Klavan on the Culture I sometimes wonder what the country would be like if we had a professional mainstream media, instead of the hacks and shills who currently infest it. Ah, but that is in some alternate universe. In the one we inhabit the Newspaper Guild, the union of many newspaper reporters, has endorsed the Occupy Wall Street movement, and journalists and pundits are organizing to help the Occupy Wall Street Movement get its message out:
Of course we can all recall the neutral, just the facts, coverage of the Tea Party movement:
“I sometimes wonder what the country would be like if we had a professional mainstream media, instead of the hacks and shills who currently infest it. Ah, but that is in some alternate universe”
You might want to try looking for them at small- and medium-size community newspapers and radio stations, and on certain community-oriented blogs, some of which do a better job of reporting the news than the local legacy media does despite not getting paid for what they do and having to fit it around a day job and family obligations.
Elaine is right. In my long legal career I have encountered many situations that were newsworthy and therefore reported on. In each case, the reports were either seriously inaccurate or horribly selectively biased, or both, with one exception. Many years ago I represented an insurance company before the Cobb County board on Commissioners on a tax dispute. The hearing did not go well — I was young and naive enough to think that the Board would be interested in the law or facts. The next morning I read story about the hearing in the Marietta Daily Journal. It was a first rate summary of the hearing. No opinion and no mistakes — just straightforward summaries of the arguments presented, questions asked and answered, and conclusion. All dry and very matter of fact. I was impressed and mentioned it to one of my colleagues, who quipped, “That young man has no future in journalism.”
“You might want to try looking for them at small- and medium-size community newspapers and radio stations, and on certain community-oriented blogs, some of which do a better job of reporting the news than the local legacy media does despite not getting paid for what they do and having to fit it around a day job and family obligations.”
Quite right Elaine. I represent the local paper in town, named, appropriately enough, The Paper, and I have generally found them to do a top notch job. I was involved in a case almost a decade ago which received some national coverage, and invariably the smaller the newspaper the better the job they did of getting the facts straight.