Story is here.
Actually, 60 minutes did not kill journalism. If anything, it was a commercial for the journalism industry. It is one reason why there is so much criticism in the blogosphere these days about how the press has largely rolled over for Bush and the Republicans. Tim Russert is rather pale compared to Mike Wallace.
Moreover, newspaper and media owners have always been concerned with profit. If that wasn't the case, San Francisco would actually have a decent newspaper rather than the Chronicle, which is a joke, and the L.A. Herald Examiner and the myriad old New York papers such as The World would still be in business.
What has really killed journalism, especially on the local level, has been Eyewitness News. Instead of gritty reporters acting in the public interest, they were now positioned as your lovable "friends," with inane joking banter between stories that actually trivialized journalism rather than made it more palatable. Weather reports became song and dance routines. It was also used to sell advertising masquerading as news stories, something Disney has only made worse since it bought ABC.
This was also around the time when news divisions were beginning to be folded into the entertainment divisions. Now news is positioned as just another form of entertainment, not as public service to the nation.
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As for your assertion that the news media has bent over for the Bush administration, I will leave you to decide for yourself how realistic you are being.
But perhaps a bit of what you say is true regarding the blurring of the line between entertainment and news, yet you do ignore the positive effects brought by eye-witness news. Words are a poor replacement for images, and still images are even poorer than moving ones. I think the idea of the liberal journalist sitting in a hotel room in the Middle East writing an article about one dead body he saw on the side of the road presents the old method of bringing news to the masses and the pictures of American troops walking the streets of Baghdad, talking and joking with one another while smoking cigarettes presents the new method. When the words were all the people had to go by, the general feelings of the journalists: the moods, the tones, the intentions—all of these factors played a larger role in how the situations reached the people. Now no one who seriously wishes to hear the news enjoys watching Fox and Friends or Good Morning America, but the truth is that what we had in the past was just as deficient if not more so when it comes to providing the truth of the matter.
Now I will not accuse you of too much based on a very short blurb, but I am tempted to paint you as adamant supporter old-style journalism, the kind that has the all-powerful journalist funneling more than news into his articles—in this vision he is the truth-sayer, a conscientious superhuman with the ability to feel and care and put those feelings and carings into his works. He goes beyond the boundaries of the real situations seen in images and in video—he sees into the heart and reports on it. I hope this isn’t where you are going, because I am very tempted to agree with you on the fact that entertainment and news are getting to be too good of friends, but I would hate to have to disagree with you on the virtues of the journalist and his ability to portray truth.
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