Thursday, July 22, 2004

Reaping what you sow, part 2: journalism

As Gawker points out, some 'real' journalists are stupidly complaining about bloggers getting press credentials. Instead of bitching about it, maybe they should consider instead why we are getting them.

If more 'real' journalists were doing their job and doing reporting and research instead of regurgitating talking points, then more and more Americans wouldn't have to turn to the internet and such to get their news and the Daily Show wouldn't be winning awards for journalism (to all you titty-babies crying about a comedy show winning the tvcritics award, unless you work for NOW with Bill Moyers, you should shut up and just be glad that you can't be fined for being such lazy interviewers and cowardly stooges. No one else on TV news deserved an award and if you don't start doing better you really don't even deserve a job.
Some in the old guard haven't totally been bad, but if you tell me that you couldn't have -shouldn't have- done better, then you aren't the men/women I thought you were [this means you Koppel, Walters, Jennings, Rather, Sawyer, Brokaw, Lehrer, etc.] ).

I don't catch everything you do but I am aware of a lot that hasn't been covered. When your special report on what happened in Haiti and the US's role there airs, I'll apologize. Or when you critically cover the disenfranchisement of a million black votes in the last election, or what is happening in Sudan, or really dig behind the rhetoric of any of the admin's double-speak titled plans, then you get to complain about bloggers.

When radio starts playing all the same crap, you get a few people who love it and tune in and everyone else looks elsewhere (satellite radio, p2p, internet radio, mp3 players) and radio becomes this bland joke that people listen to as a last resort. When journalists lose their spine and bend over backwards to protect the status quo and repeat talking points and forget the critical analysis part of their job, then people are going to start getting their news from somewhere else (like say, bloggers).

Quit bitching that someone else is getting to play the game. If you hadn't dropped the damn ball in a major way, they wouldn't have been invited in.

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