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Edited on Thu Jan-06-05 11:04 AM by Lydia Leftcoast
1. The older generation of journalists grew up in an age when U.S. and world history had a prominent place in school curricula. I've read a lot about history on my own, but some of my older relatives have an impressive knowledge of the subject simply based on what they learned in school. If Jay Leno were to stop my older relatives on the street and ask them about history, their answers would not be embarrassing.
2. The older generation read books for fun instead of watching TV or playing video games. About twenty years ago, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune revived a feature in which local schoolchildren are asked to write short essays in answer to certain questions. For a while, the paper ran the responses to the same questions from ca. 1900. It was humbling. The children from 1900 had larger vocabularies and wrote in more sophisticated sentences. Their writing style was consistently about two grade levels ahead of that of the contemporary children.
I attribute this to two factors:
a) Children spent what would today be their TV or video game time reading books. These were not simplified books, either, but stories written with sophisticated vocabulary and sentence structures, deemed suitable for children only because of their content. (Little Women and Treasure Island ] are two examples.) Reading these books, children unconsciously absorbed more difficult words and sentence structures.
b) Schools explicitly taught English usage and effective rhetorical devices in those days. We are now on our second or third generation of teachers who never learned these things in school. How can they teach children skills that they themselves do not possess?
3. The journalists who covered World War II and even the Vietnam War traveled with the troops, and more or less went where they pleased. Edward R. Murrow reported from London as the bombs were falling. As I recall, Shirer lived among ordinary Germans as Hitler was coming to power, not in a five-star hotel.
The first time journalists were not allowed to travel with the troops was the invasion of Grenada. It was also the first time journalists rolled over and played dead in the face of such restrictions. The NPR reporters sat in Washington fretting that they could only rely on Pentagon press releases. Meanwhile, the reporters on the CBC program "As It Happens," also banned from the island, picked up the phone and called the president of the U.S. medical school, the British consul, and other residents of Grenada and learned a lot of facts that didn't come out until years later in the U.S.
4. The CIA has been infiltrating the media for a long time, at least since World War II. However, until recently, there were reporters willing to call them on their B.S.
The wealth of the top journalists is definitely a problem. In the old days, journalism was a relatively low-status occupation, and certainly not a way to get rich. It's no coincidence that we don't see much coverage of labor and working class issues anymore. (Did you know, for example, that major print media, such as Time and Newsweek, hire fresh graduates from Ivy League schools for their fast track? )
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