Letters to the Editor
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L.W.M. and sysprog are correct - The "honorable journalist" was a brief aberration of the '50's
The notion that journalists as a class are honorable professionals guarding the principles of our democracy and our common good was a brief aberration of the 1950's and early 1960's, borne I believe of the gravity of the issues of the Great War --- the Holicost, the Bomb, America's vital role in how things turned out, for good or for bad, in both areas.
The remaining millennia-old history of journalism is pretty yellow.
This is what adds huge relevance to the Founding Fathers' view of the Press, and the modern phenomenon of centralized industrial media ownership.
As I cite in an article I link to in my sign-off (and those of you who have noticed my recent comments have grown weary of the repetition) the Founders valued the multiplicity of voices among a diverse and independent press, not some misguided expectation of integrity, when they cited the vital role of the Press in our democracy.
Modern technology has allowed corporations to grow huge, press content to become objects of profitability free of civic interest among shareholders, opinion to become homogenized, and that vital diversity of opinion the Founders valued so much to erode greatly.
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Well look at it this way
The 'journalists' are just for better or worse, propagandists. Even Gary and Salon and company. They get most of their ideas from the letters to the editor columns like this one. So does it shock everyone that it's a profoundly pointless tail chasing endeavor?
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stark contrast
Are Kamiya, Greenwald, Daou, and many others correct in their assessment that the MSM failed its mission, its (so-called) ethics, and its country between 9/11 and the invasion? My instant response is "well, yes, of course!". But why is that my immediate gut reaction? Upon reflection, for me it comes to this: I was a teenager in the 70s, so that's the era in which I became aware of the world and things political. My gut reaction to Kamiya et al.'s claims stems ultimately from comparison in my own mind of today's so-called journalism to the journalism I experienced in the 1970s. 70s journalism certainly had flaws, but it is just as certain that it was stunningly different from today. Unfortunately, that is not a good reflection on today's "journalists". Has the MSM failed during the past six years? Yes: completely, utterly, not a shred of doubt about it.
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Kamiya"s Red Rose article about the Toothless "press' gave me hope.
I only had time to read Salon's editor's Red Rose star favorites. I am certain I missed bits of good 'dust' of newsworthy particles breathing Life into the morning mist and sunlight.
I hope a singing Bluebird remains on our left shoulder while toothless dragon loyal scribes, weaken the fake neocon reign. How do we/i train a bluebird to remain?
The silence of honest reporting has been, to me, a funeral dirge. A flickering light or a spark from a thunder bolt strike, can be a great-crack-sound in the branches of a tree that the Bushco rule has burned in molten metal and now it's time to rise true citizens from this dust. Flute.
I say to the honest people...'Stay.' You are beautiful bits of sparking gold-light reflecting the sunny side of my Life. Thanks again. O, I'll 'shad up,' even tho I want to say something more and act irapuato-potato-full. Rose.
O, or Rose Pinot Noir, a sip, from a berry that's fermented from a plucked Rosewood bush, or something like that. O, or Ring around the Rosy, but let's not all of us fall down. O, or humn A Happy Bluebird sits on shoulders, and if it 'craps' on both shoulders, that's fine. O, or we wipe it off and learn to do a jitter bug cartwheel. Don't act shyward.
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"How 'journalism' works"?
Or, as The New York Times's Michael Gordon sniped to Amy Goodman when she criticized his aluminum tubes story: "I don't know if you understand how journalism works."
Yes, heaven forbid these guys should try to get such an important story right.
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Ahh...
Wait a second...
There was Jack Reed, George Seldes, Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken... dozens of others from other times, like Tom Paine and the pamphleteers of the revolution. The aberration is not the rule.
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And I'm somewhat sympathetic to the Biercian cynicism of Pluege
Did I spell that right?
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Eh?
Everybody's honorable. Everybody's dishonorable. All saints are sinners. The 50's surely weren't the halcyon days of the press, though they were the period of the most entertaining press critic, Liebling.
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Stenography
It whats for news.
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@El Cid
I think your mistake is in thinking that the Democrats are predominantly liberal. That's historically untrue - they've had a liberal wing, but so has the Republican party. It's only a very recent phenomenon that liberalism vs. conservatism have become segregated by party. The parties have been divided by class, region, and population density rather than by ideology until the post-Goldwater and civil rights era.
Clinton wasn't a liberal; neither was JFK. They were allied with liberals, and so instituted some liberal policies. But both were fairly conservative, if not ideologically "libertarian". Theodore Roosevelt was more of a liberal (if imperialist) than either of those two.
So the liberal view-point has always been a very minority view-point after WWII - it had a heyday from 1900-1940. The accusation of liberalism isn't strictly true, either in the media or in politics - what you really have is traditional conservatism, and the more radical conservatism as a reaction to the institutionalization of the New Deal, and it's transformation from a "liberal" policy to a frankly conservative one at this point.
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jojo++: What? I was precisely arguing AGAINST Democrat = Liberal
If I recall, you were arguing for a party-based difference in journalistic coverage.
I believe I repeatedly tried to distinguish between 'liberal' and Democratic -- why else did I give those examples of hawkish foreign policies by Democrats?
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Most Journalists are intimidated/conditioned
I would suspect most national journalists would agree with Gary's thought-provoking analysis of the Iraq war and the media's many failures. Many journalists would be too intimidated, though, to highlight the role of the neocons and Israel Lobby in bringing about the war.
This is shame, not only because it is critical for the media to be able to report the truth if American democracy is to function, but also because the neocons and the Lobby are working overtime to bring us another disasterous war, this time with Iran!