I read articles like this one from Maureen Groppe and Peter Urban about Republicans whining about the use of “czars” in the Obama administration, and it makes me question whether I’ll care when newspapers finally go under. Its full of “some say one thing but others say another thing” reporting, and it’s not until deep in the article that you find out that the Republicans had nothing to say when the same thing was going on in the Obama Bush administration. That information should have been in about paragraph two and it should have been a statement of fact not a quote from someone else.
For all the legitimate policy differences one might have with the Obama administration, this is a bullshit, made up issue and for real journalists to spend any time on it is ridiculous.
I quite agree! Now it’s time for The Star to do a hard-hitting exposé of ACORN detailing how this Obama-inspired criminal enterprise promotes child prostitution and how it waxed wealthy on the Democrats plowing BILLIONS of Big Government tax dollars into their partisan vote registration scheme that planned to use “Donald Duck” and “Minnie Mouse” to elect André Carson to Congress!!!
I think you meant Bush administration, not Obama.
I did. Thanks for the correction.
What irritates me, I guess, is not so much the double standard of guys like Pence – that’s par for the course, and not inherently unique to a particular party. It’s more that this is only considered “news” because Pence is griping about it. If, say, a Libertarian who had been complaining about such things in the Bush administration continued to complain in the Obama administration, this article almost certainly wouldn’t have been written.
So, “news” in too many cases — particularly with respect to the federal government — seems to be a matter of writing what one major party says about the other, taking no position on the truth, having a “controversy” and maybe selling some ad space.
politicians in both major parties do the same sorts of things as well; that doesn’t help…but that’s the nature of politics; you’d hope for something better from the media
wilson46201
Well said.
As the Foruth Estate crumbles under the weight of advancing information technology, society is blessed with a free market of ideas allowing us to be unencumbered by polemic media bias.
Example: They don’t seem to note that the czar pool is mostly comprised of white males.
Will Obama will determine the daily print media is too big to fail and requires billions of bail-out tax dollars?
wilson and kenn– “billions”? Really?
And do explain how “registration fraud” could have actually helped a candidate. The problem of how to get Mickey and Donald to actually show up and vote seems to be a big one. There seems to be a big step missing in the plan.
Then there was the fact that ACORN was required, by law, to turn in all collected registrations–whether they appeared fraudulent or not. And that they had, for the most part, already sorted them and alerted the government which ones appeared to be fraudulent.
Wilson is just being sarcastic, I’m pretty sure, based on past experience with him and his unwavering support for Andre Carson (and Julia before him). I’m not sure what perspective Kenn’s coming from on this.
D’oh! I should have noticed there were only three exclamation points at the end…
Doug:
Newspapers, as a medium, will die as did the town crier because guys like you are too good and too inexpensive at what you do. Journalism as we think we know it is a product of twentieth century competition between and among family owned newspapers and government approved broadcast networks. So called objective journalism emerged as a reaction to the yellow journalism of the late 19th and early 20th century. Universities such as Indiana University started journalism schools and taught future journalists to be fair, accurate and objective. Media owners hired these journalists and prided themselves on being stewards of the public interest, and they made money doing so. It all hit its height in the 1960s and 1970s with the Cronkite, Pentagon Papers and Watergate and has steadily declined because the people who owned and controlled media companies did two things: (1) they crushed or swallowed the competition to emerge as monopolies and (2) they decided to chase profits in areas other than objective balanced journalism. I worked as a print journalist during this transition period, from 1983-1995. Now, instead of having two or three papers in, for example, Lafayette getting to the bottom of what is going on at city hall, we have one that gives its diminishing space to the legend of Michael Jackson and to which movie outsold the others. The broadcast networks and the big prestigious papers like the New York Times and Washington Post, the true guardians of the public interest, have taken steady hits to their credibility with unending scandals and questionable conflicts of interest. So that type of journalism is pretty much dead.
Now, with blogs and cable, it is more like it was in the days of Andrew Jackson when newspapers were directly affiliated with or owned by political parties and publishers had clear agendas. Fair and balanced reporting of public affairs was beside the point. Sound familiar?
Well, its a brave new world now. I hope you and other bloggers of good faith keep doing what you are doing, exposing hypocrisy and trying to help us sort out what is really going on out there — like a good journalist.
Barry,
I’d like to believe that, but the problem is that most bloggers comment on articles written by the newspapers. No newspapers, no commentary.
The other issue is that bloggers don’t have the time to attend town meetings or the credibility to interview the mayor, etc… Big stories are often broke by local newspapers.
I agree, newspapers have fallen WAY behind, and I don’t have a subscription myself because of that. However, for the most part, bloggers can’t fill that void that would be left behind. Even cable news depends on the newspapers to break the stories much of the time.
Now, in defense of Doug, he does bring up commentary on laws that are working their way through the process, something that I assume he finds out through the state website. Services like that are better done by Doug than a local newspaper.
Good points, Jason. I agree that we are steadily losing credible sources of news, but that has been ongoing since the 1970s newspaper consolidations and the commercialization of TV news. We are seeing the rapid acceleration of the process. That’s bad news. But the good news is that there are more sources of news — most of them free — than ever before. Yes many are questionable, but I believe in the process of sorting through this explosion of information new models are emerging and Doug’s blog is one of them. Who else takes the time to decode the Byzantine workings of the Indiana General Assembly? I don’t see that stuff in my newspaper. You can tell easily when he is commenting and when he is giving information and news. And we must think he’s credible because we keep reading his blog. Also, Doug does not appear beholden to any corporate interests.