Is USA's media and journalism facing death?

The first cut and paste.
Read if you have time and repent if you can.
Four years ago on May 1, President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln wearing a flight suit and delivered a speech in front of a giant "Mission Accomplished" banner. He was hailed by media stars as a "breathtaking" example of presidential leadership in toppling Saddam Hussein. Despite profound questions over the failure to locate weapons of mass destruction and the increasing violence in Baghdad, many in the press confirmed the White House's claim that the war was won. MSNBC's Chris Matthews declared, "We're all neo-cons now;" NPR's Bob Edwards said, "The war in Iraq is essentially over;" and Fortune magazine's Jeff Birnbaum said, "It is amazing how thorough the victory in Iraq really was in the broadest context."


How did the mainstream press get it so wrong? How did the evidence disputing the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the link between Saddam Hussein to 9-11 continue to go largely unreported? "What the conservative media did was easy to fathom; they had been cheerleaders for the White House from the beginning and were simply continuing to rally the public behind the President " no questions asked. How mainstream journalists suspended skepticism and scrutiny remains an issue of significance that the media has not satisfactorily explored," says Moyers. "How the administration marketed the war to the American people has been well covered, but critical questions remain: How and why did the press buy it, and what does it say about the role of journalists in helping the public sort out fact from propaganda?"

"Buying the War" includes interviews with Dan Rather, formerly of CBS; Tim Russert of MEET THE PRESS; Bob Simon of 60 MINUTES; Walter Isaacson, former president of CNN; and John Walcott, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder newspapers, which was acquired by The McClatchy Company in 2006.

In "Buying the War" Bill Moyers and producer Kathleen Hughes document the reporting of Walcott, Landay and Strobel, the Knight Ridder team that burrowed deep into the intelligence agencies to try and determine whether there was any evidence for the Bush Administration's case for war. "Many of the things that were said about Iraq didn't make sense," says Walcott. "And that really prompts you to ask, 'Wait a minute. Is this true? Does everyone agree that this is true? Does anyone think this is not true?'"

In the run-up to war, skepticism was a rarity among journalists inside the Beltway. Journalist Bob Simon of 60 MINUTES, who was based in the Middle East, questioned the reporting he was seeing and reading. "I mean we knew things or suspected things that perhaps the Washington press corps could not suspect. For example, the absurdity of putting up a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda," he tells Moyers. "Saddam...was a total control freak. To introduce a wild card like Al Qaeda in any sense was just something he would not do. So I just didn't believe it for an instant." The program analyzes the stream of unchecked information from administration sources and Iraqi defectors to the mainstream print and broadcast press, which was then seized upon and amplified by an army of pundits. While almost all the claims would eventually prove to be false, the drumbeat of misinformation about WMDs went virtually unchallenged by the media. THE NEW YORK TIMES reported on Iraq's "worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb," but according to Landay, claims by the administration about the possibility of nuclear weapons were highly questionable. Yet, his story citing the "lack of hard evidence of Iraqi weapons" got little play. In fact, throughout the media landscape, stories challenging the official view were often pushed aside while the administration's claims were given prominence. "From August 2002 until the war was launched in March of 2003 there were about 140 front page pieces in THE WASHINGTON POST making the administration's case for war," says Howard Kurtz, the POST's media critic. "But there was only a handful of stories that ran on the front page that made the opposite case. Or, if not making the opposite case, raised questions."

"Buying the War" examines the press coverage in the lead-up to the war as evidence of a paradigm shift in the role of journalists in democracy and asks, four years after the invasion, what's changed? "More and more the media become, I think, common carriers of administration statements and critics of the administration," says THE WASHINGTON POST's Walter Pincus. "We've sort of given up being independent on our own."
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html

Although it is both a nuclear power and a crucial front in the war on terror, events inside Pakistan don’t tend to generate much interest from the U.S. media. So far in 2008, coverage of Pakistan has filled only 1% of the overall newshole as measured by PEJ’s News Coverage Index.

In the course of the past year there has been one dramatic spike in coverage of the turmoil inside Pakistan. It occurred during the fourth quarter of 2007 and revolved around a key figure"Benazir Bhutto, the Harvard-educated, pro-Western former prime minister.

Bhutto returned to Pakistan to participate in elections last October. Her return triggered a cascade of events"protests, bombings, and the declaration of Martial Law, and the placing of Bhutto under house arrest. The week Martial Law was declared (Nov. 4-9) coverage of Pakistan rose to 17% of the newshole. The struggle for political power was then punctuated by Bhutto’s assassination on December 27. That week"Dec. 23-29, 2007"attention to Pakistan accounted for 18% of all the coverage studied. Driven by those two dramatic events, coverage of Pakistan in the final three months of last year filled 5% of the newshole.

By the time 2008 rolled around, media interest had plunged again, down to 2% in the first quarter of the year and to less than 1% in the second quarter. The Aug. 18 resignation of President Pervez Musharraf, after his rule was destabilized by the events of last year, is a major development attracting media attention this week. Given the limited coverage, the resignation may be hard for many Americans to understand. And the track record would suggest that such coverage won’t be sustained.
http://www.journalism.org/node/12449

America's media companies give the people what they want. Because the American masses are largely insular and ignorant, news of the world around them is not what they want..
http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/05/02/geog.test/

Don't you think that media and the people who writes"stories" should inform the public and alert the danger ahead because of the faulty system?
Are the journalists are critical enough and are they make some investigation before their"stories( not reports) getting published?
Why this degradation?

america does not have journalism anymore, the fourth estate died when the corporate interests bought it, and then dismantled it. The places where journalists once worked are rapidly going out of business, and they are in the business of supplying content to fill the space around the advertisements (propaganda from the corporate interests).

Once upon a time journalists wrote stories, they were educated and had time to investigate and they also knew how to write. Now we have people who call themselves journalists who are maybe a bit more intelligent than the ignorant herd but not by much, and they are not given the time nor the training that would be required in order for them to learn to investigate and then write thoughtful stories. They repeat what they have been told, often told by people who have something to sell or an agenda.

And so it goes.

Yes sir.
I am disillussioned with the modern development.

In the 1970s, reporters played critical roles in revealing what became the most serious U.S. political scandal in the post-World War II period. Washington journalists pursued the clues left at a petty burglary in the Watergate office building, following them all the way to the White House. The reportage led to congressional investigations and the ultimate resignation of President Richard Nixon.

The performance of the press during Watergate was held as the mirror that reflected the best that journalism could offer to democracy: holding power accountable. It became a trend in American newsrooms. The profession enjoyed high credibility in the years that followed, and a remarkable increase in journalism school enrollment occurred.

Almost three decades later, the situation has changed. Investigative journalism does not seem to be the brightest star in the firmament of American news. If the tone of the press was self-congratulatory in the post-Watergate years, pessimism about the state of American journalism is currently widespread. Observers have often argued that increasing media ownership concentration and the drive to sensationalize news coverage have sapped the vigor that investigative reporting requires. Business pressures also deter investigative reporting. Its demands for a great deal of time, human and financial resources frequently conflict with profit expectations and production cost controls. Also, the fact that stories might result in expensive lawsuits makes news companies nervous about supporting investigations
http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itgic/0401/ijge/gj03.htm

Economics plays a major role in shaping the information served up to the U.S. public in newspapers, on radio and television, and now on the Internet. The media are profit-driven enterprises. While nonprofit and advocacy organizations have significant voices in the U.S. media, most of the public's primary sources of information -- major urban newspapers, the weekly news magazines, and the broadcast and cable networks -- are in business to make money.

Few institutions are more important to a democratic society than a free and independent media. Such freedom requires the public, elected officials, and civic organizations to support truth, fairness, and balance in reporting and to insist that media outlets honor the principles that empower them.
------------------------Nicholas Johnson
Professor of Law, University of Iowa College of Law

It seems that most people are finally awakening to the fact that it is not a good idea to blindly accept the manipulating lies with which we are daily brainwashed, particularly by the communications media. It is totally acceptable and sensible nowadays to be cynical and critical of any source of information, particularly when associated with politics, big business and the media.

The 'information' age has literally turned upon itself.

George Orwell in his prophetic book '1984' said, "Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful... and give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind."

Hitler's propaganda henchman Dr. Goebells said, "If you tell people a big enough lie, often enough, they will believe it."

There are many definitions of lies and the Thesaurus has a great source of words to describe the distorting and twisting of any facts. Among the word variations that cover the outrageous manipulations we experience daily are fabrication, inference misstatement, falsification, evasion, deceit and deception. A lie is the deliberate withholding of any part of the truth from someone who has a right to know.

People are becoming accustomed to receiving deceit and deception. We are being constantly lied to by governments, government officials, drug companies, the medical profession, multinational industry, food companies and politicians. Lied to by media, by 'reality' programs, doctored photographs in magazines, by employers and by unions.

Lied to in financial transactions, stockholders reports and false corporate statements. Lied to by advertising, salesmen and anyone trying to make money to our disadvantage. Falsification has been piled onto fabrication, until lying -- through omission, distortion, bias or clever wording -- has become a way of life! The list is truly endless.

Life has become like a jigsaw puzzle, but without the picture on the front of the box so that you don't know what it's really supposed to be like. Governments, multinationals and media are clever enough to make sure you don't always have all the pieces!
http://www.naturalnews.com/023999.html

Non Profit news??? Well newshour on PBS and Council on Foreign Relations pub "foreign affairs"....who else has a business model that does not depend upon staying in the good graces of the corporate class?? Only the pubs of NGO's I think, and they are so small bore and have such a limited audience that they don't impact the collective conscious very much.