Chicago Tribune can journalism survive Murdoch?, Sean Hannity journalism died in 2008, Citizen Wells welcome to the age of Big Brother

“the Times of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today’s issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston’s job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones.”…George Orwell, “1984”

“The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had
actually been destroyed. For how could you establish, even
the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside
your own memory?”…George Orwell, “1984″
“The (American) press, which is mostly controlled by vested
interests, has an excessive influence on public opinion.”… Albert Einstein

I would have chuckled at the recent Chicago Tribune headline except for the fact that this is so damn scary.

“Can journalism survive Murdoch?”

From the Chicago Tribune July 20, 2011.

“Inevitably, someone will rise to the generic defense of journalism and give Murdoch “victim” status, but that would be very wrong.

I am not suggesting that Murdoch, the modern day media equivalent of, at the very least, the East India Trading Co., knew that his minions were hacking phone and email accounts and corrupting police officers and whatnot.

But he certainly set the tone.

Bottom feeding, a key management strategy in a fractured British journalism that aims very sophisticated, gritty publications at every level of the culture, will do that.

As anyone in media can tell you, there’s a fortune to be made in giving people what they think they want. This development has already transformed American journalism.

Reporters are now advised to be marketers and fundraisers and advertising-sensitive purveyors of events aimed at “building audience.” You have to bring your ‘tude to political reporting, too, just like Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow and all the rest.

Regular old-fashioned news (as honest a report as one can create of something that happened a minute ago) just isn’t good enough anymore.”

“Murdoch’s debacle, which started quite some time ago with Fleet Street level competition for “news” so bold a pirate would be aghast, may well bring down his empire. (It has already led to shuttering of News of the World, a screamer of a Sunday paper, England’s biggest, that made bottom feeding one of its key menu items).

The scandal may also eventually undermine David Cameron’s government, which has been cozy with the media baron and his associates over time, and lead to even more embarrassment for the police. There were bribes to cops for information. Two key authorities have already stepped down and, my guess is, more will be saying farewell.

What does it all mean to American journalism?

First, as journalism continues to mutate and re-create itself and become even more audience obsessed, it’s pleasant to think of a time when reporters saw themselves as defenders of what was right, of the interests of the people.

There may well not have been a civil rights era in America without the press and TV news. And while John F. Kennedy may have been the president who called for a trip to the moon, Walter Cronkite was the national host who raised the engineering and physics of space travel to poetry and read it right into the living rooms of the nation.

Yes, things have changed.

The people who decided journalism was a profit center managed to squeeze the profit very well. They did not simply throw out the baby with the bath water, they simply crushed the little critter.”

Read more:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-oped-0720-murdoch-20110720,0,1972931.story#start

This is a good article from the Tribune. However, what happened over at the Chicago Tribune? In the years leading up to and through the Tony Rezko trial, the Tribune did a pretty good job of reporting. After that, with the exception of John Kass, the Chicago Tribune  in lockstep with the rest of the mainstream media has given Obama a free ride. Where is the reporting on Obama and his ties to Chicago corruption and Operation Board Games as well as Obama’s eligibility issues? And what about the multiple articles from the Tribune disappearing. Were they hitting too close to home?

In 2008, Sean Hannity stated that journalism died.

It is worse than that. Starting way before 2008, “news” organizations began morphing into entertainment sites and ultimately brainwashing tools for the Big Brother of cash and ideological control.

Welcome to the age of Big Brother.