The Virtual Record of My Opinionated Rantings

"If I had to make a choice, to choose the government without the press or to have the press without the government, I will select the latter without hesitation."

-Thomas Jefferson

Any time you study something, it’s great to have access to an expert in that field. The best way to learn Mandarin would be by having a study buddy who just happened to be from China. The best way to learn about cooking would be from a master chef. The best way to learn about the print news media is from someone who lived in it.

Bob Wiggington is one of those people. He spent years working as a journalist, doing everything from hiring reporters to traveling to high-conflict areas in Afghanistan, before he ended up teaching at Lindenwood University. On Monday, I, along with my fellow classmates, had the opportunity to just listen to him talk.

Despite the demanding deadlines and people who couldn’t have been crueler, Mr. Wiggington told us that working as a journalist was likely to be, “the greatest job I could ever have because I felt like I was doing something.” Newspapers have always been the citizens second line of defense against the government (with the first being the Constitution). He pointed out that with the widespread layoffs that are a result of more and more people getting their news either online or not at all are going to cause us as a nation widespread problems dealing with our government. When the politicians are only hiding their dirty laundry from 100 people instead of 100,000 it becomes infinitely easier to simpler.

Over the last week, I’ve been thinking about this. Is the only reason the media may fail to do their watchdog duties because there are fewer journalists? Is there more to the story? I spent one week paying more attention than ever before to the print media, and some things became clear.

First, I found it impossible not to agree with Mr. Wiggington on the fact that many papers (USA Today, St. Louis Post Dispatch) may very well be to busy pandering for readers to actually care about stories and content any more. Brightly colored cover pages illustrate every story with blown up shots of sports teams, politicians, and celebrities to the point where one can’t tell the lead story from the filler.

Another thing that may worry me and no one else is the fact that, for the last few months at least, it would seem that all brackets of the news media are too busy falling head-over-heels in love with Barack Obama to report objectively on just about anything political. Were we to rely wholly on the print news media, we would know only that this “Mr. McCain” has been trying to steal lovely Senator Obama’s thunder. For my token bit of editorial in this blog, I must say that I hope in the end of this love fest, the press gets herpes, because they obviously aren’t using protection.

Then again, that last sentence obviously has nothing to do with the facts and everything to do with the fact that I’m racist.