
It feels as though our business, what was once called the “press” but has now morphed into “media” by virtue of the fact that there is so much more out there than just the old printed word, may have peaked with Dan Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, or maybe with Woodward and Bernstein during the Watergate period.
It feels to this 76 year old, like we have been sliding away from being the old watchdog press and into something more and more conservative. Like Victorian ladies and gentlemen, afraid of being overly offensive or possibly attracting a lawsuit.
I recall my mentor, Bill Vance, telling me, “Sooner or later you have to learn to take the gloves off.” Wonder how many newsroom bosses we have like Bill Vance, now? Any? And here we all are, after a long slide into fear and disrespect, driven in no small part by companies that cared only for the bottom line and avoiding lawsuits rather than tough, adversarial Journalism. Companies that merged into just a handful, all or most with a similar mindset.
There were of course, mitigating factors. Things like ENG coming along, with the concurrent demand to do everything on the broadcast side “live,” with little or no time for fact checking. And Ronald Reagan, killing the Fairness Doctrine, giving rise to “trash talk” radio, and wingnut 7/24 cable news channels, with little news and mostly opinion. With all of that, we were “slip sliding away,” weren’t we?
I felt that slide happening, did you? Don’t you think that to a degree this current news business atmosphere aided and abetted Donald Trump? I have to wonder if once we get through this current madness, if in fact we are able to get through it, lessons will be learned about getting back to the “telling it like it is” mindset of the 1960’s? A time when some of us were naive enough to think that the truth was an absolute defense. Could be that every so often people need a reminder.