I want to start this lovehate in reverse. I love journalism. I love the sense that a media outlet, be it print, television, film, radio, website or blog has the ability to maintain an objective integrity that allows for informative and enticing stories about the world around me. I do, however, have an ability to distinguish the ever-increasing blurring of the objective and the subjective in mainstream journalistic delivery.
Quite plainly, the human interest story is now 99% of journalism and human interest is governed by the least objective body in existence: humanity. Let me also admit that while this is often a tired subject that's been around for years, it's the look forward that concerns me. Its basis has been batted around by satirists from Mark Twain and Umberto Eco to Peter Cook and the tagteam of Stewart & Colbert. People gave the knowing wink when Colbert exalted the term truthiness, but we're getting dangerously closer to that threshold. Not to be misanthropic about some sort of dystopian future, but I have to wonder if facts will even matter in 100, 50 or 10 years from now. Commentary has become the new story; on the web front, isn't Digg really about the importance of opinion and commentary over the actual links themselves? In teaching even high school students the basics of writing a newspaper article, there is the tried and true W5H model of Who, What, When, Where, Why, How to deliver all of the facts pertinent to a situation. Facts are checked and double-checked, sources are required, and above all, there can be no sense of bias on the part of the writer. We have been devolving down a sliding scale toward a point where the Who, What, When, Where, and How of a story has been reduced to a soundbite. "News" has given way to entertainment and entertainment has glorified the 5th W - Why. The why allows for commentary, expert opinions, punditry, and no-so-expert opinions not just on the story, but, more importantly to broadcasters, every tertiary aspect of the story that market research says will get more viewers.In reporting on the events in Georgia over the past couple of weeks (not the home of the Braves), I'm sure more time has been spent on McCain's and Obama's opinions on the matter and less on educating the general populace about the fact our Americentric view should allow for a Georgia that doesn't have peach farms. Check that! We're not even hearing about what people who are political forces think about a political situation, we're hearing from the pundits and none of them are adding facts. Journalism has become a culture of who can yell the loudest and who is most entertaining. And even the most idiotic blowhard can be entertaining in the right setting.Television news has been reduced to 5-6 hard news stories a day. I hope the defense for such a concentration is that not enough interesting things are happening. On the day I write this Paraguay has a new leader, Zimbabwe continues its collapse, Polan gets rocked by a tornado, Peru has thousands march in protest, 14 million people in Africa are on the brink of starvation due to food costs, India is concerned about a cement industry cartel, people in Haiti are eating mud, Taiwan's former president is laundering 31 million dollars off-shore, the tropical storm heading to Florida has killed people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, trees are being genetically enhanced to swallow up double the carbon, and Argentinian authorities are investigating the deaths of 14 children in clinical trials. And that's the news, back to the blowhards... wait, incredibly we've taken all the time reporting REAL news.I would certainly rather know some of these world events are happening rather than listening to O'Reilly, Hannity, Matthews or Olbermann wax redundantly about the world on NEWS stations. When personality becomes the news, it says more about what broadcasters think of us as consumers of information.I started by saying that I love journalism, but I love opinion as well. There is a place for both. No one will ever accuse me of being a journalist, and I don't want to be - it's far too much work. I enjoy a well-crafted rant. I like listening to a good rave. Hell, I even enjoy hearing someone else fly off the handle letting invectives fly. None of this, however, is news, and the more we buy it, the more they'll serve it up with a side of slick computer-generated overlays.