grylliade.org Free minds. Free markets. Free beer.

How did you find this stuff out? Especially, the yahoo message board connection?

I'm just that awesome.

Reddit helped.

One of the signs of End of Days.

Yond Cassius Obama has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.

Source : Julius Caesar Act 1, scene 2, 194–195

I think he'd need a microscope to know where not to stomp.

DA- You are right, of course.

Look-there is a right way and a wrong way to do journalism. The right way involves careful research as well as balanced evaluation and presentation. It requires a more-than-surface-level understanding of issues. It also involves presenting more than pretty pictures and a one graph version of the story.

But that is not what sells. What sells is Fox news and Paris Hilton; USA Today and pretty pie charts with no big words. So yes, it is a question of the market limiting how much good journalism can be done. Good journalism requires thinking readers (and viewers and listeners) to engage with the material. That's not what people want. People want their prejudices reinforced and they want titillation. IOW, Fox News and Paris Hilton.

there's good writing out there. i know people like to bust on it, but for a daily the ny times is largely excellent. compared to the local competition it's even better.

WSJ news reporting used to be good. As good as there was. They had an axe in their op ed space, but the news part was always decent. Again, it was a narrower audience targeted and now it's a mass appeal rag.

Also, I know there is good writing out there, but I get bothered by the idea that the journo has some sort of special place in society as the Truthgiver to The People. Sorry dude. I don't trust you that much.

Also, agree about the NYT outside of the oped space.

It's true that the Times does do some good reporting. They also do some truly craptacular reporting sometimes:
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/hist100.96/elc/baffler.html

The New Yorker also publishes some good stuff, which unfortunately is often heavily ideologically slanted. But in the end it's all just Sturgeon's Law, you know?

It's really just a case of separate markets. The market for Swatches is different from the market for Breitlings, gourmet French restaurants serve a different clientèle than Wendy's, etc.

I don't think Gresham's law applies; the supply of reliable reporting approaching some reasonable level of objectivity and accuracy has always been the exception to the rule and, if anything, there is probably more of it today than there was in "the golden age."

To steal from Colbert, junk news has to be accurish, sort of in the same ways many academically unchallenging schools must still at least pretend to have standards. But most people most of the time prefer sound bites and film clips to anything in depth, balanced and rigorously researched. Like I said, they're different markets.

One thing that should be remembered about the market is that it's not just demand, it's supply, too.

It's not beyond the pale, it's not beyond the realm of believability, it's not pure pie in the sky to entertain the possibility that journalists might practice good journalistic ethics and deliver good journalism simply because doing that is what most interests them and motivates them to work.

Obviously, if that's not where the most money is, then you have a tension between what (at least some) people in the field want to supply and what the consumer wants to pay for.

There is a belief out there (one might say "a meme," but some here consider that pretentious! :-) ) that journalists could/should/used to do more of this, just out of their own sense of what's right. This is not an entirely preposterous proposition (even if that's a gratuitous use of alliteration!). Now, when people harp on that side of things while ignoring factors in the demand that make such things difficult to deliver large scale, that's childish, no doubt. But let's not jump to the other extreme and think that because there is, naturally, a market, that this market is necessarily 100% demand driven.

That said, I think it may be the case that the balance has been tilted dramatically toward demand since the technological explosion in media availability. Though one would presume that would go in all directions. But the possibility that this explosion has diluted the ability of journalists (at least those in the mainstream) from doing what they most want to do, i.e., practice good journalism, is what those who wring their hands over the explosion of media availability fear and lament. Whether the Good Journalism done by the likes of Walter Cronkite, when there was a lot less competition, was for real or a conceit (i.e., The Man Above Reproach, as Jason puts it) is, of course, debatable.

Bwhahaahaa! That's stupid wrapped in a stupid tortilla and smothered in stupid sauce. The tactic is stupid. The Left Behind people are stupid. The outraged Dems are stupid. It's beautiful.