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Edited on Fri Feb-05-10 02:25 AM by JDPriestly
Most of them do not know enough about history and culture to write anything interesting or challenging.
The major local newspaper in L.A., like so many others, completely lost my trust because of its uncritical reporting on the Bush administration (the Iraq War for example). I and many other readers, I am sure, were disappointed to see how long the L.A. Times delayed in reporting on the Downing Street Memos. And then when the Times finally did report on it, the article was relegated to the inside pages. The propaganda supporting the war of course appeared on the first page.
Recently, the L.A. Times has continued to report with a viciously right-wing view.
I want a newspaper that simply reports the news in the front pages and saves the editorializing to the back pages. Unfortunately, the L.A. Times does not seem capable of even publishing a headline on any controversial subject that does not immediately color the article with a point of view -- usually a right-wing point of view. And why? Because their journalists do not know enough about history or what is going on to simply report facts.
I prefer to read blogs and news items written by scholars, by people with specialized knowledge in a field, people who don't try to write about health care and insurance issues and Iraq and Israel and Brazil, people who express opinions -- but only about things they really understand thoroughly.
So, if I want to know what is going on in business or economics, I want to read something by Krugman or a person who works for a company, or a person who has worked on Wall Street. I don't want to read articles written by reporters who talk to one expert and then another and then write an article that garbles the information provided by the experts. For example, if I want to read about the fraud on Wall Street, I read something by Elliot Spitzer -- who as Attorney General of New York put fear into the hearts of cheats on Wall Street. I don't want to read some watered down article that quotes Spitzer for a couple of lines and then quotes the CEO of a big bank for numerous paragraphs. (Quoting them in that proportion because, after all, the big bank is an advertiser).
Journalism is suffering because journalists are usually writers who really don't know what they are talking about. Because they just write about things they often don't really understand, they get into a lot of trouble. The "reporters" who allowed themselves to be "embedded" among the troops in Iraq are an example of the problem. They were writers -- and they were allowed to accompany soldiers. They wrote what the military wanted them to write. They didn't stop to ask about the basic assumptions of the war. Their were not educated to ask deeper questions. The press is sinking in its own superficiality.
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