So, who told me?

One of my favorite books about journalism is A.J. Liebling's The Wayward Pressman, which is not about an offset press operator's descent into perdition. It's available on amazon.com. I think.

Anyway, its introduction is self-effacing. Liebling recalls when he was telling his deskmates at the New York Times that he was soon to give a talk at a school about newspapers.

"Oh?" A fellow editor raised an eyebrow. "Who told you?"

Liebling had to admit it was a good question, and he used it for his book about a lot of things to do with the press back in the 1920s and 1930s.
And so I use it here, for my first entry. This is the only real blog I have written for. I created another one for another state's publishers association, but, being publishers, they approach it as if it were coated with bird flu.

I have been told by 30 years of other editors, reporters, photographers, press critics and readers (a lot of those). And this is what I hear and see:

The media, however it is produced and by whoever, is careening into a caricature of the ideals it promotes as its driving principles.

Heck, that was easy. Any journalist worth his or her secret MoveOn.org membership will tell you that.

So here comes the hard part: It is hardly likely that any movement will be successful to change things. The reason is a combination of the institutionalized strategic ignorance of most newspaper owners and operators and the failure of honest journalists to persuade them otherwise.

So we have the spiraling experiments with ideas that mostly have been tried before. The so-called ''citizen journalism'' has such a long history we may as well call it a tradition. But as such, its success has been best in isolated circumstances, and almost never against large media concerns.

The idea of casting off the talisman of objectivity is not new, either. It was attempted broadly back in the 1970s -- in fact, Hunter Thompson, the anniversary of whose death is upon us, made the notion even more attractive, and elevated it to a marketing tool. But in time, the broader base of readers and viewers pushed back, and demonstrated their preferences for straight-ahead reporting -- e.g., Watergate -- over hyperbolic writing, frankly written to impress other journalists.

That only proves that I've been around long enough to notice that old mistakes have been repeated. Most publishers and their ilk and kith and kin still run most newspapers the way they did two and three and four and five decades ago, while the sharks, like Dean Singleton and Rupert Murdoch, seem more revolutionary even than the journalists who believe, for some reason, that the revolution will arise from the grass roots, among the readers who, I'll have to point out, have distrusted them for so long and have been abandoning them for much longer than they seem to remember.

And so it goes...

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