Michael S. Malone

ABC's Michael Malone Ashamed To Be Known as a Journalist

How easy to use the Twin Towers as a metaphor for American journalism.  I've been watching them burn for awhile, but was still  flabbergasted by their sudden total collapse, coincidental with the Obama campaign. The Fourth Estate is now a fifth column in a war against America.  All of this is so surreal that I needed Michael Malone's Editing Their Way to Oblivion: Journalism Sacrificed For Power and Pensions,  because I was beginning to think I really was the babbling uncle locked in the attic.  Here's a the opener.      “ The traditional media is playing a very, very dangerous game.  With its readers, with the Constitution, and with its own fate. The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling.  And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer. But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living.  A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer”, because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist. ” I'm going to jump around and snip things here, some out of order .... “ For many years, spotting bias in reporting was a little parlor game of mine, watching TV news or reading a newspaper article and spotting how the reporter had inserted, often unconsciously, his or her own preconceptions.But my complacent faith in my peers first began to be shaken when some of the most admired journalists in the country were exposed as plagiarists, or worse, accused of making up stories from whole cloth. I watched with disbelief as the nation’s leading newspapers, many of whom I’d written for in the past, slowly let opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the front page. But what really shattered my faith - and I know the day and place where it happened - was the War in Lebanon three summers ago.  The hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia only carried CNN, a network I’d already learned to approach with skepticism.  But ...   nothing, nothing I’ve seen has matched the media bias on display in the current Presidential campaign. ” Then Malone does something that I was unprepared for.  He ascribes motive, and it's chilling. “ In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -and desperate times call for desperate measures.  Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play.  Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here.  After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway - all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire. And then the opportunity presents itself:  an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.  With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived Fairness Doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe, be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there. ” Click-click.