The Value of Journalism
“…those giant presses and barrels of ink and fleets of delivery trucks were never what made newspapers invaluable. What gave newspapers their value was the mission and promise of journalism—the hope that someone was getting paid to wade into the daily tide of manure, sort through its deliberate lies and cunning half-truths, and tell a story straight.”
– Mark Bowden, The Atlantic, October, 2009
I came across Bowden’s “The Story Behind the Story” in The Atlantic the other day. It deals with the state of the news industry and what happens when professional journalists are replaced by people with a specific agenda and no other purpose than to win the ideological war that appears to have overtaken our country. The above quote pretty much encapsulates what I love about journalism when we aren’t being told to do more with less or when coverage is dictated by bean counters. Anyway, it made me feel a little better and hopeful that spending the last 10 years in newspapers wasn’t a total waste of time!
