Most of the readers here know this topic is one of my chain pullers. Pundits are not journalists, nor are most bloggers. Huff-Po (for the sake of brevity the only example, of many potential examples, I will use), at least up until now, had no real investigative journalists. What they had was a group of people, some with a certain expertise, some not so much, willing to give their opinion based on the facts as they see them. For god sake Bill Maher?

Opinion is good, I love giving mine. This post is tagged opinion. It’s my favorite tag. I love a few of Huff-Po’s columnists too, but what about the real investigative journalism? The kind that makes us sit back and think, not run to the nearest opinion blog to see what others think. What about finding out the answers to larger societal and political quandaries? For all the rambling on the new way of news, there is no new way of real investigative journalism. We are already a world of editorials, thanks to cable television. When the journalism, or the source of the news, goes to hell, the editorials are worth less than they would be otherwise, and that’s unnerving, considering how editorials go.

I came across the posts listed in the following paragraphs and thought I’d put them out there for you to read, as a prelude to the NYT magazine Strained by Katrina, a Hospital Faced Deadly Choices . The piece — by Sheri Fink, an M.D., a staff reporter at ProPublica, and senior fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative — is a spectacular must read (will be in the NYT Magazine this weekend), and an example of what we may be missing in the future. It is a piece that needs digesting, and we will discuss the piece itself another time, save to say that this is real investigative journalism, done by people who know what they are doing, and care about the subject matter. It takes time, and it is expensive to produce.

This post is merely a link to posts asking the questions we have to ask. Good reads for what might be a rainy weekend in many places throughout this country.
Cost of the NYT Magazine NOLA Story Broken Down
The Price of Truth

My question for the weekend is, if we are unwilling to pay for things like real investigate journalism, why? Is it because we really don’t want to know the truth? Are we are too wrapped up in our own problems, significant or not, to see any worth in the larger ethical, social, or political questions we should be asking. Or is it some kind of calculated evolution? Will journalism go the way of the clothing we wear, made in third world countries, sometimes from factories with questionable labor practices, and often of lesser quality.

What say you?

What of the future of journalism? What of the future of the truth.

Check out the preceding post, Old School Friday, if you missed it.

Wonderland or Not.

The media’s excuse is that people don’t watch stories on health care, and there is little in the way of compensation for such reporting. By that FOX was right to eschew Obama’s health care press conference, they won the ratings in that time frame, but from the standpoint of being a news organization with some responsibility to put significant content in front of the public, they lost.

I loathe that Congress works in such a way that if some kind of plan on health care isn’t rushed through this year it’s bound to be unaddressed for some time. There is something wrong with a system that works that way, especially when the issue is so complicated that I doubt most of Congress understand anything but the political ramifications of it. I don’t have confidence in this process, or the people in charge of it, and I’d like to see some real investigative reporting on the health care issue.

Much of what I read/watch from major news services is nothing more than reports on the political implications of passing, or not passing, a health care bill. I want to see real life reporting on how systems in other countries work, not vague statistical comparatives. What I see is “reporters” making their point with any of the various points you can make with statistics, depending on which ones you choose for your particular agenda. As I’ve said here before, facts of omission are a greater part of our news these days, and with health care it is even more so because it is a complicated issue, probably takes time to investigate, might even take time and concentration to understand, and brings little in monetary rewards. But the public needs to hear some good reporting on this issue.

In a note to Trudy Lieberman (director of the health and medicine reporting program at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism who covers health reform for the Columbia Journalism Review’s cjr.org, and regular contributor to The Nation), Sarah Varney, one of the few really decent health care/health reporters out of LA (I lump her with Kelley Weiss, Joe Barr and Paul Conley at Capital Public Radio), who was inside Canada working on a report about their system, said.…

“I would say as an American health reporter there is a lot of pressure inside news rooms to give the Canadian horror stories equal footing with what my reporting actually found—-which was that the Canadian system is by-and-large a functioning system that covers everyone for half the cost with enviable health outcomes”

According to cjr.org’s Health Reform Too Boring for Broadcast?

“Varney told a compelling and interesting story that directly contradicts the ads now running on U.S. television. She also conducted a round table conversation with some of the best Canadian health experts, including leading health economists Robert Evans and Morris Barer. They explained that their system is not socialized medicine — doctors don’t work for the state; they are independent and run their own practices. What is socialized is the insurance pool— every Canadian is in it— which powers the country’s lower cost, not-for-profit health insurance system.”

Trudy Lieberman’s Health Care pieces at at cjr.org

At the Nation

We need real health care reporting, whether we want it or not, and it is all but non-existent.

If you have a favorite reporter who is currently covering health care, I mean really covering it, let me know.

Peace

Wonderland or Not.

I’m thinking, though not deeply, about death. The grandfather of a good friend died today. Funerals are sad, death not necessarily so. Sometimes death is a relief, or so I hear. I’m not sure how we can know if death really alleviates anything. The dead can’t tell us. The best we can hope for is it all ends with death being the balm of life.

The consequence of this death is that my friend is coming this way for the funeral, and I’ll get to spend some time with him over the next couple days. I love catching up with people on the “real friend” list, discussing girlfriends, boyfriends, life plans, work, school, and family dysfunctions. It’s peculiar that I totally hate discussing this kind of thing with people who are not good friends. The casual acquaintance bores me to tears with stories I find riveting if delivered by someone I have put in the “life friend” category.

Speaking of funerals. I wish everyone would shut up about Michael Jackson. Now we have to look at his hair burning Pepsi commercial, his nasty old father, his countless friends, who prior to this lived in some heavy woodwork, Larry King asking some of the stupidest questions imaginable to people we’ve not heard of before, not to mention the other CNN histrionic pundits extraordinary. Soon people will be posting autopsy pictures. Watching this stuff makes me sicker than eating ten bowls of cherries. We are an indecent people here on Planet Earth.

peace

Wonderland or Not.