Could Tribune employees soon be working for the Koch Bros?

I wish them well. This should be part of the Great Media Pushback suggested recently by Glenn Reynolds.

 

Their new bosses might insist on it. Pendulums that have swung far in one direction do tend to swing back eventually.

 

Can overt agendas as the new owner of the U-T has, and exemplified by Patch, kill the notion a career is journalism is not some sort of noble calling, but is in fact, a career where one performs work they hopefully enjoy, to some extent, and get compensated for it?

 

I don't like the phrase "propaganda organs" but do think that agenda-driven journalism could work as long as there is enough agendas driving enough journalism to balance things out. My understanding is many newspapers in Europe have very strong agendas shaping their content and news decisions.

I think agenda-driven journalism is very different than propaganda. The Washington Times is not a propaganda organ. It's a newspaper with an open slant that affects how it covers every issue. Most news organizations have slants. The Times is overt. That's not a failing. That may be more responsible and reasonable to readers, particularly in this era when they aren't limited to only your product anyway.

 

Go back to the origins of political "debate" in this country between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. You will see way back then then that men of means often started their own newspapers whose sole purpose was to produce screeds that villified pols of the other party. There were no giant newspapers, but there were a lot of small ones.

Is that propagandizing - or is it editorializing?

It is sort of like the difference between a cynic and a realist. It all depends on whether or not you agree with him...

 

I disagree with you and the newspaper I used as an example.

 

The problem with agenda-driven "journalism" is the same one that exists with Fox News and MSNBC. Their audiences end up being the choirs to which the expected preaching is done. They wind up as basically closed systems.

Part of the appeal of the general circulation paper was that, if it were truly serving the values of objectivity and fairness, it could be consumed by people across a spectrum of opinions. Sometimes it would reinforce, sometimes it would challenge, all because it was adhering to a line in the middle.

Through my multiple decades in media, I saw how the middle did not hold. The shift left in political agenda swamped newsrooms, content and products, after which just calling it "the middle" didn't fool many for long. It alienated many in the audience and, worse, many who otherwise would have done business with the media outlets.

The latest wrinkle has been journalists giddily forsaking any ethic of striving for objectivity, declaring it unrealistic, impossible or even dead, and overtly pushing agendas that had been tamped down in the best of times or covert as the slippage began. Maybe that will prove to be a way out financially (doubt it) but it surely damages any sense of national or community discourse and smarts.

 

When your brand of "journalism" leads you to ignore stories because they would harm a political interest, then you are no long practicing journalism. You are practicing PR. If a paper's owner/publishers say all coverage of a certain issue must portray only a positive light, then they are not practicing "agenda-driven journalism." They are practicing public relations. Using the word journalism in that sense is an insult to the thousands of real journalists around the world.

The idea that "most news organizations have slants" is right-wing tripe to justify blatant bias in reporting by agencies like Fox News. The "slant" for most news organizations is to present the truth as they can best discover it to their readers, not to promote an agenda. Sometimes the facts promote an agenda for one side or the other. That doesn't mean the news organization has a slant. It means one side or the other is right.

The only place in a newspaper for "agenda-driven journalism" is in columns or editorials.

 

Sadly, most people don't want to read accurate news. Most people want to read something that tells them what they are thinking or believe is right.

And, of course, these news groups have plenty of content at their fingertips.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/13covert.html?_r=0

 

The only news organizations that don't have slants are the ones run by robots.

What you're saying sounds great, but the news has never been presented that way.

 

But that's what it should strive to be. Balanced. Like real balanced, not fake balanced. Not "agenda-driven" balanced. I honestly believe most news organizations strive to hit that. Sure, there are some on each side that don't, and even the ones who work for it don't hit the mark every time. But at least they make an effort rather than saying, "Well, there's a chance I might be slightly biased, so I'll throw all attempts at impartiality out the door and just become a shill."

Maybe I'm just too much of an idealist that way.