One of journalists’ recurring put-downs of bloggers is that they are simply recycling someone else’s news — that there will always be a need for reporters to produce it. Yet, America had a reporterless past and will likely have a reporterless future. And, news will be better for it.
We have lost perspective on what a reporter actually is — a middleman. On one side are news events. On the other are audiences who want to know about them. A reporter’s job is to move “the truth” from Point A to Point B as accurately as possible.
For the first century of their existence, the public had a realistic view of what full-time reporters actually did and awarded them the appropriate, low level of status. Legendary editor Walter Lippmann wrote in 1919 that “reporting is not a dignified profession for which men will invest the time and cost of an education, but an underpaid, insecure, anonymous form of drudgery, conducted on catch-as-catch-can principles.”
Now we have journalists, whose intent is to
be the news, with their inclusive bias, rather than
report the news.
Interesting read, imho.
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