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3/15/2005 Here are a few stories that have popped up in the news recently about the profession of journalism and the challenges that reporters face both in the field and in the workplace. The first is about the hazards of journalism, according to a report by the AP the last 12 months have seen more journalists killed and more journalists targeted for killing than in the last 10 years. In another story I applaud the stand that Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, has taken in her resignation from Newsday. She quit as a result of the growing phenomenon of corporate journalism where increased profits are weighed more heavily than quality of product produced. One of the great quotes from her concerning this: "If you trim back your staff, if you trim back your costs, and you put out a lower quality product, your stock value goes up. All across the news industry, we have seen this same phenomenon." Finally, the practice of television journalism, always on shaky ground in regards to credibility in my mind, has been dealt a further blow this week. It appears that many stations have been accepting prepackaged news from the White House and airing the pieces as their own according to the Government accountability Office. The Office has stated that this amounts to "covert propaganda" and that 55 year-old rules against government spending on propaganda had been violated. An update to this story: it appears that the White House is sticking to its guns. Advisors to the administration have made claims that it is perfectly legal for the propaganda machine to go into full swing, stating that an arm of the Department of Justice is responsible for investigating this issue, not the GAO. Of course we know who controls the DoJ....
posted by Nathan Hall at 3/15/2005 02:44:00 PM link |
