More on the Death of Mainstream Media

» DailyKOS: The Cult of the Professional (Devilstower)

By means of adding to the Chris Matthews article earlier, this strikes me as a worthwhile tangent when it comes to the changes in media today.

It's not the blogs that have caused faith in the media to decline. It's not Wikipedia which has led to a diminished respect for facts and research. The fault doesn't lie with the amateurs. It's squarely in the court of the professionals.

By this I don't mean to engage in a "Judy Miller Attack," placing the blame on those who gather and report the news. Keen is quite correct to point out that many -- most -- reporters are both knowledgeable about their subject areas and courageous in their efforts to gather information. As someone who never held a reporting position higher than $5-a-story stringer to a small town weekly, I feel both awe and gratitude for the people who place their careers and bodies in harm's way to see that I get news from halfway around the world. There are a few bad apples (and sour Picklers) in the barrel, but most reporters are in fact both capable and objective.

That's not enough. Keen's attempts to defend the traditional media by stating that reporters are good is like trying to sell a Yugo by boasting of its high-quality tires.

The media -- newspapers, radio, and television -- is not made up of reporters running on a sparkling field of journalistic integrity. Those reporters are instead embedded in a machine intended to do the one thing that Mr. Keen sets as the mark of professionalism -- make money. And the way the media has chosen to make money over the last few decades is, perversely, by devaluing their own product. The clearest illustration of this can be found in three massive changes that have affected news over the last two decades: the increase in radio pundits, the establishment of the Fox News Network, and the reaction of the remainder of the media to the first two events.