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Collapse of the Fourth Estate

By Jon Whiten

In March, on the five-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the nation’s major news outlets reflected on the war and what led us to the half-decade mark. But few evaluated their own roles in the disaster that has maimed countless Iraqis and U.S. troops, killed hundreds of thousands and, according to economists Linda Blimes and Joseph Stiglitz, could… return to article

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    Journalists and journalism have become suspect with respect to timidity trumping temerity. If ever a time has come for the “yellow journalism” and “muckraking” of Upton Sinclair and his contemporaries to be the model of journalistic fortitude, not rectitude, it is now. The banalities of “news” advanced as perceptive, insightful, cogent and purposeful are as evident as the increase in volume for a tv commercial’s soundtrack. The “mild-mannered reporter” is no longer just a cartoon character’s disguise, it is a profession’s countenance of the very thing that mocks its pupose, a mild manner that reveals more than its feigns. How “nice” and “polite” and “respectful” and “respectable” have journalilsts become, now that the dumbing down of America is leaving no one behind and reading newspapers its denouement. Are there any women and men in the room worth their credentials? Or are we to presume that journalists suckle us for our own good? PBS coddles corporate sponsors, publicly-traded news publishing stock is unattractive, and merely a few magazines reflect serious thought for serious readers seeking content of civic vigor. To say that U.S. journalism must own up to its part in the trumpeting for revenge and saber-rattling of self-delusion in the march to oil’s drum is to say that it’s getting hotter on this planet. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows; you don’t need a journalist to tell you that what should be written can’t be published. It’s less a matter of “Collapse of The Fourth Estate” than that the three Estates of The Realm have embedded journalism so deeply in their vested interests as to smother it with sanctions that bode well for the profession, ill for its calling. When will the profession get mad as hell and not take it anymore?

    United States Posted by Bud Wizer on May 15, 2008 at 11:45 AM
    Page 1 of 1 pages

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