(Wikipedia) Michael Massing is a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. Michael Massing received his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard and an MS from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He often writes for the New York Review of Books concerning the media and foreign affairs. He has written for The American Prospect, The New York Times, The New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly. In addition to his magazine contributions, he has written on the War on Drugs in his book, The Fix (2002), and on American journalism, Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq. Massing received the MacArthur Fellowship in 1992.
(photo from The Huffington Post)
Well, I wrote a somewhat extensive analysis which was erased when my computer or the internet went fluky. Basically, mainstream journalism is too often sadly pathetic and the blogger journalists are the new muckraker journalists who are forcing mainstream journalists to face their biases and their false objectivity. If democracy is to survive (or made into something more than a pretty ideal), then it will be up to civic journalists to speak truth to power. It takes someone who isn’t comfortable (who isn’t established and fully respectable) to afflict (call a spade a spade) the comfortable (the rich and powerful). Mainstream journalism is only as good as the civic journalism that forces it to be good. Left to its own devices, mainstream journalism (i.e., corporate journalism) would be nothing but propaganda that would destroy democracy at its roots.
Filed under: blogging, Sociopolitical Tagged: | alternative, blogger, journalism, journalists, mainstream, media, muckraker, news, reporters
