Once upon a time, columnist Kathleen Parker was a conservative. I say "was" because about the time John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, Parker turned into a latte-sipping blue blood who preferred subjecting Americans to four years of Barack Obama to listening to Palin's folksy accent.
Now, it seems, Parker is taking up the cause of the liberal media, by telling us that everyone who isn't a card-carrying member of the press is ignorant and shouldn't criticize the MSM.
The biggest challenge facing America's struggling newspaper industry may not be the high cost of newsprint or lost ad revenue, but ignorance stoked by drive-by punditry.
Yes, Dittoheads, you heard it right.
Drive-by pundits, to spin off of Rush Limbaugh's "drive-by media," are non-journalists who have been demonizing the media for the past 20 years or so and who blame the current news crisis on bias.
There is surely room for media criticism, and a few bad actors in recent years have badly frayed public trust. And, yes, some newspapers are more liberal than their readership and do a lousy job of concealing it.
But the greater truth is that newspaper reporters, editors and institutions are responsible for the boots-on-the-ground grub work that produces the news stories and performs the government watchdog role so crucial to a democratic republic.
Unfortunately, the chorus of media bashing from certain quarters has succeeded in convincing many Americans that they don't need newspapers. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press recently found that fewer than half of Americans -- 43 percent -- say that losing their local newspaper would hurt civic life in their community "a lot." Only 33 percent say they would miss the local paper if it were no longer available.
In Parker's view, it's not that newspapers have become irrelevant to most people or insulting to their readers. It's that "ignorant" people pointed out these inconvenient facts.
Look. I understand that Parker is probably bitter about the fast-approaching demise of large newspapers. Like journalists and the ones they love everywhere, Parker has probably seen more than a few colleagues take buyouts or get laid off. At my own beloved Fort Worth Star-Telegram, about 10% of the workforce was just laid off, with more cuts to follow.
But Parker is wrong to blame the messengers for the demise of newspapers and the lousy reputation journalists enjoy among the general population. The blame rests not with Rush Limbaugh, the Media Research Center, or bloggers. It rests with publishers who made bad business decisions. It rests with editors and reporters who were not responsive to the needs and complains of readers. And it rests with technological changes that have altered the way we get news.
Back when I entered journalism in the 1980s, there were plenty of news outlets and student journalists wanted to be more than mere reporters of news. They saw themselves as shapers of public opinion. This attitude led to all sorts of discussions about framing issues and events in ways that were designed to change the way people saw and felt about events. This is why newspapers frequently printed lousy pictures of Ronald Reagan or reported ad nauseam about Dan Quayles gaffes. It's why acid rain and (now) global warming were reported as facts when scientists were still questioning the data. And it's why, for instance, when journalists distorted stories, they often ended up being the stories themselves.
This isn't even bringing up "journalists" like Janet Cooke and Jayson Blair, who damaged the reputations of journalists everywhere by lying and falsifying information in their stories--sometimes making it all up.
And even when journalists did important reporting, such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning stories by Star-Telegram reporter Mark Thompson on problems with Bell helicopters, the insensitivity to readers and their concerns (and sometimes their livelihoods) causes readers to look elsewhere for their information.
I've said previously that I don't think newspapers will go away entirely. There will always be a need for local coverage of school board meetings and zoning changes. But much of what passes for journalism today does not qualify as either necessary or important for most folks in their busy lives. That's not Rush Limbaugh's fault. It's not Brent Bozell's fault. And it isn't my fault. That's just the way it is.
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