Media Watch

What happened to newspapers and journalism

"We have met the enemy and they are us." - Walt Kelly

An article in today's Financial Times explains better than anywhere else what went wrong with newspapers and journalism.

The writer joined the Washington Post a decade after "All the king's men" and manages to explain how centuries of public service was undone by hubris.

Below are just two paragraphs of Lionel Barber's column entitled;

Why Journalism gets my vote
Eric Alterman went further: "As the profession grew more sophisticated and respected . . . top reporters, anchors and editors naturally rose in status to the point where some came to be considered the social equals of the senators, Cabinet secretaries and CEOs they reported on. Just as naturally, these same reporters sometimes came to identify with their subjects, rather than with their readers."

An earlier generation of ink-stained newshounds saw life differently. Like the iconoclastic investigative journalist IF Stone, they saw it as their duty to expose establishment wrongdoings. The reflex reaction of the new journalism, however, has too often been a defensive crouch. Or how else to explain the uncritical acceptance of the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq, based on bogus claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction?

See FT  for the rest here.

Thank the Gods who protect democracy for the web and its blogs.