onmyowntwohands

jockohomo:

“For more than fifteen years we have been moving away from real journalism toward the creation of a sleazoid info-tainment culture in which the lines between Oprah and Phil and Geraldo and Diane and even Ted, between the New York Post and Newsday, are too often indistinguishable. In this new culture of journalistic titillation, we teach our readers and our viewers that the trivial is significant, that the lurid and the loopy are more important than real news. We do not serve our readers and viewers, we pander to them.”

* “This cover story of June 6, 1992 for The New Republic magazine seems especially relevant in light of the Murdoch scandal of 2011. The piece, written for the twentieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in, identified the pernicious influence of tabloid/sleaze journalism that, even then, was beginning to dominate so much of the American media.” [Full PDF available at Bernstein’s website].