Excerpt from "OFF THE RECORD"

Journalism Examines Its Conscience

by Bruce Anderson

"JOURNALISM EXAMINES ITS CONSCIENCE" was the title of Chris Coursey's column in the Friday, May 30th edition of the Press Democrat. The column descends from its fatally flawed premise to a long, delusional keen about how hard Coursey and Co. try to be faithful to the truth of events. I got the impression that Coursey was sincere, meaning he's either retarded or insane. Or both.

FIRST OFF, "JOURNALISM" is a sociopath. It has no conscience because its purpose is to make money. No profits, no journalism. The people who own the journalism business calibrate their news to their bottom lines, hence the PD and the Singleton papers dominant in Mendocino County. Second, journalism is not a profession; anyone can do it and these days anyone does do it, as the Press Democrat makes clear on a daily basis. Third, there are lots of conscientious journalists around, but very few publications in which the good ones can do their work without becoming drug or alcohol dependent. Fourth, in the dishonest times we presently endure, most journalists -- those at the PD certainly -- either get in sync with the gated community mentalities who own the enterprise, or they look for work outside the non-profession. Fifth, it probably is a shock to Coursey and his colleagues that a young journalist at the PD's mothership New York Times can make up a quote or even a whole person, but Coursey and his colleagues, and I speak here from personal experience with a bunch of them, also believe that they do honest work for an honest newspaper. Or at least say they do. In other words, they're nuts. Sixth, the kid at the NYT who has generated all the gnashing of teeth in the nation's journalo-bordellos and in the child brothels of campus journalism departments didn't do a single thing that his colleagues don't do on a daily basis on much more important topics. The NYT couldn't publish a daily paper without blind quotes from the leadership, and where the heck is Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction anyway? Seventh, most Americans already do their own reality checks against what the media define as the prevailing reality, hence the statistic that only some 30 percent of US "think the media do a good job." On the other hand, something like 60-plus percent of Americans apparently think the president is a plausible character, but that same majority of alleged Bush enthusiasts also knows that polls are just one more way we're lied to every day about damn near everything. I happen to think the media are doing fine, but I read them and listen to them knowing who they are and what they represent and who owns them. For example, I read the PD every morning knowing it is edited by, ahem, extremely limited persons who publish a paper that returns a healthy annual profit to its majority shareholders in New York by not engaging in journalism. The PD accomplishes that annual profit by child-like columns on kids, dogs, gardens, cooking, sports, funnies, horoscopes, chloroform opinion of the David Broder type, severely edited letters-to-the-editor limited to a couple of hundred chaste words, all of it wrapped around un-contexed wire service accounts of distant events and barely fleshed out local police reports of the previous evening's drug and alcohol rampages by alienated youth. Most of the paper, however, is made up of advertising, which is the true reason for its being because it funds the censored fare masquerading as journalism. The Press Democrat, and almost every other newspaper in the land, are the way they are on purpose, but it's not journalism in any traditional sense of the term.