Today's Journalism: A Punchline, Not a Profession

As network news ratings continue to plummet, the audience for the Daily Show is surging. Let me first say clearly: I love the Daily Show. But still, there is something scary about the fact that the mainstream "news" media has become so insulated and out-of-touch with average Americans that people are tuning into a satire program on a comedy station to get their information.

The recent White House correspondents' dinner shows exactly how sad the mainstream media has become. As media critic Frank Rich notes, "once these dinners were just typical Washington rubber-chicken fare, unseen on television and unnoticed beyond the Beltway." Now, however, they are proof of "the Washington press corps' eagerness to facilitate and serve as dress extras in what amounts to an administration promotional video." First Lady Laura Bush's highly-scripted performance "prompted a ballroom full of reporters to leap to their feet and erupt in a roar of sycophancy like partisan hacks at a political convention." As long as these reporters got their exclusive tickets to the dinner, got to rub elbows with their powerful friends, they were sure to offer far more coverage to the First Lady's jokes about horse masturbation than anything serious like Iraq, Social Security, and other nuisances.

And its not just the elite beltway media. In a new Chicago Tribune op-ed, Douglas MacKinnon, former press secretary to Republican Sen. Bob Dole, tells reporters that their "continual focus on, and reporting of, missing, young, attractive white women not only demeans your profession but is a televised slap in the face to minority mothers and parents the nation over who search for their own missing children with little or no assistance or notice from anyone."

It's true - many reporters today are so completely out of touch with serious issues that journalism gone from a respected profession to a laugh-your-ass-off punchline. It has become such an insulated, insider club, that major networks still give airtime to arrogant unethical blowhards, even if they compromised U.S. national security in order to promote themselves. It is a profession where the top White House reporter of one of the biggest newspaper in America openly admits she didn't ask tough questions of the President at his pre-Iraq-invasion press conference because "it's live, it's very intense, it's frightening to stand up there." Despite millions of Americans opposing the war at the time, she actually justified being "very deferntial" because, she said, "no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time."

Yes, yes - there are some very good journalists working today who do some very, very good work (I even praised one of the best recently, not just because he wrote a story I thought was important, but because he REGULARLY writes important, serious stories). Many of these, however, see their work buried, or are toiling at the various business trade publications, where they don't get as much play as the blow-dried robots on television. What's interesting is that at the business publications, the reporting is better because the narrow audience of readers demand the real factual stories because they are relying on the information to make their living. They can't accept swallowing the usual fare of regurgitated conventional wisdom/spin from some political pundit who has never been more than 5 miles away from Manhattan or Washington, D.C.

Which brings us back to the real point: by and large, the national media has become a national joke. It's such a joke, in fact, that I am actually embarrassed to tell people I once attended journalism school and had to spend time with folks who enter a profession that makes a mockery of our democracy and our country. And sadly, no one knows when this pathetic state of affairs will end. But until it does, Viva John Stewart and his crew for being one of the few outlets where we can get the truth.