The death of journalism

Funny how on the day that Moody’s recognizes what the rest of us have known for years- that the New York Times is junk, Michael Malone ABC News columnist (and admitted bleeder of ink) warns of the end of the profession of journalism (found at Little Green Footballs);

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Gov. Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to Alaska to rifle through her garbage.  This is the Big Leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play.

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No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side – or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for Senators Obama and Biden.  If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as President of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.

…it is the traditional media’s fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote McCain’s lawyer, haven’t we seen an interview with Sen. Obama’s grad school drug dealer – when we know all about Mrs. McCain’s addiction?  Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview?  All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize?  And why are Senator Biden’s endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

Journalism has been dying for a very long time…I remember sitting in the Army’s Public Affairs Office in the Canal Zone and reading the trash back in the States being published about the US troops stationed around me. Stories I knew were false – but checking the facts would destroy the narrative of drug-ravaged sex fiends in the military, so no one bothered asking the people who knew the answers.

I saw how supposed journalists didn’t bother to print stories about communist terrorists in Panama throwing bombs into the military housing areas from the Thatcher Ferry Bridge or setting off car bombs in the PX parking lot.  But Jimmy Carter wanted to give away the Canal and stories like that might inflame Americans – so you never heard them.

Until then I’d wanted to study journalism…I’d taken the course in high school and joined the Army to pay for  college to go to journalism school. I’d volunteered to train to be an Army journalist when our infantry battalion decided they needed one, earned the secondary MOS (it was 71Q, now it’s 46Q) and I took correspondence courses related to the field. That was 31 years ago. That was the year I decided to go back to the infantry and make it a career instead of becoming a journalist – the infantry was something I could trust and understand.

The First Amendment protects journalists and their sources because they’re supposed to be above the political wrangling and mud-slinging and tell Americans the truth so we can make informed decisions – to protect us from the government and the inherently crooked double-dealing thugs that populate government offices. Now journalists have become the crooked double-dealing thugs themselves for the momentary comfort they find in making the emotionally rewarding support of the candidate that makes them feel good about themselves, rather than the candidate that would protect our way of life just four more years.

Category: Politics