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Unfortunately the once-decent journalism professionals have been corrupted.

I saw it first-hand during the Watergate Scandal. I was majoring in journalism in college at the time and there was a huge sea change between those who entered the college pre-Watergate and those entering post-Watergate. The post-Watergates all wanted to be the next Bernstein and Woodward, taking down an administration. (These crusading anti-establishment “reformers” are now at the height of their careers and have little to show relative to what Bernstein and Woodward achieved.)

Then the field underwent a change during the Clinton Administration. Journalists poll at something like eighty percent or higher Democrat-leaning and they worked hard to cover for Clinton and his peccadilloes. They convinced themselves it was all right because Clinton’s weaknesses had nothing to do with his administration policies, so they rationed. (Yet they knew they had no problem attacking a conservative for lesser peccadilloes of conservatives, justifying it on the grounds that conservatives, in their view, were always trying to tell people how to live their lives.)

The pent-up frustration with not having power and opportunity to attack “the man” burst even before Bush was sworn into office and, once the initial shock of 9-11 passed, they worked hard to undermine his policies. They saw fruition when the House and Senate went heavily Democrat in 2008.

Feeling their oats, they went whole-heartedly in the can for Obama, partly because he was Democrat, and partly because he was half-black. All pretense of neutrality completely fell away. They covered up for him by refusing to ask the hard questions, by refusing to investigate and basically became a PR arm of the Obama Administration. They saw the opposite of Watergate as he was installed as 44. Instead of taking down “the man”, they created “the man”.

Now that their hero has revealed his feet of clay, the reporters are in trouble. If they do anything anywhere closely resembling investigative reporting, they know they will bring down Obama. If they don’t do it, they will have to sacrifice their own professional reputations (what’s left of it now). Add to that their loss of a captive audience for news, thanks to the internet, and you have some desperate people, striving to remain relevant.

They can’t be Bernstein and Woodward. Cronkite, Rather, Jennings, Helen Thomas, and other icons of journalism have been discredited. Reports on climate change, the wars, medicine, and other fields have both been discredited and taken over by specialist journalists, and the internet enabled “non-professionals” who are scooping the pros. (When I went to college, we were encouraged to concentrate on just our major and avoid a minor as being too limiting for a journalist. Consequently we were formally pushed to be generalists, not specialists.)

So here’s what you have: (1) a formerly respected field is now discredited due to the journalists’ schizophrenic zeal to destroy conservative powers-that-be and save liberals powers-that-be; (2) on non-political hard news items, the journalists are being supplanted by people like Drudge and sites like Free Republic, or by specialists turned journalists covering the hot scientific issues; (3) the 24-hour news cycle has created a premium for the gut-wrenching tabloid stories, regardless of merit or accuracy; (4) the Watergate generation of journalists are seeing their dreams of glory slip away during the administration of someone they can’t criticize; and (5) the hegemony on news held by the New York Times and the other “big” news-gathering organizations no longer exists so even the heights of professional achievement, such as an editorship at Time, is eroding and will never be the same again.

The established journalists of today sold their souls for a mess of pottage and it’s getting messier by the moment. Younger journalists have a carefree attitude about accuracy and lack the pretensions of neutrality that older journalists consoled themselves was the hallmark of their field. Today the “professionals” find an appealing emotional story, milk it for what it is worth, and move on to some other fancy of the moment. Journalistic crusades are a thing of the past, at least until the next Republican Administration.

That makes for bitter editors and journalists who destroyed their chance for greatness or relevance by trying to be part of the story instead of reporting it, ala Bernstein and Woodward. Now they created Obama and now must slink into ignominious retirement because they can’t now attack him without attacking themselves.

I know, that’s more than you wanted to see. I just had to rant a bit, to relieve my own frustrations. Thanks for putting up with it.