Must read: Media Culpa

"The problem is systemic. The U.S. corporate press is now corrupt beyond redemption. No one’s mere critique, however sharp, can make the slightest difference, since the mainstream press’ overall conditions are unchanged, and no insider has begun to think about the need to change them.
The problem is complex. Why has the press completely failed its constitutional obligation to inform the people of this country? That, and not, say, full-frontal nudity, was the whole purpose of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press.
The problem has to do with corporate concentration and the disappearance of our press into “the media”; a press corps compromised by too much wealth and too much personal fondness for the people at the top; the over-dependence of American reporters on official sources; the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, and other such deregulatory moves; the winning propaganda drive against “the liberal media”; the complicated influence of TV, with its over-emotionalism and obsessive focus on TV itself; and a sense of institutional trauma after Watergate and Vietnam, so that the corporate press will never wander near the brink again.
There are other factors, too. What we need now, however, is not just more analysis of our dilemma but fundamental change. We need a radical program of media reform, ASAP. . . .
Although more journalists than ever “get it” now—that is, they see that their profession has been ravaged by commercial pressure—it’s still the case that people in the media are often quite incapable of grasping the true problem. Especially the successful ones, who are neck deep in the status quo, and therefore can’t allow themselves to see how far they’ve strayed from their true path. To the likes of Jeff Greenfield and Aaron Brown, journalists are not obliged to do investigative journalism. All they are obliged to do is tell us what the White House said today, or (sometimes) what the Democrats replied.
At a symposium at American University a few years back, Judy Woodruff actually said that it is “not our job to get out front” on stories. That would be news to Madison and Jefferson. Bad news. . . .
By and large, our mainstream journalism has been pretty lousy from the start. The real Golden Age of News in U.S. history was the epoch of the so-called muckrakers, an extraordinary bunch of independent journalistic sleuths. They were intrepid advocates, eager to bust open scandals and make waves—completely antithetical to most mainstream reporters nowadays. What enabled their achievement was a broad range of independent magazines, which derived their profits not from advertising but from newsstand sales and subscription fees. The readers, not the advertisers, paid the publication’s bills. Once the entire print scene went commercial, a process complete by 1912 or so, the age of muckraking was history.
Decades later, U.S. mainstream journalism had a moment of surprising glory. It was in the ’70s when certain crises made it necessary for the corporate press to cover stories that they would surely rather have ignored: the true state of our war effort in Vietnam, Richard Nixon’s subversive activities as president, the congressional inquiries into the history of abuses by the CIA. Such news was so big and so important that it could not be suppressed—although it often barely got reported, as it faced considerable opposition from within the journalism world itself. That anomalous moment gave us great reporters like Lowell Bergman, Seymour Hersh, Frances Cerra, Sidney Schanberg, Robert Parry, John L. Hess and others. Most of those paragons have trouble getting any visibility today, because the kind of journalism they did 30 years ago is generally impossible today. And our democracy is much the worse for it."