Part of journalism is dying. It isn't the local paper which covers the City Council and School Board meetings. While substantial changes may have to be made to cope with the impact of the internet, community journalism will survive.
The part of journalism which is dying is national journalism. With their credibility--the only thing they really have--shot after their massive failure in the run-up to the Iraq War, national journalists have taken to covering the inane and overdoing every single story they cover. Now, they're about to auction off access--the thing they crave the most--to the highest bidder, instead of the public interest.
It's been a week since Michael Jackson died. And while that was certainly news a week ago, most Americans have moved on. But the Michael Jackson story is still leading cable news casts, is still being covered on national newscasts, and is still on the front page of the New York Times.
While Americans struggle to cope with 9.5% unemployment, the White House Press Corps is asking why the President didn't call the Jackson family, and instead sent a sympathy card. While Americans are wondering why Congress is struggling to act on a health care reform plan that 76% of the public supports, the White House Press Corps is still obsessing over the fact that a mere blogger got called on second at the President's news conference, and showed them up by actually asking a substantive question.
Helen Thomas is a great journalist. If she thought about it, instead of followed the lemmings of irrelevancy that surround her, she'd understand that the reason the White House called Nico Pitney and gave him the heads up that he might be called on was because he wouldn't have attended the press conference otherwise. I mean who would want to stand in the back of a room for an hour as pre-emminent journalists asked tough questions like, "What took so long?" and "Do you smoke cigarettes in front of your family?" And is Pitney knowing he was going to be called on really all that different from reporters from the wire services and broadcast networks knowing they are going to be called on?
The problem with the national press corps is that it has lost touch with Main Street. It has become so obsessed with status and access that the best stories of a lifetime--stories about cancer patients losing their insurance after they are diagnosed, stories about communities trying to rebuild after the plant closes down, and stories about hope in the face of despair are largely unreported. To the national press, those stories are a distraction from the pressing issues of the Nico Pitney "scandal," and the President's smoking habit.
And it's about to get worse. The Washington Post is auctioning off the access the national press corps so desperately craves. For $250,000, the Post promises unprecedented access to senior administration officials, Members of Congress, and lobbyists. The national press corps will probably fall over themselves to get ticket to these affairs. The President, however, should ban all senior administration officials from attending these sorry affairs. These officials are, after all, the people's servants, and most Americans don't make $250,000 in a year, let alone spend $250,000 in a night..
The national press corps is fiddling while their own house is burning. By the time they realize that their own obsession with status and access is what lit the fire, people like Nico Pitney will have run right by them and the old institutions will be gone.