Hope Springs
“I’ve been the subject of not one, but two, fawning puff pieces published in[NYT]in the course of my young life. So I should join the suck-up parade too, right? Wrong. There are more important matters at stake - the future of Authentic Journalism and democracy in an era of Simulated News…”
Could American journalism be approaching a reformation? As the layers of the onion begin to peel off, we see just how widespread and systemic the disease is. But who has the will to fix things? I don’t think it’s going to be a revolution, but instead a replay of Luther’s 95 theses. I’m guessing three things (it will be fun to check in two years and see if I was right):
- The general public will get bored with the issue; they’ll still buy their local newspaper
- The mainstream newsrooms will continue to be run by cynical people who see this all as a PR issue that they simply need to “wait out” and then deal with in a PR fashion
- Many conscience-motivated journalists will get disgusted by the lack of reform and will break away from mainstream
Therefore, this issue will play out over a number of years as the “protestant” journalists gradually expose all of the dark areas of the orthodoxy to the glaring lights of publicity. Further scandals and exposures probably won’t have much influence on the general public, since people have short attention spans and the mainstream newsrooms can easily steer their opinions. Butthis willimpact j-school graduates. Mainstream newsrooms will not change except in the most superficial ways. But the “other side” now has a critical mass of journalists who are not playing along with the lies. These journos can attract others who are driven by conscience and a sense of “doing the right thing”, which is very attractive to idealistic j-school grads. Thus the schism will grow.