The Death of Investigative Reporting

The media has always played a vital, if changing, role in American democracy. Ever since the early days of our country, the media (which back then was chiefly black-and-white newspapers, color had yet to be invented) has had a strong impact on politics. Up through the Loss of American Innocence with the 70's Watergate/Vietnam/MASH the media has played the rule of guardian, insuring that, while politicians may occassionly deceive, they at least never commit actual crimes.

A key component of this guardian role of the media was investigative reporting, aka 'muckraking'. This involved reporters actively seeking to find condemning, or at least embarrasing, information about politicians, thus insuring that those who serve the public give up any chance of a private life. While this practice was attacked by some, it did at least make it harder for politicians to do anything horrible, and i would argue that the only people we want running the country are those willing to have semi-transparent lives anyway. If our leaders aren't willing to make that simple sacrifice... anyway, investigative reporting became a key in the modern media's role of guardian.

Then came corporations. The became buying up individual newspapers and TV stations, thus taking away the individuals' voice. This is a process known as media consolidation. While a reporter was usually interested in the truth (because those were the types of people that became reporters) their now corporate masters were only interested in profit. Thus the individual media companies and family businesses were one-by-one bought up by corporations much in the same way corporations bought up farms, toy companies, railroads, shipping, movie studios, etc, etc. The corporate leaders were interested in increasing readership/veiwership, and so looked for stories that people found intereting (if it bleeds it leads), and avoided other stories that, though probably important, tended to bore/turn-off/confuse readers/viewers.

Thus presently, investigative reporting is dying, and very quickly. Five (or is it four now?) huge corporations own all of the major broadcasting companies (TV), radio is no better off, and no one reads the newspaper anymore anyway (but even if they did, there are few nationally read newspapers left). Now many of these corporations are donating money to politicians, creating a very troubling conflict of interest. Of course, the most troubling thing is, many of these corporations have stopped even pretending to be 'truth-seekers', saying simply, "we are a company trying to sell a product" (paraphrasing, but just barely because i don't have the quote in front of me). Ironically, blogs, which have been attacked by the mainstream media for not being legitimate, are doing more truth-telling than a lot of the corporate 'news' shows.