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Produced & Maintained by Idaho Mountain Express, Box 1013, Ketchum, ID 83340-1013 
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Copyright © 2002 Express Publishing Inc.
All Rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Express Publishing Inc. is prohibited. 


For the week of March 5 - 11, 2003

Opinion Columns

‘Professional’ journalism in America

Commentary by DICK DORWORTH


I live in our small town of Ketchum, and most people reading this know it and the surrounding area. I write for this small town’s weekly newspaper, which you are reading. This small town is unusual in ways too numerous to describe here, but in many more ways it is not unusual at all. Despite abundant material wealth, it is still just a town, a part of the world where people live and die and work and dream and do their best to deal with the problems and choices of the human condition. There are people who live in Ketchum and the surrounding environs who think and refer to the area as "not the real world," as "fantasyland," as a place and, by inference, a citizenry somehow removed or isolated or protected from the "real" world out there someplace else. I don’t agree with that perspective because it doesn’t match my observations of the world and how it works (and, sometimes, doesn’t work), locally, nationally and internationally. And, of course, a person who admits to living in fantasyland and not in the real world is, by self-definition, of questionable reliability and has a skewed perception that requires, at the least, skepticism.

As a citizen, it is my responsibility not to agree with the opinions of those who admittedly live in fantasyland. As a journalist, it is my job not to agree with them. Where we live and work is, in my view, part of and connected to everyplace else in the world and to everything that lives within it. What we do and how we think and how we are at home is real and has an effect in the world. Actually, it’s the only effect we can have.

In recent weeks, in both letters to the editor and in conversations with citizens of this small town, I have heard the opinion expressed that those of us in the small town journalism trade should refrain from writing about national and international issues and, instead, focus our efforts on local topics and leave national and international issues to those who live and work in the national centers of power, like Washington, D.C., New York and Los Angeles. There is certainly merit in the argument that journalists with easy access to centers, positions and people of the power of America should have more direct information with which to inform their writing. But the merit is not definitive. Being too close to something is, in itself, in many ways a limited perspective. That power corrupts is known to all. Power also distorts in order to protect its own. One intention of democracy is to limit the corruptive influence of power by dispersing that power among the citizenry. "Of the people, for the people, and by the people" is not just a sound bite in a political speech, or, at least, it is not supposed to be.

If the people in the small (and big) towns of America get all their information and opinions about the nation and the world from the major television networks and large, big-city newspapers, they need to keep a few things in mind: In 1983 the majority of all U.S. news media was controlled by 50 corporations; by 2000 it was controlled by only six giant corporations. Political and other biases aside, those corporations are by law obligated to put profitability at the forefront of their priorities. News media makes its money from advertising, and advertisers, at the local, national and international level, tend to put their money into media that endorses their perspective of the world. While this is understandable and corporations have every right to place their advertising where they choose, it makes professional journalism an arm of the advertising industry of the corporate business world. To say that ethical journalism is compromised by such a circumstance is to understate the case. The problem is compounded when the very corporations that pay for advertising own the media that lives on advertising. That largest of the media giants is AOL/Time Warner, followed by the Disney Corporation and General Electric. For an interesting exercise in what this might mean for the media, I suggest tracking down on the internet the names of the Board of Directors of AOL/Time Warner and the large corporations and businesses they represent and run in addition to the media. Another is to track down all the businesses General Electric is into, including the military. The journalists who work for the media these mega-corporations control are unlikely to examine too closely issues that might tarnish or call into question their employers’ interests. At least they won’t do it more than once.

If journalists and other citizens (journalists are citizens, too) in the small towns of America do not pay attention and contribute to the larger dialogue, then the larger dialogue will not pay attention or contribute to them, and that is the death of democracy. In a recent local radio talk show about the upcoming war in Iraq, a local citizen expressed the opinion that we needed to "trust" that our national leaders know what they are doing, that they are telling us the truth about what they are doing, and that they are acting in our best interests. This opinion, in my view, has an intellectual content equivalent to that of those who live in a self-described fantasyland. This is not only because of the obvious and repeated mendacity of the current administration on a variety of topics---the economy, the environment, the war on Iraq, immigration policy, justice, the re-building of Afghanistan, Enron, education and the 2000 election in Florida, among other things—but because in all administrations to mindlessly trust people in power is dangerous, dumb and undemocratic. And it is the responsibility of small town journalists who work for privately owned newspapers to continue to point this out.

 

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