"The American press has the blues" laments Russell Baker's latest NYRB Essay. My beef is with the decimation of science editors and the devolution of fact checking as journalism slouches towards Talk Radio, but Baker says his colleagues :
table talk is about journalistic frauds and a Washington press too dim to stay out of a three-card-monte game...Murdoch of course has long spread melancholy in newsrooms around the world, but it was the disclosure in May that the Bancroft family, which controls The Wall Street Journal, might be ready to sell him their paper for five billion dollars that really struck at journalism's soul...no newspaper is so valuable to the republic that it cannot be knocked down at market for a nice price. Murdoch at the Journal is a dark omen for journalists everywhere. When the sign in the shop window says "Everything For Sale," it is often followed by "Going Out Of Business."
How did it come to pass that an "assemblage of self-servers, frauds, political double-dippers, gasbags, mountebanks, spoiled reporters, and unprincipled swine make up that vague organism called "media"?
Once the WSJ goes, Baker expects The New York Times may be
"auctioned off like a side of beef."
'A side of beef?'
The NYT should be so lucky! A side of beef rarely serves as its own parody. Good and bad meals, yes. Parody, no.
Posted by: John Burgess | July 30, 2007 at 08:23 PM
Ah, trust Adamant to get to the meat of the matter!
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Posted by: Health News | March 18, 2011 at 02:07 AM