Mainstream Corporate Media Works in the 'Dog That Doesn't Bark' Division

BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Stephen Pizzo

Thanks to my trusty dog, Buster, I don’t have sleep with one eye opened or with one ear cocked for trouble. If someone decides to lurk anywhere near my house he lets me know -- loudly and persistently.  More times than not it’s just a neighbor or the UPS guy.

Nevertheless, I not only appreciate Buster’s enthusiastic embrace of his watchdog role, but I empathize with him as well. After all, for a quarter century I was watchdog myself, back when that was a reporter’s job. And back then I and my fellow news-dogs acted just like Buster. Sure, sometimes we barked up the wrong tree, at the wrong people for the wrong reasons. But more often than not we alerted  readers to things they didn’t know, had a right to know and needed to know. More often than now we took a bite out of some genuine skunks.

Back in those days even smaller regional papers had “I-teams” -- small groups of reporters with a love for the hunt and a way to a real bite, not just bark. They were the fighter pilots of journalism, complete with the swagger -- and more often than not a well-earned swagger. Then, in what now seems a flash of the eyelash, it all disappeared. Media became “corporate media” and, so being, underwent as Dilbertization process that no longer supports barking. It attracts lawyers, lawsuits, loses advertisers, pisses off corporate interests.

Today’s reporters are well-behaved. They don’t pee in the house or bark at strangers... no matter how strange they may be (Madoff, for example). They no longer bark at “news,” because, after all, real news is an unsettled matter, filled with complexity and nuance. It’s a still-moving train, and so being a good way to get chewed up in the wheels. Instead today's reporters prefer to wait until that train finally goes off the tracks and something awful happens. Then they swing into action and tell us about that and explain all the things that happened along the way that led to the crash, all the things they could have told about back then, but didn’t. In other words, their “news” is a self-indicting narrative of failure -- their failures.

I only mention this, because it’s killing us.

Here’s another guy who’s had it right up to here with our lazy-ass, risk-adverse media dogs: