The perfect epitaph for establishment journalism

A big portion of establishment journalism is now infotainment, but it's unclear if it's the infotainment corporations that are to be blamed here. I know many journalists who work for these 'infotainment' businesses who hate the work they're doing but keep doing it anyway because the demand for real news has severely diminished in recent time. If you're a journalist and you want to make money to pay the rent, you probably have to settle on working for an infotainment company. Right now the economic incentive is to get as many eyeballs as possible to show ads to... and the way to do that is to provide infotainment, not real news.

I think what this really underscores is another folly of capitalism, or at least the need for government funded or government owned media a la BBC or PBS.

"Establishment journalism has long slipped entirely into infotainment."

This remark, and your whole comment, is not well-informed.

When you talk about "establishment journalism" (in the U.S.), you're talking about NYT, WaPo, WSJ, and a handful of other outlets like this. Each of these papers has its strengths and weaknesses, but "infotainment" is not the main weakness. (Take a look at the NYT front page today, for example.)

In other words, your gripe about "infotainment" may be the case, but that's happening in a different segment of the media, not the one the OP was targeting.

It's too bad, because the original post did have a good point, and was heading in the right direction. Probably the main problem with the NYT (I'm a subscriber, and I at least look at its front page every day) is that it does not like to rock the boat. It's an establishment paper. Some ideas, even if having merit, are simply out of bounds. ("Everything from A to C" is what Christopher Hitchens, in his pre-9/11 days, used to say.)

This "not rock the boat" tendency explains why the (ostensibly liberal) NYT had on board Judy Miller, a largely-discredited cheerleader for the Iraq war. She had access to top Bush administration sources, and she seemed to know what was happening and going to happen. Thus, she became a mouthpiece. The NYT, in this case, was willing to sacrifice being correct for merely being abreast of the establishment narrative.

That's the real problem with the high end of establishment journalism.

The UK expenses scandal was publicised by the Daily Telegraph after a "whistle blower" gave them a CD with details of the claims on them.

You do realize we're discussing the Independent, a UK newspaper, not subject to the Fairness Doctrine or the lack thereof, right?

"while citizen journalism can allow for unbiased reporting"

I would say that's really not true. I am trying to think of a time when we didn't have biased media or citizenry. Newspapers have picked candidates forever and its pretty easy to see their leanings. Humans believe things and it shows in the reporting.

Part of this stems from people's weird belief that politics was more polite in the early days, which is just so much trash from "a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse-swapper and the nightman."

The demise of the Fairness Doctrine was an acknowledgement of reality and a 1st amendment win. The government has no place holding anyone accountable for speech other than as an action of an aggrieved party in the courts.

Our problem these days, is that we really don't have news networks. News networks don't make money. We have pundit networks. No one is doing an actual news broadcast. They all have their political point of view.

The problem with the Fairness Doctrine is that it requires you to devote equal time to the other "side" without regard to how reasonable it is. Equal time for rabidly political anti-vaxxers? Oh joy.

Giving equal time to absolute nutters only serves to legitimize them.

And I also take issue with this: non-biased media is absolutely a thing of the past.

Depends on what you mean by non-biased. It's impossible to have a complete lack of bias for a couple of reasons. First because there's inherent bias in the stories you choose to cover, and second because a dry reporting of facts absent any kind of analysis is terrifically boring and less informative than the alternative.

The best thing you could do as a journalism group in such a case would be to remove yourself from commercial influence, and take an objective a stance as possible on the stories you choose to publish and how you analyze them. Being permanently vigilant of the inherent bias goes a long way towards correcting it, IMHO.

You lose all credibility when you assert that the entire (US) media is beholden to the Democrats.