View Full Version : Death of American journalism...



SoonerDave
03-21-2014, 08:17 AM
Perhaps this is something others have already noticed, and to an extent I knew this was true - but never quite to the extent it "hit" me over the last week.

Hard, trustworthy American journalism as we have come to know it is, essentially, dead.

I kind of came to this conclusion by inference following a series of things that finally locked in my own head what I knew to be true in the abstract. Here's kind of a sample over the last few days/weeks/months that finally caused the lightbulb in my head to go off.

Just this week, a peer-reviewed article appeared in a British journal that established there was no causative link found between the consumption of saturated fats and heart disease/heart attacks. It was huge because the authors admitted this went against the grain of the last twenty or so years of "conventional wisdom." Now, regardless of the accuracy of this study, it seemed relevant and legitimate enough to me that it would get some domestic (US) play in the news. But how much did I see? None.

Reminded me of a similar thing about two or three years ago - another study, also published in the Lancet (British equivalent of the AMA journal) that concluded statins should simply not be given to women. And that doctors in Britain were starting to heed that advice. How much play did that story receive in America? Not much, at least that I can recall. And it wasn't until we heard about the latter-day association of Lipitor to increases in incidence of diabetes in women did we even start to hear anything adverse about statins in the mainstream media. And a similar story - again, not domestic, but I'm not sure it was British - that middle- to older-age men with no history of cardiovascular disease/heart attacks don't benefit at all from statins.

The intent isn't to focus on medical stories. Those are all just some general examples that happened to be medical. Then came this last week with the Malaysian Airlines missing plane disaster, and the true state of American media just came to the fore. Wild theories, few facts, and to top it all off, one of the biggest outlets of them all actually had someone on postulating that the plane was sucked up by a black hole. Seriously. IT took information from other outlets (again, some British) to pick up on the fact that parroting the Malaysian government's line on the "investigation" was a loser from the outset.

I think about these kinds of incidents, realizing that some of the better (any?) journalism came from outside the US, supposedly the bastion of a free press. I think about when I was a kid and was just old enough to understand the nature of the investigation into the Nixon administration, and to think of how far American journalism has declined since that time. We don't investigate anymore. We don't challenge. We take the public line on everything. I doubt anyone like a Woodward or Bernstein could even get a job in the mainstream media these days.

We don't hear anything adverse in the medical field if it might tend to run opposite to what might be the better interests of large pharmaceutical corporations. We don't hear anything adverse about particular politicians if it breaks against the agendas that journalists - at least in theory - aren't supposed to have. Yet we've somehow allowed American journalism deteriorate into this Captain Kangaroo world of dancing bears and happy talk, while allowing it to abdicate its role as the neutral watchdog over companies, governments, officials, and, at times, citizens.

Not anymore.

Its even true at the local level. Remember when local media broke the County Commissioners scandal, or the illegal tax breaks handed out by the "Oklahoma Industries Authority" to GM back in the day? Or DHS corruption under the leadership of erstwhile head Lloyd Rader? Heck, how many of us remember the last time a local news outlet broke a real story requiring real investigation and the attendant risk associated therewith? And, no, sweeps-week pieces about "Secret Mold In Your Sink - Friend or Foe?" do not count.

This is not a liberal/conservative issue in my book. It should be an American issue, an issue of how an important pillar of our institutional structure is corroding and rotting from within, allowing who-knows-what to go on unchecked and unknown.

That's to the detriment of everyone.

tomokc
03-21-2014, 08:54 AM
Dave, this is a great post. I get my local news from this place because local TV news is a police blotter recitation and the outrage of the day. My national & international news comes from NPR & WSJ, two very disparate sources.

I value traditional media because of the chain of command/checks & balances within those organizations, but they come at a price. In a world where content is free, many people won't pay for that, and they then don't understand why the news has gone to hell. I see the causal relationship.

How to fix? Others smarter than me will have to find the solution. In the meantime I'll be supporting OKC Talk, and subscribing to the WSJ and underwriting NPR.

Jim Kyle
03-21-2014, 10:16 AM
How to fix? Others smarter than me will have to find the solution. In the meantime I'll be supporting OKC Talk, and subscribing to the WSJ and underwriting NPR.You do know that WSJ and Faux News have the same owner, don't you?

I trust the BBC more than any domestic source. In addition, they usually have the details at least 24 and sometimes 48 hours before any US media tells us about them. I have a bookmark to BBC News - Home (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa) that gives me access instantly.

kelroy55
03-21-2014, 10:31 AM
Unfortunately I think with the 24 hour news cycle and the internet, good journalism has taken a backseat to being first. I also like the BBC and PBS news. They actually cover stories rather than run through them to get to the next one.

MsProudSooner
03-21-2014, 05:02 PM
NPR does a good job.

TaoMaas
03-23-2014, 05:53 AM
This is not a liberal/conservative issue in my book. It should be an American issue, an issue of how an important pillar of our institutional structure is corroding and rotting from within, allowing who-knows-what to go on unchecked and unknown.

That's to the detriment of everyone.

Bingo! You're exactly right! Unfortunately, you're about a decade or so too late. What you're really mourning is investigative journalism. Cable tv and the internet have all but killed that off. Ultimately, it's about money, really. A news source has to have the funds to allow a reporter the time to follow leads and dig into stories. Most of our traditional outlets are being choked out because of the erosion of their influence. Who reads a newspaper when they can read the same thing on the internet? The real pisser is that we all used to be okay with paying to have the newspaper delivered to our door, but we balk at paying a similar amount to have that same news delivered to our computer. So I guess you could say that WE are the real problem. There are new global outlets, like Yahoo or Google, who have the money, but they lack the inclination to fund investigative reporting.

Jersey Boss
03-23-2014, 02:37 PM
The consolidation of media outlets is also partly to blame. If a newspaper has other newspapers, radio and television in their holdings and gets blackballed on access, the repercussions domino.

bradh
03-23-2014, 06:00 PM
Very similar to what sports journalism has become. While I admit to being a loyal reader to ESPN.com's Page 2 back in the day (before it became Grantland), it spawned an entire generation of sports writers who valued being cute and funny over being informative and accurate.

I will say Grantland has raised the bar a bit from what Page 2 was, but you really can't beat the guys who put in the effort with the players and teams, especially when the others are just writing on observations made through a laptop screen.

tomokc
03-24-2014, 07:20 AM
You do know that WSJ and Faux News have the same owner, don't you?

Jim, yes I do, but their differences are night & day. I can't watch Fox (or MSNBC) because of its inane political bias. That isn't present in the non-editorial content at the WSJ where I get basic information about the Malaysian flight, Washington mudslide, Syrian war, Russian occupation, Supreme Court argument, etc., and read right through them without distraction. Hitting political bias while I'm reading basic news & information is like hitting a speedbump on the highway. But that changes when I turn to the editorial pages. I read the opinions from both left and right because the slant is expected - I want to see what each is thinking and preaching because I learn from each.

If I disqualify a news source because of who owns it, then I've guaranteed cerebral myopia. If I limited myself only to sources that I agreed with 100% of the time, then I'd only read what I wrote!

ou48A
03-24-2014, 07:32 AM
I posted this almost a year ago. Its probably worth looking at again.


CBS Anchor: 'We Are Getting Big Stories Wrong, Over and Over Again' | The Weekly Standard (http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/cbs-anchor-we-are-getting-big-stories-wrong-over-and-over-again_722331.html)

CBS anchor Scott Pelley said at a speech at Quinnipiac University that journalists "are getting big stories wrong, over and over again."

"Our house is on fire," said Pelley. The video of Pelley's speech is courtesy of nowthisnews.com.

"These have been a bad few months for journalism," he added. "We're getting the big stories wrong, over and over again."

The CBS newsreader was quick to take at least partial blame. "Let me take the first arrow: During our coverage of Newtown, I sat on my set and I reported that Nancy Lanza was a teacher at the school. And that her son had attacked her classroom. It's a hell of a story, but it was dead wrong. Now, I was the managing editor, I made the decision to go ahead with that and I did, and that's what I said, and I was absolutely wrong. So let me just take the first arrow here."

And Pelley said the republic relies on the quality of the news business. "Democracies succeed or fail based on their journalism," said Pelley. "America is strong because its journalism is strong. That's how democracies work. They're only as good as the quality of the information that the public possesses. And that is where we come in."

ou48A
03-24-2014, 07:40 AM
Very similar to what sports journalism has become. While I admit to being a loyal reader to ESPN.com's Page 2 back in the day (before it became Grantland), it spawned an entire generation of sports writers who valued being cute and funny over being informative and accurate.

I will say Grantland has raised the bar a bit from what Page 2 was, but you really can't beat the guys who put in the effort with the players and teams, especially when the others are just writing on observations made through a laptop screen.
I agree.
ESPN's commentary is way too much like tabloid journalism and its bad for sports IMHO...
Unless they are covering an OU I limit the amount of ESPN's sports coverage in print or on TV that I follow.

Jim Kyle
03-24-2014, 09:55 AM
If I disqualify a news source because of who owns it, then I've guaranteed cerebral myopia. If I limited myself only to sources that I agreed with 100% of the time, then I'd only read what I wrote!Good point, but as one who experienced from the inside the subtle ways in which an owner could influence editorial policy while appearing to have no bias in the reporting, it doesn't always work that way. "It isn't news until we print it" does guarantee a myopic result, and that's a direct quote from my city editor back in the day, echoing the policy of Mister G. There, owner influence wasn't confined to the editorial page.

Adolph Ochs, who created the New York Times and made it the outstanding paper of its time (sadly it no longer follows his tradition) used to assign not one, but two, reporters to each story that had a chance of being controversial. He picked them for their bias, one for each side, and ran their reports side by side. That tended to even out the bias inherent in each individual's observations. However, in those days journalists didn't treat their subjects with kid gloves and simply echo what spin doctors told them...