Don Rogers: Media more slave than master

Summit Daily News ^ | Saturday, January 1, 2011 | Don Rogers

[Yardstick]

Our local editor does these touchy feely editorials to demonstrate he's more open minded than the rubes he's forced to sell papers to.

Lol -- exactly.

[Vaduz]

The papers continues to fail in Los Angeles too they are so small now you have to close one eye to read it.

[Condor51]

'Journalism borrows from the scientific method..'

That is one of the most STOO-PID^™ things I've ever read!

[abb]

Even the local rag in our small town is a joke. The city and the school district spend money and whine about budget cuts with no scrutiny from the local paper. No context to the arguments, just regurgitated drivel from “officials”

Take a look at where the city and school districts publish their legal advertising. That will tell you why they get no scrutiny from the local paper.

[colorado tanker]

Journalism is supposed to be a craft, the craft of telling a well-supported story. The lead graph was key, the grabber. Get out the five dubbyas in the first graphs. Make sure of your sources. Heck, for a big story, hit the "morgue" or the library and do some research.

All that was thrown out after Watergate. Suddenly, J-School kids wanted to "make a difference" - meaning scandalize Republicans and get them thrown out of office. The craft was lost and they became Democrat political hacks.

The baby was thrown out with the bath water. I frequently read stories with no political implications at all at the end of which I can't figure out what happened. These political hacks not only are biased, they've lost their craft, they can't write a lead, have no idea what the five dubyas are and can't even tell a story. The people who we rely on to tell us what happened are now some of the most incurious and incompetent people on the planet.