Journalists With An Agenda (or Newshawk, an endangered bird)

Let me disclose right off the bat that I never knew the names of the people at the head of the Washington bureau of the Associated Press until I read this article from Politico today.  I don't know where some of you people find time to research this stuff, and know as much as some of you know, I honestly don't.  But I can tell you that when I broke into the broadcast industry some 28 years ago, there were two acronyms that were the stalwarts of journalism.  They were AP and UPI (United Press International).  Those days may be coming to an end.

Ron Fournier says he regards Sandy Johnson, his predecessor as head of The Associated Press’s Washington bureau, as "a mentor."

Johnson, though, regards Fournier, who replaced her in a hard-feelings shake-up in May, as a threat to one of the most influential institutions in American journalism.

"I loved the Washington bureau," said Johnson, who left the AP after losing the prestigious position. "I just hope he doesn’t destroy it."

I don't care whether you were a local radio farm futures announcer, a church broadcaster, or a rock DJ ... at the top, and sometimes bottom of every hour, chances are you would rip and read the news from your AP or UPI teletype machine chugging in a closet somewhere outside of the studio.  If you were lucky, the company you worked for paid someone else just to do that; read the AP or UPI newswire every hour.

The blurry, hastily stamped font gave every story the look of a breaking presidential assasination piece.  It just felt like you were reading something critically important.  But of course, the Martina Navratilova scores looked just as important.  One thing you could count on was that whoever typed and telecast that story had a boss, and that boss wouldn't have tolerated anything going into that story that wasn't sheer, corroborated fact.

What some of you younger diarists may not know is that in those days the press was your political body guard, and I mean whether you were a republican, a democrat, or a communist living in an upstairs flat in San Francisco behind a bookcase wall.  The press did WAY more than report on local fires, accidents, crimes and announce county fairs.  That was its second job!  Its first responsibility was that it investigated government corruption, followed up and fact checked on statements made by politicians, gave us insight on rumblings of conflict when the government thought it was more information than your tiny peasant brain could handle, and report it ... all of it ... without an opinion, and without bias or judgment as much as humanly possible.

When President Ronald Reagan blew up the Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh came oozing out of the sea.  In time reporters saw that not only did a bolt of lightning not come out of the sky if you slanted a story to fit your political agenda, you could actually get more attention doing it - and in some cases make a lot of money as a result.

When I was a youth, my parents got the dishes washed up and rushed into the livingroom to click on the big tube TV to give themselves time to adjust the signal through the rabbit ears so that when Bill Bonds, John Kelly, Jack LeGoff, and Marilyn Turner came on with the local news ... they were ready.  Sometimes they would pay me 5 cents a half hour to stand next to the rabbit ears and supplement their power with my arms flailing like a pentacostal christian.  That was followed up by 30 minutes of the most morose, serious, but always important news stories of that day.  They were read poker faced by greats like Cronkite, and Huntley & David Brinkley. But later with the advent of this new found taste for slant, television news went from being a 30 minute round up of the days events - to a 24/7 assembly line of pundits both screaming at once on the left and right sides of your screen trying to see who could shout their political agenda louder.

But through it all, there was always a syndicate wire service that you could look to for the facts.  UPI eventually lost it's glamor for most print outlets and everyone was paying their AP fees and running the top stories.  Most people may not have even realized over the past decades that most of what you read or saw on CNN or MSNBC was written by an AP reporter, then expounded upon by their own writers.  In some cases, it was flat out re-printed as written.  But it was never, ever AP doing the "Here's What You'll Get If You Vote Democrat" story.

It has all come to an end with the developments of late at AP.  Obviously, Ron Fournier is already doing some grave damage to a journalistic institution.  But the biggest damage is done by the public no longer understanding why we had a "Free and Open Press" in the first place.  Why did the Fairness Doctrine require that if someone who pitched themselves as a journalist did 20 minutes with a conservative spouting his trickle down economics, the journalist had a duty to present the opposing view?  Why were our founding fathers so adamant about this right to know the truth about our N.E.W.S ... the facts about all things political and otherwise that comes from the 4 corners of the Earth; North, East, West, and South?

It's because when someone hands you a piece of paper with a story on it, and presents it as though it is true ... they not only have to prove it, or corroborate it ... but they have to give all sides so you can make up your own mind about it.  Because to do otherwise is propaganda.

And that is something you younger folks do know.  Especially those of you who have only been around for a couple of decades.  Because propaganda replaced real, unbiased journalism a long time ago.  It may be all you've known your whole lives.  Your freedom of press has been dwindling before your eyes.  So to see this last bastion of real, Constitutionally protected journalism fade from the halls of governance may not seem like a big deal to you.  Just another failed corporation, you'll say when they've all been privatized and closed in chapter 11 - one at a time, each in their own season.

But let someone who was there when it was truly the 4th Branch of Government tell you - the N.E.W.S. was once something you could read, and count on.  And if someone tilted or slanted the story to fit a political agenda, it was likely their names you'd see printed on the next day's front page.

Fight for it people.  March in the streets if you must.  You have more rights than you know.  Resist the temptation to sleep.  They will take everything and you will awaken a slave.

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