redblueamerica.com

To riff a bit more on Ben's post and Another Skeptic's comment, I was struck by the whining tone in The Washington Post piece about the demise of newspapers. Acclaimed ex-journalist David Simon, in his laments, think's he's touting the virtues of old-time newspapers. In fact, he's exposing the reasons for their march to irrelevancy. And he gets off to an arrogant, roaring start in the lead:

Is there a separate elegy to be written for that generation of newspapermen and women who came of age after Vietnam, after the Pentagon Papers and Watergate? For us starry-eyed acolytes of a glorious new church, all of us secular and cynical and dedicated to the notion that though we would still be stained with ink, we were no longer quite wretches? Where is our special requiem?

Boo-freakin-hoo. To think of your profession as a mission -- where you preach to the intellectual savages -- and as your place of work as a church (secular AT ALL TIMES, of course), is a serious misreading of the job. Just report the news, dude. Save the patronizing attitude toward your readers for the cocktail parties.

Bright and shiny we were in the late 1970s, packed into our bursting journalism schools, dog-eared paperback copies of "All the President's Men" and "The Powers That Be" atop our Associated Press stylebooks. ...

Sigh. When you are a secular missionary, instead of a reporter, Watergate is the miracle of the Resurrection, and "All the President's Men" is your Scripture. And Vietnam? Perhaps leading America to defeat is akin to Moses (Charlton Heston version) coming down from the mount to shatter the golden calf. Yet it is instructive to read this piece from the Columbia Journalism Review that exposes the myths of journalism's heroism in Watergate. We continue with David Simon:

Isn't the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium -- isn't an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?

Well, yes. News is valuable. But we'd prefer it without the pretensions of most liberal journalists, who feel their job is to tell us what to think about the events of the day rather than just reporting the news. True, not a lot of that has changed just because more people read their biased news on the Internet. But now we have the opportunity to consume news from various points of view -- and talk about it with other readers -- rather than just taking the big media's word for it. And, as for me, the Los Angeles Times serves two main purposes: Giving me a sports page to read on the can, and crossword puzzles. Most everything else, pretty expendable.

But I give Mr. Simon credit for having more self-awareness than most MSM dinosaurs.

It's hard to say that, even harder to think it. By that premise, what all of us pretended to regard as a viable commodity -- indeed, as the source of all that was purposeful and heroic -- was, in fact, an intellectual vanity.

Right on! X gets a square

That's about as much of this story as I can take. I'll leave it to Ben, if he feels so inclined, to get deeper into Simon's story where he talks about the nuts and bolts of the decline of old gray ladies.