December 13, 2008 12:01 AM
Crumbling
This cartoon may seem a bit self-serving, given the recent news about this newspaper. I'm most likely to be unemployed fairly soon, no longer doing the job I love. In the week following the announcement that the Rocky is for sale, the Miami Herald was put up for sale, the Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy and the New York Times announced it was borrowing millions against its new building. As worried as I am about my own fate, I'm more worried about an America with a severely weakened newspaper industry. There's a reason the First Amendment gives special treatment to the press. We're the watchdogs of a free society.
Yes, we make plenty of mistakes, yes our judgment can be impaired by personal bias, yes we can be intrusive and annoying. But there's no ready replacement for what we do. We're where the news comes from. Newspaper reporters generate most of the stories you read, hear on the radio and see on television. Sure, bloggers fill some of the vacuum, but the blogosphere does not operate under the rules of journalism. It propagates many more false stories, lies, libels, flights of fancy, rumors, and deliberate distortions than it does credible news stories. For all our errors, we ink-stained wretches of the legitimate press try to adhere to strict standards of fact-gathering and of vetting the information we gather before we print it. When we make mistakes, we correct ourselves.
Those of you who dismiss the press as simply biased, of blindly pressing an agenda, have not worked in a newspaper newsroom and seen firsthand the care taken every day with every story by disciplined reporters and editors. This is especially true when we are breaking a story about political or financial malfeasance, which may be the most important job we do. When we are acting in the role of watchdog, and we've caught a burglar, we absolutely want to get it right. You need to look no further than today's paper to see what I mean. Laura Frank's dogged investigative work on the continuing failure of the federal government to compensate ailing Rocky Flats workers for illnesses they contracted making nuclear bomb parts with radioactive material is the newspaper at its best. Who else is going to do that job when we're gone? Who's going to stand up for the sick and the dying and force our government to honor its commitments? I shudder to think what this society might become without strong, vital newspapers performing the eternal vigilance that makes a democratic society viable.
December 13, 2008
8:28 AM
AlanS writes:
Right on, Ed! A nation without a strong and independent press is vulnerable to shenanagans by its government and industry that can do real and lasting harm to democracy and freedom. Worse, a smaller press controlled by those same entities is a horror that I hate to contemplate.
December 13, 2008
9:59 PM
ZachO writes:
I disagree,
blogs and technology are enabling journalism to grow and improve in countless ways. What’s mortally wounded is old journalism and old models. There’s a market failure now in newspaper companies, not in journalism. They’re not the same thing.
December 14, 2008
9:10 AM
Locke writes:
Zacko,
You're wrong for two reasons. First, it's not just newspapers. Local TV stations, the national tv networks, and magazines are failing. Second, blogs are not run by professionals, not edited and do not hold themselves accountable to the public. They are not journalism by definition.
You can make the case that things liked Spiked, Salon, etc. are examples of journalism being strengthened in the digital age, and I agree, but those few examples are more than offset by the overall dwindling of the /professional/ media.
December 15, 2008
6:43 AM
Sandy Fox writes:
You have a right to be concerned about yourself and those at The Rocky.
Part of the issue is that we are a society of instant gratification and we are more likely to get that from the web (even this one). It doesn't dawn on us that without an actual group of people working their craft, there would be not websites whether it originates as a newspaper or as a website on its own.
Newspapers not only report and inform but also raise the bar on the correct use of the English language. Hopefully, it can be a study of how our language should be used to communicate with the masses.
December 15, 2008
10:40 AM
sstnt writes:
Ed, I agree with your assertion that newspapers are a very important part of the media, and of our democracy. A well educated and well informed citizenry is vital. Yet, you could just have easily put a "credibility" under the word "Newspapers". Because without credibility, newspapers are as useless as if they did not exist to the Republic. You, as a political cartoonist, are not constrained by the same fairness and balance that reporters and editors must ascribe to. And yet, your cartoons are given large and prominent position on the editorial pages, even when constantly heavily liberal and biased, with scant attention to the other side(smaller, black & white, etc). If, as you say, the newsroom tries to present fairness and balance, unfortunately they are not trying hard enough. Perhaps, since the bias is in your favor, you just don't see it?
December 15, 2008
2:13 PM
Locke writes:
Sstnt,
Your argument is faulty because you're mixing up hard journalism and opinion journalism when you talk about credibility.
The entire rest of the editorial page leans conservative, more than 'balancing' Stein's work. If anything, it is unbalanced to the right! But moreover, as I alluded to above, the opinion page DOES NOT HAVE TO BE BALANCED. It is an opinion page. In the Rocky's case, it is openly slanted to the conservative side. Stein's work IS the 'balance.'
December 17, 2008
1:34 PM
Steve Collins writes:
Bless you, Ed, and good luck.
December 22, 2008
8:16 AM
Bouldergeist writes:
"But there's no ready replacement for what we do. We're where the news comes from. Newspaper reporters generate most of the stories you read, hear on the radio and see on television. Sure, bloggers fill some of the vacuum, but the blogosphere does not operate under the rules of journalism."
Problem is, neither do journalists. I recall the time a reporter from a national magazine of some repute fraudulently "quoted" me without even bothering to speak with me -- having me "say" something that was demonstrably untrue. Unless your agenda coincides with the journalist's, you can count on the story being wrong.
The main advantage of blog journalism is that in many cases, the author is an expert in the field. Journalists are typically helpless when covering legal issues, because they simply do not have the requisite training.
Journalists and news organizations come to their stories with hidden agendas all the time. FAUX News set a standard even Pravda would have grave difficulty in living down to. The blogosphere might not be much better, but it can't do a lot worse.
The blogosphere is what our local newspapers were 250 years ago. Newspapers could print anything -- and in many cases, did. We survived that, and we will survive this transition.
December 27, 2008
11:13 AM
Ted in Vegas writes:
How true, Bouldergeist; how true!
I too have bee misquoted by "professional" journalists to my own detriment. The Denver Post "journalists" evidently don't even know how to balance a check book or are familiar with the concept of invoicing. I sat down with the Post's "journalists" to discuss a former Lt. Governor's books and explained that all of the money is properly accounted for and properly spent. But because some of the invoices were received and paid after an event, they decided the money was spent wrongly and wrote a damning piece against Joe Rogers. It was quite evident they were idiots, but their idiocy helped kill his career and mine. But, they were "professional journalists", who work hard to get a story right, right? No, hardly work to get a story at all is more like it.
You say journalists can't write about law because they don't have enough knowledge about the subject; YOU'RE RIGHT! But they also can't write, intelligently, about:
politics
economics
theology
transportation
finance
just about anything else.
All they are taught is how to properly write sentences and paragraphs to draw people in to their material. I took their journalism classes at Metro and while they're told to make sure to get a story right, to them that just means to quote accurately and decide what's most important, but not given the education on how to determine what is important.
There's an old saying: you can't lead where you won't go and you can't teach what you don't know.
There's a whole bunch that journalists don't know; they can't portray what they don't know. That means there's not much they can accurately portray.
They're basically worthless.
January 4, 2009
11:13 AM
Anthony703 writes:
Not that there is going to be much of an audience...
The primary problem with the press today--they are the sounding boards for just one idealogical point of view and having two papers in the same town means very little, other than having the same political philosophies duplicated ad nauseum.
Once upon a time, say back in the early 70's, when I first came to denver, I relished both the News and the Post for presenting opposite points of view. And the result--I subscribed to both papers, enjoying the morning and afternoon editions. Then--I could pretty well figure out the real story by evaluating both perspectives.
But today--Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum are not worth the effort or expense. Let them both go in the tank and compell their employees to get real jobs where honesty actually is a job requirement.