Member-only story
Our Mainstream Journalist Standards Can Get Lower
What Expectations Are to Come?
Full Disclosure: I still subscribe to the “standard” newspaper I’ll criticize. Why? Because one, I paid for a year on automatic renewal. It’s not worth it to get my money back. Two, for that price, they have still come out with excellent pieces of investigative journalism that is well worth it. And they still connect me to “the official” story of record that is seen as one of the standards. That still matters, if not as much as it used to, it is not irrelevant.
The Washington Post in this case is what I’m commenting on here. I subscribe to the digital NYTimes as well, though it is significantly more expensive, as they too have very credible and important pieces of investigative journalists. The Post just published a two-year investigation into sexual assault by police and wrote in depth about the painful topic. I admire that and it isn’t easy to fund those pieces. The major networks don’t cover that. Their opinion pieces are more popular than those, and I still indulge them like everyone else. But I look to various other opinion pieces as well from the almighty “internet.”
We can’t merely let the papers like the Washington Post sink completely into infotainment, into Fox News belittlement of “dems” and minorities through spreading oppositional branding of “anti-fa” and…
