If you've been wondering what is happening to mainstream journalism these days you'll have to read G. Pascal Zachary's piece "A Journalism Manifesto" for an interesting perspective on this field.
Zachary challenges some of the myths about journalistic tenets such as objectivity, fairness, balance, and credibility. In an age of "instant" everything, Zachary argues that in, "trying to be fair and balanced, journalists have failed their subjects and themselves."
With the increasing use of the Internet as the flashpoint for information and misinformation the days of pack journalism are pretty much over, Zachary contends and I concur.
I think Zachary is on target when he comments:
The internet demolished the journalism herd, driving holes into the fraternity's defenses and exposing most journalists as poorly prepared, fearful of making grievous errors and reading from a brief and superficial script. Blogs and other forms of "citizen" journalism can never replace the breadth and quality of professional journalism, but the immediate effect of this torrent reportage has been to destroy the credibility of mainstream journalism.
Today, we stand at a fork in the road of journalistic practice, as technological innovation allows for more participatory communication. Zachary's fear of blogs and "citizen" journalism may be unfounded in that ultimately it is for the reader to decide how much trust they place in the information they receive.
The direction journalists decide to go in these days depends largely on the enormous commercial pressures being placed on the industry. Responsible journalism, unfortunately, has increasingly succumbed to explicit and implicit forces governed by management directives that favor shareholder interests over the public's good and well-being.
Perhaps, like those other buzz words such as "fair", balanced", and "objective" journalism, the lofty ideals of socially responsibility can be also added to the list of modern mythologies.