I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
At lunch, an old friend recently retired from a network job in Washington, DC, was dismissive of what passes for journalism on the Web. As a fellow survivor of old news mediums, I once might have agreed, but no longer.
“Compared to what?” I replied.
For what passes for journalism in the mainstream these days often isn’t. And good things are happening in cyberspace.
It’s true the Internet still conveys lots of ignorance, bloviating, self-aggrandizement and partisanship. And as the Independent’s Brigette Russell says elsewhere, riffing on facts is lots easier than finding them. In fact, says David Simon (the former Baltimore sun reporter who created “The Wire”), “the parasite is slowly killing the host.”
But Web journalism is evolving. There’s more traditional reporting, for example, from operations like Politico, ProPublica (investigative), the New Mexico Independent and its sister publications.
Also, popular bloggers are pursuing more reporting alongside opinions, among them Joshua Marshall (Talking Points Memo), Andrew Sullivan and Ross Douthat (the Atlantic) and Matthew Yglesias (Think Progress).
And even as print newspapers shutter Washington bureaus, that colorful piñata of opinion, celebrity gossip and reporting, the Huffington Post employs seven editors and reporters in DC!
(As an honest parasite, I hasten to credit that tidbit to a New York Review of Books piece Aug. 13 by Michael Massing, the Columbia Journalism Review columnist.)
Of course, the challenge is finding journalistic gold amidst the dross; per CJR, there were more than 70 million blogs and 150 million Web sites, expanding at some 10,000 an hour as of last December.
Still, those numbers reflect something new — mass participation in the effort to render reality. Old institutions flounder, reconfigure and die. Individuals ascend. Also, the Web is birthing new forms. Skepticism is advisable but the churning may improve journalism.
And what we have now is problematic. Take, for example, CBS, once a favorite target of the cynics who invented the “liberal media” scam. Today’s born-again Black Rock should delight them.
In recent weeks, the CBS Evening News has twice used CATO economists as authorities, unchallenged.
I heard a CBS political analyst, John Dickerson, opine that citizens should leave health care reform to the Congress. How’s that for Establishment bias!
Also, so-called reporter Wyatt Andrews showed demonstrators disrupting town halls but raised nary a question about dialogue vs. hooliganism, grassroots vs. Astroturf.
I haven’t monitored ABC and NBC, but last time I looked they, too, had retreated so far from reality they couldn’t see either corporate power or how most people live. Network news is parsecs away (one parsec = 3.26 light years) from Planet Earth.
Fox, of course, is unique. It serves both the Establishment’s right wing and far right. It promotes the political party of big, corporate government, neo-conservativism and the “religious” right. Its method is classic — sow fear and rub raw social tensions until lower and middle class people fight each other, forgetting who’s atop the hierarchy, chuckling.
(This explains Fox’s vile attacks on Barack Obama during the presidential campaign. And since.)
Of course, we mourn the loss of serious journalistic organizations, print and broadcast, and worry about those still teetering. As I write, the New York Times account of a White House-Big Pharma deal shows corporate America calling the shots. But few newspapers do that. And change is the only constant.
Perhaps the move to cyberspace will improve how we get information and disseminate it. Maybe not. It’s time, anyway, for us oldsters, old friend from TV news, to quit longing for the halcyon days and fashion the future.
For they probably weren’t halcyon and the future is here.
