A New Kid in Town
I’m not a journalist. I never studied journalism. But I can read and write and have ethics. From what I have seen in the last several years I have serious doubts about what is being taught in our universities on the subject. Although, now that I think about it, journalism is usually classified as a liberal arts degree1 so that explains a lot. It just seems they have all forgotten the first tenet – “Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth”.2 But then maybe they never read Kovach3. I have posted several commentaries on the shortcomings of what we call the Main Stream Media (MSM) here, here, here and here. In my opinion there is not enough public commentary on the disgusting state of affairs in today’s MSM. The Founding Fathers considered them a vital part of our society. They even gave them Constitutional protection to secure their role in our republic. But in 2008 they violated our trust and abrogated their responsibility. Well enough is enough. A new watchdog has arrived on the scene. If you thought the expose on ACORN was an eye opener, just wait until they sink their teeth into the MSM.
Andrew Breitbart and crew are rapidly becoming The Blogging Network. His main site, Breitbart.com is a news aggregation site but last year he launched two companion sites, BigHollywood.com and BigGovernment.com. Last week he launched BigJournalism.com. If it is anything like its predecessors Big Journalism will be controversial. Hopefully they will use their bully pulpit to seek out, identify and document media bias, unethical behavior and outright lies across the whole spectrum of the MSM. This formerly dynamic and vital segment of our culture has fallen into desperate times through their own arrogance. Just look at the drop in circulation numbers for newspapers, the rating and share of television networks and the advertising revenue of each of the known liberal media outlets and you’ll see the results of decades of publishing what they want not what needs to be said. I stopped watching any MSM except Fox (and even they irritate me sometimes). However, Mr. Breitbart has my full attention. The only problem I have with him is trying keep up.
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1. http://education-portal.com
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism
3. The Elements of Journalism, Kovach, Bill and Rosenstiel, Tom; http://journalism.org/node/71