Truly objective journalism no longer exists. The public doesn’t want it. That’s the opinion I come to after seeing the sorry financial state of CNN . It’s not that the network was scrupulously objective; they were not. Nevertheless, the network’s attempts at neutrality have been honorable. However, as a result they operate in the nether land of soft reporting. CNN offers neither steak nor veggie platters so viewers go elsewhere for their daily feed.
FOX owns the right; its audience is loyal. The audience is also big because FOX is honest. MSNBC owns the left. Its audience is very loyal but it’s small because MSNBC programming is more extreme and less honest. If FOX’s audience is multiples of MSNBC’ audience, then isn’t FOX main stream and MSNBC something else?
There was a time when journalists saw themselves as on the front line of history with a solemn duty to record it accurately. Now, Howard Zinn’s philosophy seems to rule the day. Zinn taught that a journalist’s duty is to record or distort history in a manner that [the journalist believes] will lead to a better world, the truth is less important than the higher goal. Good objective journalism breathed its last breath on June 14, 2008, the day Tim Russert died. The nation lost a great man that day and a tradition died with him.
RANDOM THOTS 