The legislature passes a budget that runs counter to what any group of citizens you care to define opposes. That is a representative government FAIL by definition. It is not partisan.

You seem to be arguing that media in California is bad because they aren’t rnning news pieces attacking the “criminal” legislature. But then, a news story loses legitimacy if it attacks its subjects.

See, I’ve always felt that was rather naive and sadly idealized POV on the media. I want rabid news hounds out nipping at the heels of elected officials to keep them honest. Failing that, expose them to the point the resign in shame, or fake shame- either way is fine with me as long as they get the heck outta Sacramento or D.C.

Where are the Woodwards & Bernsteins of the current generation? Where is the real investigative reporting that does not involve Paris Hilton or Octomom?

Did you ever read the Transmetropolitan graphic novels by Warren Ellis?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmetropolitan

The main character, Spider Jerusalem, fits my mold of the ideal journalist. Here’s a quote from the character:

“I want to see humans talking about human life personally. I want to see people who give a (bleep) about the world. I want… I want to see posessed journalists! YES! I want to see people like me rising up with hate, laying about them with fiery eyes and steaming genetalia–possessed by ancient volcano gods from the Polynesian islands, waving vast breasts and improbable p*nises at the secret chiefs of the world–naked glowing god-journalists browntrousering the naughty twenty-four hours a day, a new planet earth!”

Now *THAT* would be journalism I could respect. Heck, I’d go back to college and become a journalist. Might still do it if I can retire from my current career early enough.

By defintion, that’s a partisan opinion. You seem to be arguing that media in California is bad because they aren’t rnning news pieces attacking the “criminal” legislature. But then, a news story loses legitimacy if it attacks its subjects.

… just how far his profession has fallen…

Every pressure, every temptation and every bias that allegedly has afficted traditional media is equally at play in all of the new platforms trumpeted as replacing it.

…Colbert… O’Reilly… Stewart…

All comedians, although one is an unintentional fool. News exists on these shows only to set up the comic bits. (O’Reilly does the same thing as the others, except that he spins a rant rather than a joke.) People who claim to get their news from these shows are fundamentally ill-informed.

Those make the rounds at my work every so often, and this is a place where more than half of the people have graduate degrees in technical and scientific fields. I’m constantly responding with links to the relevant pages on snopes.com. It tends to be the urban myths that might somehow affect people personally, like the one about the gang initiation where they supposedly drive in a car at night without their headlights, and the initiate is supposed to shoot the driver of the first car that blinks their lights as a reminder.

Absolute 100% pure ignorant BULL. The last budget, full of regressive taxes for which there were MANY alternatives, was opposed by *every* group polled, no matter how you sliced the data. By race, by Party, by gender, by favorite color… it didn’t matter- universally opposed. The California legislature is no longer a representative government, and is on the verge of becoming criminal in the eyes of many folks of many ideological persuasions. For frak’s sake you played the exact “marginalize the opposition” card I described like a programmed little robot. You are what the political class refers to as a useful idiot. Get out of your unreality bubble and smell the truth.

A Journalist Says: Journalism is an art, and it is a vital one to the success of our country. Journalists are the people who call out the government.

And when will that be happening, exactly? Your profession is swiftly falling below that of lawyers in terms of public opinion. I’d trust a strung out junkie before I trusted most of the vermin who call pose as journalists these days. You guys botched Bush. You are botching Obama. The California state government is regularly fellated by local news media despite their Biblical proportion failures. Your words are empty and speak of a fantasy world that does not exist.

The Los Angeles Times, for example, isn’t dying because of the Internet. It’s dying because they print absolute nonsense on a daily basis.

There’s a scene in a Tom Clancy book (I forget which one. He went way downhill after Debt Of Honor) that I thought made the point nicely. An old time journalist is teamed up with a new hotshot reporter. They are chasing some guy around trying to get a story. The guy finally turns to the reporters and says, “Why should I trust you? You’re journalists!” And this hits the old time guy really hard. He realizes just how far his profession has fallen.

And I live in a world where people get their “news” from places like Steven Colbert… NOT JOURNALISM.

Totally agreed here. I remember checking out Colbert to see what the buzz was, and after three episodes I was like, “Is this all he does? A bad O’Reilly parody? I don’t like O’Reilly, so why do I want to watch the same bad parody over and over?” I can’t stand John Stewert, either. Nothing to do with the politics. It’s his constant mugging and overacting to the camera. It’s tiresome after just a few minutes.

Show me a blog which consistently posts honest, balanced, unbiased, and thoroughly researched posts that investigate serious topics.

And then show me any typical American who can tell the difference between editorializing and good journalism.

Also, it is a mistake to call journalism my profession–I am still a student journalist. And I live in a world where people get their “news” from places like Steven Colbert… NOT JOURNALISM. It is unfortunate that people with opinions are considered journalists these days. The solution is not to throw your hands up in the air and give up on the profession altogether; the solution is to stop the spread of ignorance and to help the public renew their faith in it.

Let’s imagine what would happen if every real reporter started producing stories no more than 140 characters long.

Online “news” is sadly becoming a wasteland of half-baked truths & rumors, mostly by virtue of the reality of news outlets (bloggers included) all racing each other to get there first. Little gets vetted or fact-checked. You can always discreetly retract it later. Thus quality of information suffers. Note how often the anti-vaxxers take advantage of this. Speed may be awesome (35 Tweets an hour, anyone?), but once poorly conceived bilge is out there, well, it’s out there.

(Full disclosure – I do make my living connected to print media, although at the digital end of it. Doesn’t make me delusional , tho.)

Some may sneer at the “tree based” media, but one fact remains: by the very nature of its process, print has a far greater impetus to get things right. When you’re printing a run of 2.3 million magazines, errors are a lot more difficult (not to say, expensive) to correct. You can’t just edit in a strikethrough & be done with it. The consequences of haste & rash decisions are far more severe in print. This *could* just result in a lot more thought going into the finished product.

Doesn’t always, mind you – but I’d be willing to bet it helps.

In short, take a lesson from Wyile E. Coyote: While that new Acme™ Rocket Pack might seem like the greatest thing ever, just watch out for the edge of the cliff…

Edison Carter (Matt Frewer): When did News become Entertainment?

Murray, his ‘editor’ (Jeffrey Tambor): When it was created?

STILL 20 minutes into the Future….

J/P=?

My local newspapers are thin, pallid, and don’t look long for this world. That is a BAD thing when there isn’t another medium that can support professionals so they can do the interviews, the research and investigation we need more than ever.

The Huffington Post is sometimes fun, but it’s a leech that produces only opinion, not news. When the real news agencies go away, the web will have to feed on tweets and half-baked blog content. Pretty thin gruel for an informed electorate.

NPR, Frontline and the BBC are my news oasis in this desertified news wastland.

Me, for one. I don’t read, watch or listen to news that is “full of it.”

My local newspaper isn’t crap. Neither are the local public broadcasting radio stations. News on local broadcast TV is actually responsible. My primary online news sources are the NYT, BBC and The Guardian. They aren’t crap, either.

Here’s what’s crap: Cable TV and talk radio. But, then, they don’t qualify as being part of the news business.

I don’t watch cable news. Geez, I don’ t even subscribe. I’m missing nothing except noise.

Remember, tabloid journalism has been around for years and years, and not everything labeled “news” is news.

Society is likely to split up even more than it already is and present-day fringes might turn into powerful communities with strong political power – well, judging by Texas it’s already happening.

It seems like much of the newspaper industry missed the 21st century boat and failed to transform their business model online. How different things could have been if major newspaper companies had found a way to weave a tighter subscriber community by pioneering much of what many social sites do today.

But I agree with what others have said here. What is saddening/frightening is I’m seeing more and more people’s ability to think critically being washed away as they look merely to blogs, social sites, or certain political comedy/commentary shows as their only source of news.

Don’t get me wrong, I have my dozen or so blogs I visit every day (this being one of them), and I think we always need to have political comedians/commentators. But when people stop seeing the bias that comes out of these mediums it is frightening.

Case in point, my wife gets lots of emails from friends/family about “articles” they’ve read or online petitions. 9 times out of 10 they are blatantly false and often down-right offensive. She finally got tired of it and sent everyone who sends her those stories a link to http://www.wikihow.com/Recognize-Bias-in-a-Newspaper-Article asking them to review this BEFORE sending her these “articles”.

Last thought, I see the degradation of primary education as a big contributor to this problem. People stop caring about or even recognizing bias because they often lack the critical thinking skills necessary to do so.

It is fairly accepted that so-called “news” and analysis first must pass through the filter of a large corporation that owns the media platform (be it a periodical or electronic) and then it must be profitable.

Secondly, so-called bloggers are quite capable of doing research and original reporting, and that’s what the best of them do. Generally speaking those blogs are the winners in the marketplace of ideas.

Finally, journalism is fully compatible with new media just as much as old. In fact, new media is simply a distribution model, and nothing else. Just as radio and television, the Internet only represents a more efficient transmission method.

The truth is that the old masters failed to recognize the sea change of computer interconnectivity and ubiquity and clung to their old model and are now suffering in a business sense as a result.

journalism as we knew it will disappear

In the mainstream, real journalism disappeared years ago. By real journalism I mean when journalists were concerned with informing the public about truth, not pics of Britney’s cooter, not weird political spin for whatever faction the media owner wants to support, that sort of thing. Part of that was an illusion, but it was a nice illusion. Is there anyone who DOES NOT think that the journalists in mainstream media are full of it?

As long as journalism continues to be personal opinion, punditry and invective, it’s doomed to die. Blogs are perfect for that, the evening news broadcast is not.

… as I read down further in this thread…

Yeah, what QD said.

One of the main arguments against this (besides the higher taxes) is that it would somehow make the broadcaster dependent on the very government it is supposed to watch. This does not have to be the case (for example, Supreme Court justices are paid the the government, but they are certainly not in the pocket of any Administration). In many western democracies there are healthy public broadcasters that routinely take on their respective governments.

That’s a partisan opinion, and it seems it’s influenced your opinion of journalists.

Here in California we have a government which is openly hostile to the taxpayers. Seriously. At this point we might as well have a military junta in charge. There’d be little difference except that a junta might actually offer some entertainment value. It’s basically owned and controlled outright by three or four major public employees unions that make the Sopranos look like amateurs.

Do any local reporters ever ask any tough questions of the legislators? The politicians make idiotic claims about things, and you never hear a follow up question. The “journalists” just sit their head nodding like a bunch of bobblehead dolls, head back to the office, lightly rework the press release they got handed, and then off the the local bar.

Anyone one TV or radio who question the holy political writ is dismissed as a “right wing neocon” (regardless of the actual issue at hand) by smug newspaper editorial writers who live in some sort of giant, antiseptic bubble buried somewhere in the Earth’s mantle and totally cut off from the real world.

The new media doesn’t do journalism either, but it has brighter colors, and hence gets the audience.

That was very much true seveal years ago, and it still is true in too many instances.

But, traditional media — newspapers — are clever enough to hire the same designers and techies that have built the most successful online news outlets. Across the country, it’s common for newspapers to, in efect, scoop themselves online.

What’s really holding online news distribution back is money. So far, it’s the lucky few who have been able to sustain a profitable online news business based on ad sales. The lesson that has been learned is that online news — newspapers or any other format — doesn’t bring in enough money to sustain the staff neeed to produce and deliver that news.

The most severe impact of the demise of newspapers will be a drastic reduction in the nmber of people paid to find and produce the news. Few professional journalists — with ids in school and mortages like everyone else — are going to walk away from their failed newspaper and continue to work 8 hous a day for free producing the same news for distribution on the web.

Professional journalists do it for money, like the rest of us. When the money goes away, most will find jobs in other areas. The few who will continue to write will be motivated by something else, usually an ideological agenda of some sort. That is, they’ll produce propaganda.

No one should cheer the demise of newspapers. The news they produce will simply cease to be produced. We will all be that much dumber for it.

That’s why I always write a draft of my comment(s) on WordPad before posting!

Blogging is taking the news and putting a personal spin on it. Dash of pun here, sprinkle of cynicism there.

Don’t get me wrong, I love this blog. But it isn’t where I go for my news, and it shouldn’t be considered the news.

Journalism is an art, and it is a vital one to the success of our country. Journalists are the people who call out the government. They do the research, get the interviews, and gather evidence to show what the government is doing right and what they are doing wrong. Look back in the last ten years at all of the controversies and scandals. Any journalist will tell you that those stories weren’t written to sell papers or to be outrageous. They were written because it is the job of journalists to call people out when they are doing the greater public an injustice. They publish articles in the hopes of inspiring change. And they do. Impeachments, firings, new laws, greater awareness of social problems… it’s all because someone in the news media saw the importance of a story and wrote it.

And here’s where the difference comes in: blogs have biases, they are not edited, they are not vetted, they are not fact-checked, and they cannot always be trusted. Journalists are by no means perfect, but there is a system and accountability that keeps most respectable journalistic institutions committed to the importance of journalism.

Journalism isn’t dying because of the digital world. It’s dying because people don’t care anymore, and they’re not willing to pay for the service that journalism offers the country. You should all support your local news media. You don’t know what they do for you until they’re gone.

I’ll also repeat my bad journalism example-of-the-moment; CNN.com’s shockingly long front page article that covers a study that shows that people who own pets sometimes trip over them (In my mind, a finding as shocking as saying “Study finds that people who own chairs sometimes sit on them”). And kudos to the CDC for completing said study.

People are less likely to read this stuff? Shocking.