real journalism?
Trying to come up with a name for this blog was a bit difficult...not because I didn't have anything to go with, but because what I want to say covers a lot of issues and ideas.There are many things that need to be said, but as I've gradually come to realize over the past decade or so is that the really important things are not being said by the people whose jobs it is to say them.
I doubt that American journalism was ever the zenith of the profession that many would believe it to have been. Yesterday's William Hearst and Colonel McCormick types have bequeathed their shoddy, corrupt and blatantly-biased brand of journalism to today's Rupert Murdoch, Sinclair Broadcasting, Clear Channel Media and the financial fairy godmother of so much right wing malfeasance, Richard Mellon Scaife.
But the steady loss of professionalism that has occurred to American journalism since the heyday of the Watergate years has been concomitant with the increased consolidation of the media into a few major corporate entities. And with that came the increased collusion between those corporations, always beholden to the federal regulators and politicians who can do so much for and against them.
So what we have in this country today is an American version of the old soviet-style media, with the major newspapers serving as Tass, the official news agency, giving the American public only the information needed to stay generally ignorant about issues that might reflect negatively on either the government and/or the corporations that control the flow of information.
What's more, in an increasingly post-literate America, where most people don't get their information from newspapers, but from television and radio, these media have become the de facto governmental news source.
Only in the past few years, with the increasing popularity of the Internet, has more complete information been able to rise above the din of these semi-official news outlets.
And what I've found is that there is a wealth of information available to anyone who seeks to find the truth; not only from foreign sources, but from a great many individuals in this country who have taken up the vital duty to inform from the many so-called journalists who have prostituted themselves and bastardized the profession. They have shirked their responsibilities and walked away from their obligation to serve the public and not their corporate masters.
This blog, then, will recognize those who, ignoring the onslaught of talking heads and chattering voices in the "real" media today, refuse to give up on this country. To me these are the real heroes of the continuing American revolution.
posted by mauiloa @ 1:06 PM
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