POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY NEIL REYNOLDS IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
I beg to differ on your assertion that "journalism has come a long way."
There is absolutely no objective evidence supporting that.
Indeed, the very fact that you pat yourself on the back, as it were, with that assertion tells us something not encouraging about your perspective.
In many ways, journalism today is in a terrible state, and I do not just mean the Murdoch machinations.
Newspaper columns and editorial pages are full of people passing off propaganda as journalism.
Important stories are regularly suppressed by mainline papers and networks.
There is no balance in coverage of a number of on-going situations, as for example in the Middle East or Iran.
Almost no true investigative journalism takes place outside the work of a few famous figures like Semour Hersh or Anthony Summers or Robert Fisk.
Most so-called news stories are just re-written press releases.
So-called reporters now go to wars "embedded" with the military, and they basically report, as one would expect, nothing worth reading.
The mergers of news organizations into massive corporations is an inherent threat to genuine journalism.
There is the clear tendency towards "infotainment" or soft stuff that passes for news and cheaply fills column-inches.
Journalism has many aspects of a dark comedy. Younf people march off to now-countless journalism schools, churning out graduates like sausages, all thinking one day they will be new Woodward and Bernsteins.
But they end up, if they even get a job, giving the weather forecast on a small town television station which wouldn't know a news story if it was handed to them, and which in any event would never broadcast anything controversial or challenging.
Local boosterism is all you find in every small-town paper and station.
And at the "high" end, it is very much starting to look the same.
As far as "hidden" sources go, standard journalism would grind to halt without them.
After all, it is only leaks from unknown government officials, serving their own purposes and not journalism's, that ever give us any real stories.
There was a retired CIA official who used to speak of his "mighty Wurlitzer organ." What he meant was the set of newspapers and stations he could play like the keys of a musical instrument to get his story out, giving each a slightly different nuance, and he enjoyed himself greatly being able to bend all those so-called journalists into doing what he desired.
In a word, that's journalism.
