimony. Of course, what the author here is dancing around is that, apart from the damage done by the internet to the advertising revenue stream, the trustworthiness of the content itself has been damaged by a generation of sanctimonious reporters whose higher mission of promoting the progressive narrative has sacrificed objectivity.
There's a simple solution: more stories about Taylor Swift and/or Trump. Oh wait, they're already doing that.
"The business models that will sustain journalism in the future won’t be perfect . . . They’ll leave people out who need good-quality news the most."
They'll be racist! Women and minorities hardest hit!
"They will probably cater to older, wealthier men who (for now) make up the demographic most likely to pay for news."
Bad, bad men. They should pay for everyone, as reparations for the patriarchy.
"a little bit of the holy spirit is probably necessary to report on contemporary America"
Necessary to serve up the PC narrrative just right.
"They don’t see it as a sacred calling"
For progs, if it doesn't serve the sacred cause, it's not worth doing.
Am I to infer from the current predicament that even the prog audience doesn't want to pay to have their prog biases confirmed?
Flatwater Free Press in Nebraska is a new business model, but the content is the same liberal trash.
I get most of my news from Althouse and Power Line.
I know some people miss how Althouse puts together her headlines and pull quotes in providing a message. But this stands out for a first line of a quote:
"They’ll leave people out who need good-quality news the most."
Really?
I have found current business models for journalism fail to provide good-quality news. The most obvious example is the one-sided government approved reporting as related to Covid, which includes the censoring of viewpoints that questioned the federal bureaucracy handling of Covid, and any lower entity that followed the federal direction.
The fact that there are people who still believe the 6 foot distance rule was based on trial science or that Russia, Trump did collude to steal the 2016 election, and there was anything but a protest on January 6, 2021 shows the sorry state of current journalism.
"They will probably cater to older, wealthier men who (for now) make up the demographic most likely to pay for news."
The author thinks establishment media will survive off of subscription revenue? That's ridiculous.
I read a persuasive article a while back (I might be able to dig up the link, with some effort) that argues the business model of the media has already changed. Ad revenue is way down. Who's funding the media now are rich, lefty donors and political organizations willing to put up a lot of cash to see their views published. Makes sense.
They will probably cater to older, wealthier men who (for now) make up the demographic most likely to pay for news.
Buried lede: Women don't consume news directly but get it with the requisite filtering and commentary second- third- and sixth-hand from their friends.
No business model will work unless the business produces a useful product.
Journalism is supposed to produce news reports that are useful for understanding the world and making decisions upon those understandings. That's their product. If they lie to you, their product is useless. If they regularly get things wrong because they don't understand what they are reporting upon, the product is useless. If their goal is engage in activism, they are not even producing a news product. If their activism's goal is to shut down the reporting of news and the silencing of their supposed customers, they more resemble a crime family than a legitimate business.
I keep being told I should not be celebrating journalists losing their jobs since a free press is key to the survival of democracy. I celebrate journalists losing their jobs because a free press is key to the survival of democracy. They are objectively not a free press and the journalists are objectively not journalists.
Let me be the first (HA!): Stop whining and learn to code.
When the history of the fall of the American Republic is written, I fully expect that the release of the film version of All The President's Men will be recognized as a major inciting incident. The transformation of the popular image of journalists, particularly in their own minds, from a necessary evil to crusading heroes was pernicious. And the irony is that we now know that Woodward and Bernstein were just dupes, enabling the FBI to orchestrate a coup. Of course, with very few exceptions, today's journalists are happy just being a conduit for FBI propaganda. It's easy money. Well it was, nobody wants to pay for it anymore.
There will always be a market for journalists that can write about the truth, or at least be able to even-handedly discuss disputes. There will, hopefully, be little market for what passes as journalism in today's mainstream press. I hope 95% of them end up working at McDonalds or die of starvation.
"British reporters see journalism "as a job" and "They don’t see it as a sacred calling...."
Well... American journalists, by and large, don't see journalism as anything more than a job, either. It's the 9-5 drudgery they have to suffer through, in order to pay the bills - while they're busy spreading the Progressive gospel, of course. Now there's a religion.
Bill Ackman is getting an education in modern journalism, but fortunately, the existence of a free, open, uncensored forum has allowed him to refute the recent Washington Post hit piece.
https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1756477098313625644
Elon Musk does more for western civilization than all of the hearts beating at the Washington Post, the NYT, and all of the other hack outlets, put together. Thank you, Elon.
Behold the Clare Malone recipe for disaster and despair. Nothing about unbiased accuracy, everything boils down to catering to an audience.
Quaestor's unsolicited, unreliable, and unexciting advice to promising young talent, whatever the hell that means:
(1) Don't major in journalism, and for god's sake don't enroll in a journalism school. All of the worst offenders in journalism who have ruined that so-called profession attended a J-school, Columbia's in particular. Take a lesson from recent history and eschew the lessons taught by the despoilers of America's newsrooms.
(2) Major in something else, preferably hardcore with lots of math. Suppose upon graduation, you've got a fund of genuine knowledge and a well-honed faculty for logical thinking. In that case, you're already in the 99th percentile of J-school grads without ever attending one.
(3) Minor in history. There's lots of genuine knowledge there that you will find useful, but that's less important than studying the styles of the best popular historians, many of whom were old-school journalists and practitioners of the craft when it was admirable.
(4) Get over yourself. You're an ignorant kid. Don't be another Taylor Lorenz. Devote yourself to thirty years of honest reportage. After that, you might just fill the crusader bill.
British reporters see journalism "as a job" and "They don’t see it as a sacred calling,"
American journalists meet them half way. They see their work as a job, but they expect us to see their work as sacred.
Talk about fodder…
There is tremendous unmet demand for news and journalism right now. There seems only to be propaganda. Taibbi, Attkisson…that guy that gets beat up by the Democrat funded thugs…that Mary Catherine Gallagher woman…they’re giving it a go. Some of us are paying attention…
It’s hard to pay for all the stuff. One streaming service costs as much as my whole phone/cable/internet of five years ago. I don’t have much money left over to look at propaganda…and I’m rich.
It was just over 80 years ago when the tight channels were navigated to success in journalism. Of course, the writers were far less sanctimonious, at least in their published work.
In the magazine world if one excepts such liberal weeklies of small circulation as the New Republic and the Nation and such organs of the solid intellectuals as Harpers the tendency was toward a very timid discretion in the treatment of public affairs. This discretion was relaxed somewhat in 1932 and 1933, when readers clamored to know what was wrong with the management of American business and the upholders of the status quo were too bewildered to offer confident resistance, but reasserted itself after the New Deal Honeymoon. Among the big popular magazines with circulations of two or three million the only sort of militancy likely to be manifest thereafter was a militancy such as that of George Horace Lorimer of the Saturday Evening Post, who risked considerable losses in circulation (but, of course, few losses in advertising) by his incessant hammering at the Roosevelt Administration. Otherwise these magazines particularly the women's magazines touched controversial issues timidly if at all and confined themselves mostly to highly expert fictional entertainment and to the discussion of matters to which neither their owners, their advertisers, nor their more tender-minded readers could conceivably take exception. When an attempt was made to provide, in Ken, a liberal-radical periodical of large circulation, advertisers held off and thus condemned it to an early death. But on the whole it would be inexact to say that direct pressure from advertisers affected very largely the policy of the successful big-circulation magazines. What chiefly affected them was the desire of their owners to see their own opinions echoed, to make money by pleasing and flattering their advertisers, and at the same time to provide agreeable and innocuous entertainment.
That there was money to be made nevertheless by the sharp presentation of facts, and particularly of facts about America, was shown by the growing success of Time an expertly edited, newsy, and withal irreverent (though not at all radical) weekly and its younger sister Fortune (founded in 1930), which although edited by liberals for the benefit chiefly of the rich, developed such a brilliant technical team-research and team-authorship and trimmed its sails so skillfully to the winds of conservatism that it not only became a mine of factual material for future historians but subtly broadened reactionary minds. None of the other periodical successes of the decade promised to have so acute an effect upon the status of the writer as this adventure in writing a magazine inside the office; there were those who saw in it a threat of extinction to the free-lance journalist, a threat of the coming of the day when the magazine writer would have to look for an office job or be shut out from publication.
--Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America, September 3, 1929–September 3, 1939, Frederick Lewis Allen
I do find it interesting that today the writers fear free-lance whereas the fear in the past was of the office job or starve trend.
That “Brown sniffs at” I interpreted as something to do with brown nosing.
(1) Don't major in journalism, and for god's sake don't enroll in a journalism school. All of the worst offenders in journalism who have ruined that so-called profession attended a J-school, Columbia's in particular. Take a lesson from recent history and eschew the lessons taught by the despoilers of America's newsrooms.
(2) Major in something else, preferably hardcore with lots of math. Suppose upon graduation, you've got a fund of genuine knowledge and a well-honed faculty for logical thinking. In that case, you're already in the 99th percentile of J-school grads without ever attending one.
(3) Minor in history. There's lots of genuine knowledge there that you will find useful, but that's less important than studying the styles of the best popular historians, many of whom were old-school journalists and practitioners of the craft when it was admirable.
Agreed, and I believe these points apply to teaching as well. Degreed teachers are fine for pre-k to third grade, beyond that you need teachers who actually know the subject matter (math, science, etc.)
One model which would work is for journalists to pre-pay contracts on themselves with instructions to the trigger person to retire them if and when they report a provable lie as fact, or fail to report facts which are material to a given story. Obviously this would have to be very precisely described.
Climate scientists who wish to influence public policy could benefit form this model as well. Their model predictions could be recorded and then evaluated for accuracy when the actual measurements become available. I'd be more willing to listen to a climate scientist with skin in the game.
I don't and won't pay journalists to "explain" the world to me. They can report the news or I'll go find it myself.
The first step to reforming journalistic ethics is to ensure a "career in journalism," as journalism is defined by leftists and journalism faculty, is to make that career uneconomic.
want journalism? HERE is your journalism
ABC News Poll: Almost NINETY PERCENT Believe Biden Isn’t Fit To Serve
Meanwhile, he’s complaining about the size of ice cream packaging
resident Biden complains:
Ice Cream Portions are TOO SMALL!
Jack Poso @JackPosobiec said...
Shrinkflation so bad it’s hitting your remaining brain cells. Imagine being so dumb you admit what's happened under your administration
A former newspaperman opines:
https://donsurber.substack.com/p/let-newspapers-die
The five W's? Piece of cake.
Who? Doesn't matter, make it about Trump.
What? Doesn't matter what else, make it about Trump is an ass.
When? Whenever it makes it worse for Trump.
Where? If possible make it where the DC Circuit Court can try the case.
Why? Because Trump is a DANGER TO DEMOCRACY!!!!
I think the problem began when they stopped calling themselves reporters and started calling themselves journalists. Reporters saw their jobs as reporting the news, answering the who, what, when, where, how, and why questions. They weren't always right, but they did their best. Today's journalists see their job as a calling, and that calling is to "change the world" (to the left, naturally). Instead of finding out what actually happened, they filter their sources to find or invent sources that support the Narrative. In the end, they destroyed their credibility with much of the country. Once credibility is lost, it's just about impossible to be regained.
Personally, I'd prefer reading infuriating human writers to AI.
"But there will also be new generations of journalists willing to leap into an unsteady industry because they think explaining the world around them is worthwhile..."
Understanding the world around you is an admirable goal but based on how things are going, I wouldn't be counting on journalists being the ones who'll be helping with that.
"But there will also be new generations of journalists willing to leap into an unsteady industry because they think explaining the world around them is worthwhile, …"
The old model, where journalists reported the news and editorialists "explained it", was useful. But journalist's vain notion that we need them to save the world destroyed that.
"everything boils down to catering to an audience."
If only... Then there would be some outlets that reported the actual news, and not the narrative. No, the editors are the gatekeepers, and like the journal editors in climate science, are parachuted into place for political reliability. The Intercept even booted its cofounder Glenn Greenwald, for narrative violations.
The "job" that journalists do is to transcribe the propaganda that we are being fed. Some of them are better writers and they can be trusted to elevate the prose and try to make the propaganda more compelling, ("Joe Biden's Age is His Superpower") and some are just hacks, who are happy to have a good paying job that comes with some level of prestige, doing work that a tech writer at a washing machine manufacturer would scoff at as beneath them, and that tech writer would be correct.
Here is an interesting YouTube by the former beureau chief for the Balkans, and Pulitzer Prize winner, Chris Hedges, about how the New York Times simply transcribes propaganda in its war reporting
https://youtu.be/N0H7PIJcEP0?si=rxUWSjpxNRgquhLz
What happened to Imran Khan is kafkaesque, but it won't be reported in the US. Basically Imran Khan told his supporters about a cable that had been sent by the US to the Pakistani military that ordered them to remove him. He was arrested on espionage charges for having the cable in his possession, and imprisoned for ten years for "revealing military secrets." Now the military is hard at work overriding the will of the outraged electorate in the most recent election.
That's not the story you were told, is it? You were told that Khan was duly impeached and removed by the Pakistani Parliament and that the US was not involved.
We are just fucking lied to at every turn. And the people in the press now see lying to us as their job. Without X, and its relative, though not perfect freedom, this stuff would just be buried. Which is why Joe Biden's friends at the Delaware Chancery Court just clipped Elon Musk's fortune by tens of billions of dollars. The judge said that "this court dares to go where no other court has gone," which is a pretty funny way of saying that there was no legal precedent for her decision. Hunter, in an email on the laptop, threatened a business associate to take him to that court and assured the guy that Hunter knew and socialized with every judge on that court.
This Biden clan is the worst thing that ever happened to America. I include the Civil War in that statement, at least in the Civil War, there was a way back to the republic we all pledged allegiance too.
What sanctimonious bullshit. A journo BA apparently entitles the holder to exhibit a ginormous degree of hubris, but in reality, they are worse than politicians and not nearly as self-aware. And please don't burden me with the "we're essential to explaining the world to all of you" tripe. Burn it all to the ground, and let some honest, enterprising individuals with a sense of honor and objectivity give it a go if they can.
mikee said:
“Just ask yourself: When was the last time you read a news article that answered all the 5 Ws of Who, What, When, Where, Why? An even then, DID NOT TELL YOU WHAT TO THINK ABOUT IT? Getting the 5 Ws is rare enough, usually one gets two or three at most - Who, a partial What, at most. Essentially no articles occur without directions about how you are supposed to react to the "news" presented.”
Many years ago, I wanted to use 5 W’s and H as a metaphor for requirements analysis, and I wanted some authoritative quotes. I went to two excellent bookstores and the library of a journalism school. I could not find a single journalism textbook that addressed the 5 W’s and H. But I found countless passages on advocacy. Journalism has been dying for a very long time.
In an article lamenting the current state of the business models in journalism, Mz. Malone, in the first sentence, incorrectly employs "that" instead of "which".
Also, reviewing her website (https://www.claremalone.net/), she appears to be a media partisan, not a journalist.
She -- the author -- had nothing to say in that whole article. A list of layoff events. An anecdote or two that are complimented by the adjective pedestrian. Her own claim that she had been thinking "a lot" about the advice some journolist gave to marry rich.
And then finally the only assertion of any interest -- using that word loosely. Trump. Trump's "misinformation-strewn campaign."
I guess it still hasn't dawned on the slower ones that the misinformation has been theirs, their own, the author's and her cohorts -- and that is a uge reason why the sad, tragic layoffs are occurring. Ever fewer people have any interest in the vanity publishing that makes up mainstream journolism today. Soon it could be only Althouse.
What the authoress does know but doesn't mention is that right-of-center websites have been doing far, far better than the mainstream media. Just another bizarro quirk in a world of mad injustice to the noble crusaders like her. Who could possibly explain that?? It must be some kind of spat between Hera and Zeus. Way out of mere mortals' hands.
When I try to think about Ur-journalism, two names come to mind. Sir Francis Walsingham and Mayer Amschel Rothschild. Two men who ran networks of informants and for whom knowledge of the latest world event was survival. Who actually needs the info provided by today's journalists?
Newspapers have never been the impartial reporter of news that we wish they were. 20th century cities had Democratic or Republican or liberal or conservative newspapers, and they were read by people who wanted their biases to be confirmed, the same way we read Althouse, Insty, Slate, or HuffPo, or watch MSNBC or Fox. Those of us of a certain age learned about "Yellow Journalism" and how Hearst started the Spanish-American War. It has always been thus.
We are now witnessing technological change.
Today's J-school graduates are the equivalent of a 1970s era kid who went to college to learn how to manufacture cassette tapes or 8-tracks. We still have music, and news; we just access it differently.
Government won’t be the one to find a successful answer. I’m sure of that much.
It’s the sanctimony that really rankles. The press is now more unpopular even than Biden and Trump, and I suspect most Americans wish they’d all just go away to be replaced by someone else.
JournoLists will publish to service the special and peculiar interests of their patrons, governments and corporations, as has become their tradition.
Journalists should publish news rather than steer perception in the model of online search engines, secular religions, academic prescriptions, government dictates, etc.
But there will also be new generations of journalists willing to leap into an unsteady industry because they think explaining the world around them is worthwhile,
That's their problem. Thinking they can explains anything. Just provide the facts. ALL the facts. I'll find my own explanation. J school grads are at the bottom of the IQ scale.
These media types pretend there is no Gell Mann Amnesia. This has been going on for as long as Ive been reading newspapers and Magazines. And grew up with 3 daily News Papers delivered to the house. And Over 30 weekly and monthly magazines. It has always been the same. The news rarely got all the facts right when reporting things we knew about.
These brats have never experienced so much as a quality recession, so percentage of workforce layoffs look like extinction to them.
Wait until the extinction happens...
I prefer the citizen journalists that I find on X. I love that we have more varied news summaries and opinions now. Corporate media has been "yellow" for a long time, right?
In the old days, the printed "letters to the editor" were carefully chosen and then printed. I prefer the lightly editing free-for-all of comments sections. I'm not surprised that the "papers" will turn commenting off.
The more voices the merrier, IMHO.
Death to the MSM. I hope they fail to pay Charon his two bits, and they're forced to swim the rest of the way in the river of ink they failed to use attacking the powers that be instead of cooperating with them.
They deserve worse.
The real problem that news outlets like The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Economist, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and even, since March of 2022, Bloomberg, is that the Biden regime will not let them report the real news, news stories that hang together, even when subjected to a comments thread, because that's no longer the job that they are allowed to do. Instead they have us trapped in Plato's Cave, and show us moving shadows on the wall, that are only remotely connected to the real events that are going on in the world, so that we can't possibly know what is going on, by design. What readers want from a newspaper like the New York Times, is one that allows us to see the events that are happening, like the guy in the allegory of the cave who could see the real events, put two and two together so that the moving shadows make sense.
In other words, these newspapers are very valuable to the regime, but of little value to the consumers. They best they can do is provide a kind of minstrel show entertainment for the readers, by providing them with a sense that they are superior to those other people in the red states, by constant mockery, sometimes deserved, often dishonest. That's all they have to sell, and it's logically impossible, based on that strategy, to grow your audience beyond 30% of the country. The days when we could all fall asleep watching Johnny Carson are long gone and it's not because the networks wouldn't like the massive audiences.
Except present-day mainstream media DOESN'T provide "quality news"; it's mostly infotainment.
Most delivered TV network news-content is undigested press releases, whether government or corporate-sourced, or "lead if it bleeds" human-interest stories which match progressive political viewpoints.
Most newspaper content is also rewritten but undigested press releases, with very little investigative confirmation, and also progressive-agenda human-interest stories.
So we get "Orange Man Bad", "Uncle Joe Good", "Ukraine good/Russia bad", and "transvestite/transgender uber alles", but no meaningful journalism as of Morrow and Cronkrite et al.
The modern practice of journalism is to win awards by sleeping with your old man government leak sources. THAT is a sacred calling, to the old bureaucrats.
Ann reads the news so I don't have to!
Older, wealthier men, eh? I’m one of those, and they think they’re going to get me to subscribe to their fishwrap? What an absurd joke. I want their propaganda organs to die. I want them selling flowers on street corners to support their families. It’s doubtful I will ever again pay actual money for a news subscription that isn’t on Substack.
"...there will also be new generations of journalists willing to leap into an unsteady industry because they think explaining the world around them is worthwhile..."
Right there -- "explaining the world" -- is the whole friggin' problem of the current generation, in a nutshell. They wanna 'explain the world' to us.
Me, I don't need anyone to explain the world. What I'd like the reporters to do is 'report' on the world. That is: be as clean a conduit as they can and just give me facts. I'll assess those facts myself, thank you very much, and decide -- for myself -- what they mean. Quit tellin' me 'why': just tell my who, what, where, and how.
Be reporters and stop with the 'journalism', please. -Henry
There is not now, nor has there ever been a professional "sacred calling". Unless it's something you're willing, or preferably doing for the love of it and not money, it's no sacred calling.
It's all pomposity and smokescreen to make you accept their authority even in areas where they don't know crap. In the case of news, they get to print the smoke so it's harder for most people to see through it.
Just remember all the bullshit these "sacred" professions did during covid. News, medical, teaching all enthusiastically spouted lies they knew were lies or at the very least should have suspected. All three sought to exert themselves in self-assumed positions of control, not for you, for themselves. Hell, they're still trying, it's just worn too thin work any more.
Sacred calling my ass. My ass is more sacred.
"If there aren't paid journalists, where will people get their accurate information?"
From Substack's where we personally pay for the accuratee information
Which is to say, the place we get it now
But there will also be new generations of journalists willing to leap into an unsteady industry because they think explaining the world around them is worthwhile,
Except they are all far too stupid to succeed at doing that
And they are just too ideologically screwed up and screwed over to undertake the task for which they might be qualified: to whit, to simply and honestly report what's happening, and let us make up or own minds and understanding
So good riddance to bad rubbish
"Quit tellin' me 'why': just tell my who, what, where, and how.
Be reporters and stop with the 'journalism', please. -Henry"
google:
"here's what you need to know"
About 146,000,000 results
I'll bet about 145,999,990 of those results are more along the lines of "here's what we want to know".
Just sayin'.
So we get "Orange Man Bad", "Uncle Joe Good", "Ukraine good/Russia bad", and "transvestite/transgender uber alles", but no meaningful journalism as of Morrow and Cronkrite (sic).
Don't kid yourself. Murrow may have been OK, but Cronkite was an old socialist who was happy to peddle avuncular lies and discreet omissions, notably about Vietnam. He was a globalist who supported unified world government, which in my opinion is one of the most dangerous and evil ideas mankind has ever had. Many other leftist termites and fellow travelers preceded him in the news business. The rot goes back at least as far as John Reed and Walter Duranty.
There is NO media anymore...Just activism. Only a few REAL journalists out there, and they are harassed by the lying left and their propagandists.
"There is NO media anymore...Just activism."
A nonsensical statement. "Media" are the platforms by which information is conveyed, and they include internet, broadcast, cds, records, print on paper in many formats, film, etc.
(Also, "media" is plural, so your statement should have been correctly phrased, "There ARE no media anymore....")
Moreover, activism has been part of journalism from the beginning. "Objectivity" as an ideal of journalism was first promoted by newspaper owners in the 1800s for reasons of commerce: they didn't want their sales to be limited to audiences who shared specific political and social leanings. They saw they could increase their sales by providing information free of (overt) advocacy, apparently "objective" reporting of (just the) facts that would be palatable to readers of all political leanings, thereby expanding their paying customers.
The purpose and utility of reporting on political issues and the government was and is to inform the public such that we can make decisions as to which politicians and policies we will support...or reject. Thus, even "objective" reporting is intended to produce subjective thought and action in the public.
"'If there aren't paid journalists, where will people get their accurate information?'
"From Substack's where we personally pay for the accuratee information
"Which is to say, the place we get it now."
How do you know who are the initial sources of the information? How can you know if it's accurate or objective.
Oh, because it agrees with your preconceptions. Of course! Hahahaha!
"But there will also be new generations of journalists willing to leap into an unsteady industry because they think explaining the world around them is worthwhile...." (Implied sneer duly noted.)
It's not just worthwhile, it is essential for us to form a coherent, informed awareness and understanding of the events happening in the world and what effects those events have had or may have on us, near and far.
My defenses of journalism notwithstanding, the commercial, profit-driven mass media as they have developed in the last few decades are far from being adequate, much less exemplary of the useful or essential journalism we really need. Moreover, although there is no going back, journalism delivered in written form on paper is far preferable to the fleeting electronic non-stop streaming of sensationalized "data" that races past our eyes, ears, and minds too swiftly to be comprehended, much less appraised as to its substance and worth.
Robert Cook purposefully misses the main point of essentially every other commenter, who all recognize that "journalism" became "activism for selected progressive causes" and is no longer at all about reporting facts for the public to use in decision making.
30 years ago you might read the morning paper, and watch a half hour news broadcast in the evening. Are you more well informed now, with thousands of sources running 24 hours per day?
Hardly. Most of what passes for news is just trivia...finding out someone you never heard of before died today. Most of journalism needs a big force reduction, and the political advocacy writers need to call themselves something else...certainly not "reporters".
Robert Cook said...
"'If there aren't paid journalists, where will people get their accurate information?'
"From Substack's where we personally pay for the accuratee information
"Which is to say, the place we get it now."
How do you know who are the initial sources of the information? How can you know if it's accurate or objective.
Oh, because it agrees with your preconceptions. Of course! Hahahaha!
More projection from the Left.
On any Substack I'm willing to read, they give a link to the paper they're talking about, or the judicial ruling they're reporting on. So I can check the primary sources for myself, and do so.
So, when they're reporting on Deadpan smearing a kid "in blackface", they show the picture or the kid's whole face, that's repainted on one side and black painted on the other, you know, the Kansas City Chief's colors, as opposed to Deadspin picking an angle that only shows the black.
Or they show the whole video of the asshole trying to bully the Covington kids, rather than teh carefully edited video the "press" you "trust" (to telll the lies you want) showed.
it's a simple question to answer, when you're not a lying sack of shit dirtbag leftist
Robert Cook said...
How do you know who are the initial sources of the information? How can you know if it's accurate or objective.
1: We know, because they've told us so, that the MSM is NOT objective. And we also know, because we see it on a regular basis, that what they "report" is not accurate, and that they do not CARE whether or not it's accurate, only that it advances their preferred political narrative.
2: More importantly, I love what they tells us about the mindset of "Robert Cook", and all the other dishonest lefties:
He's never made even the slightest effort to try to figure out how to get honest news.
Always require your "reporter" provide primary sources. Occasionally check to confirm. When someone provides edited video or just a single picture, find out where you can get more.
But all this requires thought, and work.
Cookie would rather just be told what to think, and to sneer at anyone who doesn't follow along
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