15,000 journalists and still a dearth of coverage(journalists as "business

[papau]

journalists as "business units."

http://www.calendarlive.com/cl-et-rutten28jul28,1,3225841.column

15,000 journalists and still a dearth of coverage
Tim Rutten

Jul 28 2004

The most serious problem confronting the American news media today is neither creeping political bias nor the tensions between new and old technologies. Those topics may obsess media critics, but their significance pales alongside the greater issue, which is corporate managers' growing inability to distinguish between the public's interest — fascination with entertainment and celebrity — and the public interest — a deference to the common good.<snip>

Jim Lehrer, the public television anchor, put the situation precisely at a preconvention panel at Harvard on Sunday. "We're about to elect a president of the United States at a time when we have young people dying in our name overseas," he said. "We just had a report from the 9/11 commission which says we are not safe as a nation, and one of these two groups of people is going to run our country. The fact that you three networks decided it was not important enough to run in prime time, the message that gives the American people is huge."<snip>

Which brings us back to that pesky notion of the public interest. Unlike newspapers, magazines or cable channels, the networks — and all local television stations, for that matter — transmit their signals over airwaves owned by the people of the United States. Their licenses, in fact, require them to operate in the public interest. In recent years, timid federal regulators have more or less construed that requirement as a tedious formality. But it remains on the books, and flouting it in so flagrant a fashion is, at the very least, in poor taste. Taste, as we know, is very much on the networks' minds these days, though the corporate conscience to which Westin alluded clearly does not extend to questions of responsibility.<snip>

This is casting (Coulter, et al), not editing. It is an extension of the noxious talk radio ethos that confuses a provocation with an idea and abuse with entertainment. It makes a mockery of the fundamental journalistic standard of balance, because pitting two utterly predictable writers with a demonstrable disrespect for the truth is not a debate, it's mud wrestling.<snip>

In the end, it's not a very intriguing question, because the answer is the same when you ask why the three networks have abandoned genuine coverage of national politics for faux-reality shows. It's what happens when journalists of whatever stripe forget their obligation to the public interest and allow themselves to become mere agents of avarice.

[Warpy]

1. 15,000 people who sit on their overpaid arses waiting for

press releases to drop into their laps. That's the problem, and why they don't check even the most basic facts, like where Kerry was born (yes, some idiot said he was born in Massachusetts as a way of disparaging him to rednecks).

I'm convinced that they are the generation who slid through college by purchasing term papers online, who rarely had to generate their own prose all the way through school, who never learned how to work at anything but letting others do their work for them.

Right wing stink tanks and the RNC have been only too happy to oblige these lazy SOB, these cheaters.

Only when editorial staff realize what has happened with their journalists and start to tighten things up will anything change.