Last week Ted Koppel, before that Aaron Brown, and it all started with Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw

I’m hardly a news junkie but I’ve always watched and read the newspaper and tuned in occasionally to NPR.  Maybe it’s reaching my thirties, maybe it’s the war, maybe it’s our president, or maybe it’s all three, but whatever the reason, I am committed to all the information that’s out there now. I value more than ever the free flow of information I took for granted before.  My friends may be surprised that I would choose to lament the loss of four white male voices from television to start out my first blog; but, on my nightly tours of the networks, CNN and MSNBC, I feel their absence.  I miss their conscientious, insightful stories that didn’t rely on MTV style sound bites and graphics to keep my attention.  I’m reminded of the first lesson my mentor taught me when I started teaching middle school.  He convinced me that teaching lessons in neat little five minute packages was the only way to convey information to a classroom of twelve year old boys and girls. I wish Anderson and Keith would give me more credit than I gave to my twelve year olds.

I miss the old guys’ comprehensive accounts of the events and issues that we are facing and I am so annoyed every time I am forced to hear the latest about Robert Blake at the expense of coverage of the Iraq war.  It hardly looks like print media has aged any better.  The New York Times relationship with Judy Miller makes me sick to my stomach.  By now everyone is clear that she was just a puppet for the Bush administration, the CIA, and the INC.  The fact that they couldn’t figure that out blows my respect for a paper I grew up believing was the finest in print.  While it was certainly courageous of my local paper, The Los Angeles Times, to cover the Curveball saga last Saturday, shouldn’t they have simultaneously included coverage of the Rendon Group, the PR Firm the Pentagon hired to sell this country the Iraq war?  The story of the Iraqi defector who was responsible for filling Judy Miller with her bogus information I guess wasn’t relevant.  Responsible readers had to get that story this week from Rolling Stone.

Like a good many of us I’ve slowly transitioned to the Internet as my news media source.  I recently worked a job with a twenty-something and I was horrified to discover that his generation has never subscribed to a newspaper and has always relied on the Internet for news.  Unfortunately this doesn’t mean that they are saving trees and reading the same newspapers I subscribe to online.  He told me he gets all his news from the Huffington Post. 

The good news about the blogosphere is that there is still freedom of press especially at a time when I can’t help but feel there is a war being waged against the free press. Unfortunately, blogs are often poorly written and full of grammatical errors.  They also rarely provide for the aesthetic experience wrapped up in reading the paper on Sunday mornings with my café latte.  Information is good but even more delicious when insightful writers have taken the time to compose a piece with literary style, especially at a time when style seems to be going out of style.  Blogs are often responsive and angry, not productive and probing, just like the television news broadcasts.  Everyone rants and nobody seems to be able to keep his cool anymore.  I liked it better when reporters provided the story and asked the questions that allowed me to react and lose my cool if I wanted to.  There was more common ground among Americans because we could all watch the evening news and we were given the dignity to respond in our own way.

When reporters offer highly opinionated pieces, I feel my opportunity to participate is sacrificed.  Multi-billion dollar conglomerates control our television networks and serve up entertainment instead of the news.  With our remotes in hand we select our nightly entertainment, yet all we get is confirmation of our beliefs and not something we used to value in this country, information.