Does it truly exist? The hysterics over Swine Flu. The OIC's calls for the press to not insult religion. Certain cable news networks passing off opinion as news. The overly polarizing effects of of the blogshpere. Should there be accountability in reporting or is it all just entertainment now?

Their only accountability is towards:

1. Their parent companies

2. Their sponsors

That is all

Isnt it our job as the consumer to pick out responsible journalism as to support that?

Generally, people will gravitate towards news networks that slant the news in a direction they enjoy or agree with. America's insular news intake these days is just sad. I actually spent this morning listening to two other teachers talk at length about how Fox News is the only accurate news channel, unlike the Communist News Network and "those other channels." Even selection of news CHANNELS is political now.

in the same phrase this is really scary..
no matter what your political opinion is, calling Fox accurate is ...wrong!!

of course people will gravitate to their particular slant. But it's still the individual's job and duty to pick out responsible journalism. Their job in news is much different than any individual's and thus the responsibility is different.

How sorry that teachers feel that way....

Yeah the thing is that it's so hard to determine what even qualifies as hard news anymore. There isn't really a clear line.

I'm sure there are several fun "Agenda Setting" media theorums that have come out in the last several years. I haven't read much on the subject since 2002 but it is absolutely amazing what is news and what isn't what isn't...

Hard news has become much more like a tabloid.

It could be that with the advent of the internet people are so concerned with speed that they just issue retractions after they get the stories wrong.

Unless it's unavoidable at the airport, gym or otherwise, I've stopped really watching news channels altoegther. About 90% of the content I could care less to listen to. They make it difficult to actually find out the information you want to get from them.

yeah (I generally buy the Times rather than the Guardian just to make sure I keep questioning what I read) but there's degrees of wrong!.. I wouldn't even use The Sun to wrap my chips..and Fox is the tabloid equivalent of TV (and the little extracts I saw on the Daily Show of MSNBC are hardly better)

I had this exact discussion with a print journalist at a party the other night. He works for a shitty tabloid here in Ireland, but used to work for bigger and better papers in London.
Anyway, seeing as he works for a fucking lowest-common-denominator tabloid, I asked him: "Why work for a shit paper like a tabloid. Don't you think that if the media only gave intelligent, analytical journalism, that's all people would want?"
(ie. feed the public shit and they'll eat it. Feed them good stuff, and ONLY good stuff, and they'll eat that, too, and be a more responsible public).
To which the reply was that he agreed, but fuck it, people buy shitty tabloids and they have their place.
I was about to blow up (I semi-blew up), and the geezer left. My mate Myles, whose gaff it was, just laughed.

It's wrong to conflate all news outlets. There is a place for opinion journalism, and I think that the outlets that provide it make it clear that this is what they are providing. The problem that we face today is that high quality reporting requires money, and news outlets that specialize in reporting are starved for funds, partly because the majority of the public does not seem to have an interest in high quality reporting. Even the number of people who are interested in opinion journalism is relatively small.

As an aside, I don't consider the response to swine flu hysterical. Early surveillance and preparation are essential to containing the possibility of a pandemic. If we simply waited until hundreds of deaths started occuring, then it would be too late.

I'm curious if the internet will challenge this statement.

I've actually thought a lot about this. Whether reporting is done solely for the internet or whether its done for a broadsheet, the reporting itself still costs money. There is some reporting done on the internet, and I believe that more newspapers will follow the lead of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, but I don't think that we can count on the blogosphere to take over where newpapers have left off. Most link to articles in the major newspapers that required old-fashioned legwork to produce. What the blogosphere does is offer differing interpretations of the reporting done in these articles, and that is very useful, but traditional bloggers are more responsive than informational.

Well, I don't consider the blogosphere as it is now to be journalism, more like commentators.

Here's my wacky hypothesis: we will start to see devoted people who are experts at certain fields do more reporting on their own websites. For an extremely crude example, take this very website. Though there's a good chunk of news aggregation, the community here has also "reported" on happenings such as setlist relays, or where shows are going to be before announced (I still have fond memories of discovering the Gorge 2005 show in advance).

I'm kind of thinking along the lines of the open source phenomenon in programming. If you look at it from a traditional labor standpoint, it doesn't make any sense at all, but it works beautifully in practice because of the sheer devotion of many to collaborate on a porject.

GH, you're a dreamer. I mean that as a compliment. It seems that you often see what could be in place of the more imperfect reality.

I think that good, consistent news reporting requires a professional corps of reporters. My grandfather was a beat reporter and eventually became an editor at a major city daily. Good reporting is a full time job, often requiring an entire team. I like to read the articles that win Pulitzer Prizes. It does make you realize that these people are professionals.

http://www.pulitzer.org/awards/2009

Oh, I'm not suggesting that there won't be a lack of quality in the future, either in transition or perhaps permanently. At the same time, I don't think that there is going to be an absolute dearth of the truth just because the medium will change.

I didn't think that this is what you were suggesting. However, finding the details, as in every field, is a painstaking process. And often it's a full-time job with lots of unpaid overtime. Do you believe that journalism, as a profession, will die out entirely?

I'm not sure. I think it may depend on the market and subject that the journalist is covering. As a customer, will you pay to read the material? As a business, will you pay to place advertisements next to the material?

Now, the obvious retort is that less "important" stuff like celebrities, sports, etc., will get the lion's share of attention, and that may very well be true. However, I'm skeptical that the truth will be significantly less accessible simply because it's not profitable. Going back to my programming example, creating open source code is also a painstaking process with the details, yet it somehow still gets done. My guess is that it's more of a "how" than an "if" as to how the information will be delivered.

Of course, it's just a guess, and it could be entirely wrong. We shall see.

What do you think about the suggestion that "high quality" reporting is starving for funds because people can't tell the difference between it and opinion pieces anymore? My OP was not just about a responsibility for quality, but a social responsibility as well. Should the media not report the race of accused crimials in order to reduce prejudice? Should it not show their faces? Does the using the term "Islamic Terrorist" really add value versus "Terrorist"?

Though there is something worse. I can't tell you how many times I've seen local news pieces that are actually poorly disguised ads for some product or service.

The real problem with the Press in general is that all major media outlets worldwide are controlled by just a handful of companies. When such a consolidation exists, there's bound to be irresponsibility in the Press. Even though different news agencies appear to differ on the surface, I feel this is just a veneer to hide shared agendas. Unfortunately, there's not much that be done to avoid this. In order to find truly accurate reporting, one must often turn to "fringe" media outlets such as talk radio and the internet. These often share their own sets of agendas and biases, so I guess we're really just left to digest and think for ourselves. A little God given discernment could do us well after all.