I spent most of my adult life – from the age of 19 to the year 2000 – working in professional newsrooms. Not at NBC or ABC, not at the NYT or the WaPo, but in far more proletarian surroundings: the kind of workingman’s newsrooms populated by overworked, underpaid grunts with a soft core of idealism buried beneath many inches of crispy crust, accumulated over many years of near-constant exposure to political and corporate lies – lies propagated by official sources, and their own employers.
I hear and read a lot of criticism of Traditional Media journalists, here and in many other places – on the Web, in print, in person. I won’t deny that some of it is valid; when applied to the ego-besotted careerists preening in New York and inside the Beltway, very valid indeed.
But neither will I deny the essential truth that I wrote to my colleagues as I walked out of the newsroom of The Kansas City Star for the last time as a professional journalist, eight years ago. I said I was leaving behind a room full of heroes. And I was.
And today, that species of hero is facing extinction. That’s my fucking problem tonight.
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