Death of American journalism...
Perhaps this is something others have already noticed, and to an extent I knew this was true - but never quite to the extent it "hit" me over the last week.
Hard, trustworthy American journalism as we have come to know it is, essentially, dead.
I kind of came to this conclusion by inference following a series of things that finally locked in my own head what I knew to be true in the abstract. Here's kind of a sample over the last few days/weeks/months that finally caused the lightbulb in my head to go off.
Just this week, a peer-reviewed article appeared in a British journal that established there was no causative link found between the consumption of saturated fats and heart disease/heart attacks. It was huge because the authors admitted this went against the grain of the last twenty or so years of "conventional wisdom." Now, regardless of the accuracy of this study, it seemed relevant and legitimate enough to me that it would get some domestic (US) play in the news. But how much did I see? None.
Reminded me of a similar thing about two or three years ago - another study, also published in the Lancet (British equivalent of the AMA journal) that concluded statins should simply not be given to women. And that doctors in Britain were starting to heed that advice. How much play did that story receive in America? Not much, at least that I can recall. And it wasn't until we heard about the latter-day association of Lipitor to increases in incidence of diabetes in women did we even start to hear anything adverse about statins in the mainstream media. And a similar story - again, not domestic, but I'm not sure it was British - that middle- to older-age men with no history of cardiovascular disease/heart attacks don't benefit at all from statins.
The intent isn't to focus on medical stories. Those are all just some general examples that happened to be medical. Then came this last week with the Malaysian Airlines missing plane disaster, and the true state of American media just came to the fore. Wild theories, few facts, and to top it all off, one of the biggest outlets of them all actually had someone on postulating that the plane was sucked up by a black hole. Seriously. IT took information from other outlets (again, some British) to pick up on the fact that parroting the Malaysian government's line on the "investigation" was a loser from the outset.
I think about these kinds of incidents, realizing that some of the better (any?) journalism came from outside the US, supposedly the bastion of a free press. I think about when I was a kid and was just old enough to understand the nature of the investigation into the Nixon administration, and to think of how far American journalism has declined since that time. We don't investigate anymore. We don't challenge. We take the public line on everything. I doubt anyone like a Woodward or Bernstein could even get a job in the mainstream media these days.
We don't hear anything adverse in the medical field if it might tend to run opposite to what might be the better interests of large pharmaceutical corporations. We don't hear anything adverse about particular politicians if it breaks against the agendas that journalists - at least in theory - aren't supposed to have. Yet we've somehow allowed American journalism deteriorate into this Captain Kangaroo world of dancing bears and happy talk, while allowing it to abdicate its role as the neutral watchdog over companies, governments, officials, and, at times, citizens.
Not anymore.
Its even true at the local level. Remember when local media broke the County Commissioners scandal, or the illegal tax breaks handed out by the "Oklahoma Industries Authority" to GM back in the day? Or DHS corruption under the leadership of erstwhile head Lloyd Rader? Heck, how many of us remember the last time a local news outlet broke a real story requiring real investigation and the attendant risk associated therewith? And, no, sweeps-week pieces about "Secret Mold In Your Sink - Friend or Foe?" do not count.
This is not a liberal/conservative issue in my book. It should be an American issue, an issue of how an important pillar of our institutional structure is corroding and rotting from within, allowing who-knows-what to go on unchecked and unknown.
That's to the detriment of everyone.
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Originally Posted by tomokc
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