Can you imagine being an ambitious young journalist at a place like the Newark Star Ledger? You’re fresh from indoctrination camp (ie The Rutgers School of Journalism or some such) and you’re tiptoeing across the political landscape trying your best to gore Republican bulls while avoiding stepping on any liberal sacred cows. You’re writing your ‘human interest’ drivel and ‘man bites dog’ stories while waiting for your big chance.
And even though you’re doing your best to play ball with the agenda of the editorial staff, you know in your heart that you could be one big story away from a national exposure. That could mean a book deal, or a gig at the Times or if you’re good looking enough, maybe even a TV spot or….(breathless gasp) it might even lead to a Pulitzer. So you write what you’re told about how the evil Republicans hate firemen, children, puppies, black people, or the homeless – whatever you’re told.
Then every few weeks these < freakin > amateurs come up with another story that blasts them right to the top of the heap. First it was ACORN, then the teachers’ union, and this time it’s Planned Parenthood. “Why the F#@! Won’t they let me write stories like that!” you say to your gay life partner in a more casual moment. “I mean – who gives a rat’s @$$ about protecting their political connections – I’ve got a career to worry about. If they have their way I’ll be 40 years old writing man bites dog, while some F#$!ing amateur gets video of Howard Dean with a naked 13 year old boy. I mean What the F@$#!”
Anyway – I guess it’s possible that only people who are too stupid to think outside the indoctrination box actually get jobs in traditional journalism. There could be a sort of negative sampling bias involved where only those people under a certain intellectual bar will even apply for jobs in a business that’s obviously on its last legs. And maybe it’s easier to get people like that to shut up and do what they’re told even when it means their own inevitable extinction.
But I have to believe that somewhere out there, there is an actual ‘journalist’ who is as frustrated by the media’s blatant liberal bias as their rapidly declining readers are. But clearly it’s not this person. She dutifully reports all the Planned Parenthood denials and disclaimers (complete with a vague Richard Nixon reference that she’s probably too young to understand). If this Susan K. Livio is anything but a true believer in liberal dogma, then she’s probably horribly embarrassed to put her name on the institutional apologia piece for a real news story.
Defending liberal institutions while amateurs concentrate on doing all of the real journalism. That’s the proper role of the news media in a civil society right?
Doesn’t anyone at NJ.com have a conscience?
4 comments:
I think the difference is that the media is now composed of 'journalists' while it used to be composed of 'reporters'. Journalists went to journalism school where they inhaled all the liberal miasma; reporters started out on the police beat where they interacted with real people.
The Washington Post has been gradually early-retiring its expensive older reporters and replacing then with j-school grads, and is fast becoming the local version of the NYT. It's sad, really.
My sister recently took a journalism course. (The single woman in NYC will do all sorts of odd things to fill the day, even one as devastatingly attractive as my sister.)
You would not believe the kind of dribble they attempt to pass off as 'honest news gathering'. The one which stuck in my head most clearly was that journalism schools are teaching that the journalism during Vietnam was more objective than the gulf war because 'embedding' makes the journalists sympathetic to the soldiers they're with.
They may have a point about embedding, but more objective during Vietnam?! It can be argued that the Army won the war and it was only the journalists who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Only the Spanish American war (where the journalists actually started the thing) could be said to have been handled more dishonestly. but this is what they teach in America's journalism schools.
It's disgusting really.
The NJ.com copy writer gets an assist in two standard plays from the lib playbook: (1) attack the attacker, and (2) the wrongdoer is the victim.
But I don't get too exercised about these lib "journalists." The asteroid has struck (alt media like the internet, talk radio, new networks, this blog (!),...) and it's just a matter of time before the dinosaurs' food source ($) drops below critical mass. Just deserts. To me the question is what will be the new species of lib propagandist that emerges. Those are the ones to keep an eye out for, IMHO, and perhaps beware of.
There seems to be a lot of negative sentiment about the Huffington-AOL deal, market included, but I find myself asking if it might be one of those species of lib propagandist varmint emerging from the alt media asteroid strike. Conserv alt media succeeded so wildly in my view b/c there was a huge demand for those views in the media but a dearth of supply. That has clearly changed and at some point conserv media may become dominant, esp. with the old lib dinosaur approaches slowly dying off. In this case, there would be an inadequate supply of effective lib media but an increasingly restless demand for it.
Consider: (1) the timing of this deal is interesting in terms of the decreasing lib media influence. (2) Huffington transformed herself before and I think actually turned a profit over there. (3) AOL, although in decline, still has the muscle to pull off some new innovation.
So, is this HuffPoAOL mutation going to survive and thrive? Dunno, but it might be one to watch despite what many seem to be saying.
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