Courtiers of conventional wisdom

The move of the Democratic Party upscale, chasing campaign contributions, was not the only force that led us from a robust and liberal democracy in 1978 to the threshhold of fascism today. Just as important and harder to reverse has been the transformation of journalism.

Most journalists today are courtiers of the conventional wisdom. They think journalism happens at press conferences, and they're happy to write up what they hear as if it were news just because someone important says it. They think that any context they provide should match the consensus narrative of the press corps.

What happened? No single event gave us the Kewl Kidz media. Instead, a series of societal changes all pushed our public discourse in the same direction:

• Repeated right-wing assertions that the media was biased against them
• The end of the Fairness Doctrine
• The advent of cable news stations
• Narrow corporate dominance of media
• The ascendancy of entertainment values pretty much everywhere in society

In the 1970s, the people who brought us news evidently thought of it as good for us, like compulsory schooling, spinach, and cod liver oil. They were right, but we preferred cotton candy and Paris Hilton.

You may think of the prior era's ethic of journalistic objectivity was wrong, foolish, or impossible - or all three. I don't. I think it served us well. But that doesn't matter; it's only of academic interest.

That "objective" media environment is not coming back. McClatchy may fight a rear-guard action against reporting that starts from ideology instead of reality, or perhaps it will simply step into the barely served market for left-liberal reporting. If so, a good slogan could be A bias for facts, since most of the liberal world wants to know what actually is true.

(More to follow on the individual bullets as time permits.)