From what I can tell, this Boing Boing post proposes that "citizen journalism" will be better than "real" journalism. But, what they describe sounds to me a bit like the creation of a sort of partisan journalism, turning all of the "news" into opinion pieces.
Imagine if the only news we received was essentially editorials created by special interest groups. It's really quite chilling.
Well, I actually can't clarify him, only make a clearer point...
So here goes:
I have no problem with any foreign national owning any business. My post on Sir Rupert Murdoch is about how he manipulated politics to gain control over our public airways.
Murdoch bought Fox first. Then converted into the Diatribe Network. Next,he pressured right wing politicians to force the FCC to alter its rules of ownership, effectively gutting the agency of its regulatory powers to guard the public trust.
Until they did, it was illegal for any non-native born American to own a television network.I'm not opposed to Murdoch because he's Australian. I'm opposed to Murdoch for reducing journalism to pure,short-attention-span propaganda.
I have no idea what his political leanings are actually, and I don't care.
Responsible journalism was placed in its coffin today, ready for a premature burial.
Journalism's downward spiral goes much further back than Rupert Murdoch's swallowing of the Wall Street Journal.
The government made its devils bargain with big media around 1984. What a coincidence!
It began with the merger of Capital Cities and ABC -- the seminal moment our press became, not free. Someday I'll go into detail about the how much more money that meant to Capital Cities, Westinghouse, and General Electric -- and why the stakes were so high. Another time.
The merger required a major rewrite of long standing FCC policy.
Here's a short review of "A Russian Diary," by Anna Politkovskaya, one of 13 journalists who have been killed in Russian since Putin came to power. It sounds like a harrowing account of what it's like under Putin, and will be on my list of books to read.
The people have spoken. Not only is the Evening News with Katie Couric in last place among evening television newscasts, but her audience base has dwindled to the single-digit millions. According to an interview article with Katie Couric in New York magazine (July 16, 2007), her current nightly news audience is about 5 million.
In the article Couric admits that she may have made a poor career move in accepting the anchor position at CBS. She wonders, perhaps, if the changes she made to the Evening News broadcast had been too much, too soon, too fast.
Whether I watch her broadcast is irrelevant. What Katie Couric has done as the first female news anchor woman for a major broadcast network is historic.
Though I also seem to remember Carol Simpson as the first Black woman I’ve ever seen anchoring the weekend world news. Not much press was made of her triumph with regard to her gender or her race, both of which were of utmost importance to me in my youth as I sought out those role models who would eventually influence my career path.
Carol Simpson was for me what Katie Couric now is for many of our youngest aspiring journalists.
