A Place On The . Net

The following article is one that I wrote for several publications and it seems reasonable to share it with you. After all, you are the folks who can give the best critiques of ideas and also are the best ones to find ways to share these things.

Here goes:

It's in the news. Print journalists are having to write the obituaries of their own newspapers.

I am weepy eyed. I was once a journalist, too. Things do change and humanity will just have to live with whatever replaces print journalism.

Plenty happened on the road to and from stellar reporting. It began with Newspapers controlled by the wealthy. If you weren't wealthy, you called it, “Yellow Journalism” and considered it vaguely dishonest. The rich used print as means to state their own views to the exclusion of all else. The theory back then was that if you worked hard to own something, then you had the right to use it in your own way.

Along came world wars and the revelation that journalism needed to seem fair. In order for leaders of large masses to gain support, those leaders had to appear trustworthy. It is essential to recall that they did not have to be trustworthy. Appearance was all that mattered. The way to gain the patina of integrity was to hire regular folks and let them have their way with the news. Now regular folks would state their own views to the exclusion of all else. Amazingly, owners were now considered persona non grata in their papers.

Things went along well enough because the new views of journalism were just that -- new.

It worked well through the wars. American style journalism succeeded at joining common folks together as a single, powerful mass of people who could get their way. Everybody knew that, if you had to have a war, you had better win it or else. Amazingly, this fresh reporting style was such a powerful paradigm that the losers in our wars were, in a sense, relieved to have lost to us. American soldiers were welcomed in Germany. Japan called upon our military to teach the mechanics of capitalism. Our soldiers brought war brides home and we all learned about other nations and their needs. Hate that had festered for centuries lessened a bit.

American journalism became the pattern for journalism all over the world. The aura of the impoverished journalist filled the world with trust.

It was a nice idea but there was a downside -- Ordinary folks were frequently ordinary because they lacked whatever it took to make them exceptional. Journalism's trenches were frequently home to incompetents, ne'er do wells and confidence artists.

That's how we wound up with media that does not report on the fruits of capitalism or industry. If, as a journalist, you cannot imagine yourself being the boss of something or the inventor of something, you can only report on the needs/wants of those who are not bosses. The impoverished poor had replaced captains of industry in the media business. The captains who had provided for the impoverished poor were gone from the average newspaper.

Montana's great journalist, Don Weston saw trouble coming by 1967, “Everybody talks about objective journalism. The truth is that every reporter sees from his own eyes and from nobody else's. Integrity is a threatened commodity.” Fact-as-foundation reporting was dying.

The world proceeded swimmingly for a while. Ann Landers and Erma Bombeck lived on the same warm cushion with the great war correspondents.

Then it all broke down. The arrogance of media power made opinion more important than fact. Media posed that capitalists had stolen Earth's future and that the goodness of health, fecundity and long life were poor substitutes for letting nature take its course at eating away the hungry. Ralph Nader used media to pose that those who labor are evil. Hillary Clinton pontificated about “our scientists”. Personal excellence was no longer of importance. Each person was somehow obligated to every other in a blind, meandering way.

For the first time in media history, one form of media, the Internet, began allowing individuals to share whatever they wanted without credentials or payment. There was no reason to advertise or buy papers. Now Internet news became much cheaper than news in print! More fun, too. Unfortunately, no revenue for papers meant no wages for reporters, honest or not.

The new blogs frequently seem more honest than earlier media ever was. And now we are free to read the once suppressed story, Remember the Liberty. There are thousands of others just like it. Victims of cruel untruths everywhere are free to speak. By and large the Internet supplies information that has been withheld for years though there are glaring errors.

Opinion vs. news. That's the new battle. You are now in a position to observe in a new way and even to participate.

I give you the journalism glass – half empty and half full. Quaff as you will. Journalism has changed forever.

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