Where Did the News Go?

Talking today with my executive producer/husband, Bill Russell: two events in the last 24 hours have triggered anger, despair and, ultimately, hope in us. David Halberstam was killed in an automobile accident. MoveOn.org asked for our help (along with thousands of others).

David Halberstam continues to be an example of what good journalism can do for our democracy (see earlier post "Beacon in a Dark Domain"). Losing him spotlights just how thin the ranks of first-rate journalists have become ... lots of celebrity-journalists, but they don't contribute much to democracy.

MoveOn.org asked bloggers to help spread the word "... about VideoVets.org -- a website where Iraq veterans and military families use YouTube videos to push back against Bush supporters who say ending the Iraq war is anti-troop."

The bad news is that the major media outlets aren't covering these kinds of stories. For example, instead of sitting in the White House Press Room taking dictation, some of these well-paid reporters could have made the short trip to Walter Reed Hospital to check rhetoric with reality. But they didn't ... a small example, unless you happen to be a wounded soldier, or related to a wounded soldier, or care about a wounded soldier.

The good news is that VideoVets and MoveOn and YouTube and The Huffington Post and TruthOut give me hope. Over the years we've talked to many current and former journalists (Bonnie Anderson, Haynes Johnson, Sir Harry Evans, Ken Auletta, Tom Johnson, Robert Krulwich ... David Halberstam). Many bemoan the current state of journalism. Several have also despaired of the tendency of young people to turn to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report for their "news." But these programs, at least, provide criticism of the self-serving PR cranked out by politicians ... and the media.

Blessedly The Dixie Chicks were not intimidated by threats to their pocketbooks, or to their lives. The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, Mother Jones are among those periodicals still providing credible, valuable journalist insights but are part of a diminishing group in the traditional media. Now almost 73, Bill Moyers continues to swim upstream.

Amidst the dreck published en masse, there are also lots of intelligent, thoughtful, informative books being written. On the subject of war's effects on its perpetrators, Alexandra Fuller's
Scribbling the Cat , Ha Jin's War Trash and E.L. Doctorow's The March come to mind. Peter Galbraith's The End of Iraq demonstrates the idiocy of America's current involvement in Iraq; Sandra Mackey's The Reckoning gives the lie to those (Republicans, Democrats, reporters, pundits, editorialists, think tankists and assorted other poobahs) who claim we couldn't have predicted what would happen there. She did.

Where did the news go?

To the web.

And to those artists (singers, comedians, playwrights, actors, movie producers et al) who refuse to be intimidated and who continue trying to honestly show us the world as best they understand it.

And to those publishers and editors who still feel the responsibility to their community enshrined in the First Amendment, and act on it.

In a recent conversation (and earlier post, "Muslim Girl"), Iman reminded us that we (Americans) really have no excuses for being ill- or badly-informed. Though less common in the traditional outlets, the resources are there; we lack only the WILL.