NATIONAL: We Need More Journalists to Report the Facts

PROLOGUE: I'm old school and still like to read newspapers every day to "keep up on the news" - a habit that I suspect is dying. Folks have begun to "keep up" with the news (if they bother at all, which I suspect that most people do NOT) via the internet and and its less and less accurate news sources.

Journalism as we used to know it has been dead for many years. News publications that used to send out reporters to investigate and report the news have increasingly relied on the news wire for their reporting, and basically parroting the "reporting" of others.

Evidence: major news sources such as the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times have laid off 100's or 1,000's of reporters in the last decade, and reporters no longer have a "ladder" to climb in their careers at such publications. Being a reporter is now considered to be a low wage job with no possibility for advancement, thus limiting the quality AND quantity of actual news investigation, as opposed to "accumulators" of news resulting from the reporting of others. I found an on-topic blog article that attempts to answer the question: "Is Journalism Dead?" The article identifies the trend towards relying on the "citizen-as-reporter" for our news, rather than trained professional journalists.

We became more highly aware of this "Journalism is Dead" phenomenon when our son was seeking out a college major and a career path. After our son spent a week visiting a cousin who worked as a named reporter at a VERY major newspaper, our eyes became opened to this less-than-obvious trend. The cousin encouraged our son to avoid journalism as a major and as a career, because, as previously stated, journalism was dead.

GETTING TO THE POINT: My personal frustration is with articles that do not report on the FACTS that I am seeking in order to form my OWN OPINION. Let's just get to a few examples:

EXAMPLE 1: Reporting on the so-called "Fiscal Cliff" legislation that was passed recently. Nowhere on the internet or the newspapers could I find a listing of what was actually contained in this legislation.  Note that while writing this article, I found what appears to be a decent article on the impact of the Fiscal Cliff for ordinary taxpayers like me on the CBS news web page dated January 1, 2013.

EXAMPLE 2: Today 1/14/2013 in our local San Luis Obispo newspaper, The Tribune, was an article that Egypt's Mubarak would get a new trial. It turns out that an Egyptian appeals court threw out his life sentence conviction. My problem: it didn't tell the readers WHY the conviction was overturned - the only real news information that I was looking for. In the LAST paragraph of the article, it states:

"The court did not explain its ruling and did not set a new date for the trial."

I want to know more about this last sentence. Is it routine for this Egyptian court to avoid publicly posting its rulings, UNlike here in the United States? Or was this an exception due to the notorious and volatile nature of prosecuting Egypt's dictator for more than 30 years? Who knows? Who cares? Answer: Me.

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