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the quote in #14 (above) is accurate -- that print reporters have been reduced to stenographers -- because that is surely the truth as I know it. (Television journalism is far worse; it has become a contradiction in terms: it is no longer information but cheap theater and blood sport -- a Roman coliseum of death and mayhem -- part of the corporate mandate to anesthetize the population with bread and circuses.)
Here -- I hope not too late in the thread for anyone to read it -- is a short history of the decline and fall of American media:
Forty five years ago, when I got my first newspaper job, 90 percent of the newspapers in the United States were independently owned. Most of these independent ownerships were one-paper operations; a few publishers had two or three papers. For example, the same family that published The New York Times had gotten its start in newspapering by publishing The Chattanooga Times. Chains like Scripps-Howard -- Gannett was then mostly an Upstate New York publisher -- owned the remaining 10 percent.
In those days, journalism was pretty much a blue-collar field: the people who went into it were mostly bright articulate kids from blue-collar/union families, many with the fine parochial-school educations that even then were so academically superior to public-school educations. Hence the would-be reporters of yesteryear often brought to their jobs the hard-edged skepticism acquired during blue-collar childhoods -- and, very often, they brought genuine Leftist politics as well. In fact the politics were often the decisive factor: otherwise these same kids might have gone into the priesthood or the maybe the cops.
Back then you got into journalism pretty much as I did: you talked to the managing editor of your local paper, you got a job as a copy boy or a stringer or both, and you worked your way up. It was therefore a remarkably egalitarian field -- in many respects the most democratic line of work in America. If you went to college -- and not everybody did -- you majored in history or sociology or political science or some combination of all three; or maybe you wanted to be a science writer, so you majored in physics. Journalism schools were sneered at; they were for turning out public relations flacks -- giving the future corporate mouthpieces just enough background in news writing to enable them to craft a press release that might be mistaken for a real story.
Now the numbers are worse than reversed: 90-something percent of all U.S. newspapers are owned by chains -- media monopolies -- and fewer than 10 percent are owned independently and/or locally. All the changes in media itself are the direct consequences of this change in ownership patterns. For instance:
To get on a newspaper today, you first have to demonstrate that you are wealthy enough to purchase four years of college -- the U.S. being the only industrial nation on the planet that determines one's eligibility for higher education ultimately on one's ability to pay. Then -- assuming you or your parents can pay for it -- you have to get a journalism degree, the form and content of which is entirely shaped by how much money which media monopoly has given what college. Whatever, one thing is certain: a journalism degree is the very worst of vocational education: an education in pure technique {including enough computer science to qualify for a minor}; an education utterly devoid of context or intellectual content -- literally, training to be a stenographic automaton and nothing more -- because that is precisely what the monopolies want.
But even that degree of dumbing-down is not enough. Where the reporter of yesteryear was hired by fellow news people on the basis of intellect, skill and potential -- typically you were interviewed by the managing editor, then the city editor (or metropolitan editor) and finally the editor-in-chief -- today's journalist has to first pass the Big Business equivalent of fraternity/sorority rush: corporate-style personnel management (today called "human resources") to make certain the job supplicant is suitably compliant with the triple corporate tyrannies of lockstep conformity, vindictive anti-intellectuality and forcible mediocrity. Therefore to even get in the monopoly door, today's journalist has to demonstrate the proper corporate personhood before his or her actual journalistic talents are even considered -- and the demonstration is judged, pass/fail, by someone who has been hired as the ultimate embodiment of these tyrannies: conformity, anti-intellectuality, mediocrity -- the corporate golden mean (pun intended). Fail the personnel-office personality test -- be rejected during this post-baccalaureate nightmare version of pledge-week rush (a test many old-time newsmen {including myself} could never possibly pass) -- and you'll be shown the door, never to get close to an editor or a newsroom as long as you live. But if you pass it, remember the editor to whom you are next sent was himself/herself hired by just such a process, and is therefore predictably conformist, anti-intellectual and mediocre.
The old guard -- those of us who remember better days -- are deliberately cast aside, ever more methodically marginalized. (I still write professionally, but my own "career" -- that is, in the sense of benefits, full employment, pension etc. -- ended two decades ago when an employer went bankrupt. Just as I was too obviously bohemian to ever pass frat-house muster, I am too obviously bohemian to ever pass personnel-office muster. Long ago I decided not to bother, because the few times I tried, I failed. And now I am simply too old: as skilled as ever -- perhaps even more so -- but too likely to remember when "I'm a newspaperman" was a justifiably prideful statement, therefore too likely to be a troublemaker in today's lockstep-conformist newsrooms.)
And so it goes. The journalism schools give the monopolies exactly the sorts of employees the monopolies demand, because the monopolies provide the endowments that finance the journalism schools. The corporate personnel offices further screen the selection, eliminating anyone who is not sufficiently conformist, anti-intellectual and mediocre -- in other words, anyone who might rock the corporate boat. And because the media-monopoly money is ultimately Big Business money -- global oligarchy money -- today's media now mirrors the oligarchy itself: venomously conformist, vindictively anti-intellectual and zealously mediocre in everything save insatiable greed.
The atmosphere in today's newsroom is of course radically different too. In the newsrooms of yesteryear -- even on non-Guild papers -- there was solidarity of a degree unknown anywhere else in workplace America. But today -- because the the forcible gentrification of newsrooms necessarily brought with it all the vicious penchants for back-stabbing and brown-nosing and betrayal that are among the chief identifying characteristics of the great American upper-middle class -- newsrooms are as malevolently cutthroat as any business. As a colleague of mine puts it, "one of the biggest reasons I went into journalism was because I didn't want to work in an insurance office. But then the corporations took over, and now that's exactly what it is -- an insurance office." He doesn't need to add that what is ensured -- that is, amid all the back-stabbing and brown-nosing -- is that America sinks ever deeper into deliberately induced ignorance.
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