Does the News Matter To Anyone Anymore?

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: Does the News Matter To Anyone Anymore?
Does the News Matter To Anyone Anymore?
By David Simon
Sunday, January 20, 2008; B01

Is there a separate elegy to be written for that generation of newspapermen and women who came of age after Vietnam, after the Pentagon Papers and Watergate? For us starry-eyed acolytes of a glorious new church, all of us secular and cynical and dedicated to the notion that though we would still be stained with ink, we were no longer quite wretches? Where is our special requiem?

Bright and shiny we were in the late 1970s, packed into our bursting journalism schools, dog-eared paperback copies of "All the President's Men" and "The Powers That Be" atop our Associated Press stylebooks. No business school called to us, no engineering lab, no information-age computer degree -- we had seen a future of substance in bylines and column inches. Immortality lay in a five-part series with sidebars in the Tribune, the Sun, the Register, the Post, the Express.

What the hell happened?

I mean, I understand the economic pressures on newspapers. At this point, along with the rest of the wood-pulp Luddites, I've grasped that what was on the Internet wasn't merely advertising for journalism, but the journalism itself. And though I fled the profession a decade ago for the fleshpots of television, I've heard tell of the horrors of department-store consolidation and the decline in advertising, of Craigslist and Google and Yahoo. I understand the vagaries of Wall Street, the fealty to the media-chain stockholders, the primacy of the price-per-share.

What I don't understand is this: Isn't the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium -- isn't an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores? It's hard to say that, even harder to think it. By that premise, what all of us pretended to regard as a viable commodity -- indeed, as the source of all that was purposeful and heroic -- was, in fact, an intellectual vanity....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/18/AR2008011802874_pf.html

[Lint Head]

1. No. The Constitution is dead along with freedom of the press.

We need someone with the courage to restore it. We need a Congressional Constitution Restoration Convention. The goal would be to restore the rights that have been destroyed by the criminals in the White House and the criminals in Congress during the Clinton administration. :dem:

[Sam Ervin jret]

2. There are still plenty of kids studying it? Do they study it as a future profession? Or as one

might study a long dead language?

I hope the former as I have a son at UMASS studying for his degree in it as we speak. My hope is that we are in a period of flux and confusion. A period of change that came so swift and with no direction. The owners of the medium that journalism relied upon seemed to be lost. the newspaper owners, the TV and Radio.

I think we need to separate the medium from the art itself. While i can see, as you did when you left you field, that the owners (few that they are) of the MSM have long since given up on real journalism, on research, investigation and even lately fact checking, I refuse to believe journalism itself can die.

And I'll tell you why I fell that way. As I told my son, I don't think people become writers because they want to. I don't think people become journalists because they want to. I think they do it because they cannot not do so. Why else would someone do any form of art? Art hurts. To really produce a good piece of art work, which good writing is, hurts. People like you, and i think my son, just can't help it. You can't help but write.

I once had a creative writing teacher (ya, i took it but I had to. It was required even for us Chemistry majors)say writing was like giving birth. Well she WAS a nun so I didn't take that too seriously, and having had two kids I was right, but still the metaphor does stand.

No I don't think it's gone. Not forever. No DeepModem Mom there is a future for journalism. I believe in it. I believe.

[tom_paine]

3. No, all that matters is the False Reality Bubble and Infotainment.

500-channel cable.