RIP, the profession of journalism.

The worst part of taking a week off from blogging last weekend is that I had a great topic for a post but no oomph to write it. So I'm gonna write it this week, even though it's old news by now. Then I'll put a little bit of new news at the end.

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The day the news broke early this month that the owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, had sent his minions to decimate the remaining staff, leaving one of the nation's greatest newspapers a hollowed-out shell, I had a conversation online about it with a good friend. It started me thinking about the history of journalism, and specifically how very short a time it has been a respectable profession. Because it was respectable, for a hundred years or so. Now it's devolving into what it was before the muckrakers helped turn it into the Fourth Estate.

When the movie version of All the President's Men was released in the spring of 1976, I was in my freshman year of college. I'd pretty recently (after spending a semester discovering that I did not have what it took to be a professional musician) declared journalism as my major, and the movie sure made it seem like it had been the right decision. Discovering the grain of a big story, pursuing the facts to the truth, bringing down bad actors in the highest of high places -- that was the sort of thing I could see myself doing, or at least the sort of thing I wanted to be associated with. Now, with 50 years of hindsight, it's clear to me that Watergate was pretty much journalism's pinnacle. And it's been coasting downhill ever since. 

My memory of the journalism history course I took that semester is hazy, but I recall that while the press played a role in the Founding Fathers spreading their views throughout the colonies, journalism ethics weren't yet a thing. Benjamin Franklin was a publisher and sorta-kinda reporter, but he wasn't always honest about when he was fictionalizing details; he reported his own famous experiment involving a kite and a key in the third person, as if somebody else had done it. That sort of thing would never fly today (pardon the pun). 

The profession of journalism began to hit its stride in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when muckraking reporters dug into corruption in political and corporate institutions of the time. A couple of famous muckrakers come to mind: Nellie Bly, who had herself committed to an insane asylum in New York City to find out how deplorable the conditions there were; and Upton Sinclair, whose novel The Jungle exposed corruption in the meatpacking industry in Chicago. The work of these and other reporters, though often melodramatic, caused enough of a stir that laws were passed to relieve some of the worst conditions.

Alongside these crusaders ran an attempt to set an informal code of ethics for journalists. Among the standards was that journalists should be objective. Everybody's got an opinion, but a journalist's should not be readily discernible from his or her work; a reporter should be fair to all sides. Also, a reporter should never make the story about him or her (which is why Ben Franklin would have gotten into trouble if he'd been writing 150 years later).

That all worked fine, more or less, until the moneyed classes realized they could buy up the papers (and the radio stations and TV stations) and exert pressure on the journalists who worked there to bury stories that would hurt business. Journalistic independence has been eroding ever since.

In a column in Slate published on February 5th, Alex Kirshner talked about Bezos' gutting of the Post as almost inevitable. He says the cause of the Post's death is "that one of the richest people in human history staged a controlled burn to turn it into ash. Bezos wanted the Post to die, because a vigorous, well-resourced Washington Post does not suit his vision for the world or his own bottom line." Kirshner makes the point that the paper's net worth is little more than a rounding error in Bezos' vast wealth, and reporting that angers the Trump administration can have a big impact on Bezos' other companies, particularly when we're talking about federal contracts for Amazon and Blue Origin: "Bezos' external economic interests turned him into a virus that ate the Post from the inside."

We can see a similar thing happening at CBS, the former home of famed journalists Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, where the new owner's attempts to placate Trump prompted Anderson Cooper to resign from his 60 Minutes gig just this week.

Journalism has been descending toward infotainment for decades, but real reporting has always coexisted with the fluffy stuff. I assumed it always would. Now I begin to think it won't. 

RIP, the profession of journalism, 1900-2026. It's been a good run. 

***

This weekend, Trump made a cockamamie post on his social media outlet that the US was sending a "hospital boat" to Greenland to provide medical care to Greenlanders. I could not make heads or tails of his rambling until I did a little research. It looks like what set him off was a humanitarian incident in which a sailor aboard a US Navy submarine took ill while the boat was off the coast of Greenland and was airlifted to a hospital in Nuuk for treatment. Greenland reportedly has six hospitals for its population of fewer than 60,000 people and, like the rest of the civilized world, has free, universal healthcare. So the prime minister of Greenland says they don't need our help. Besides, both of our hospital ships, the USNS Mercy and the USNS Comfort, are in drydock for repairs, so neither one of them will be steaming toward Greenland any time soon.

Trump also mentioned the governor of Louisiana, who I guess he promoted to "special envoy" to Greenland back in December to help negotiate whatever Trump thinks he can get out of Greenland's government, which is not going to be ownership of the island. Or a Nobel Peace Prize, either.

The whole thing is a fantasy from Trump's fevered brain. But what pissed me off -- and what every US sailor should also be pissed off about -- is that the commander-in-chief of our military does not know the difference between a ship and a boat. I know the difference because a) I was married to a sailor, and b) I covered the Sixth Fleet when I worked as a reporter in Norfolk, VA. A boat is small enough to fit on a ship. A submarine is a boat; our floating hospitals are ships.

If he's too far gone to understand that, what business does he have running the country?

***

These moments of bloggy sadness and disgust have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Of course the "hospital boat" thing is a distraction from the Epstein files. Here's hoping the fallout from that investigation brings the whole facade tumbling down sooner rather than later.