My favorite Paper (The 6th)

The Future of Journalism: A World Full of Hate?

The answer to the pack mentality of journalists today is a reporter that hates everything to do with government, but has a respect for the public. If, journalists today have a sympathetic view of government because they spend their time with politicians rather than the public. Then, one way for journalists to give the people the news that they need to hear is for a journalist to spend more time with the people in their natural environment, the cities where they live, work and play. The newspaper business, like all other businesses, is profit driven. Rather than being bound to educate the public they are feeding them formulated soft news tidbits that have made most Americans fat with apathy.
In W. Lance Bennett's News: The Politics of Illusion he describes the current state of US journalism as a sort of pack of journalists that feed off of each other and share information and sources (p.171-172). They are encouraged to report in formulated way that contains little or no actual information about the events they are reporting on (Bennett, p. 164). Bennett puts forth the idea that journalists are strongly motivated to showcase the same news as other news sources (p.177). The newspapers and television stations are showing the same news because they don't want to be thought of as showcasing irrelevant news stories. If ABC, NBC and CNN are all reporting on an outbreak of a rare strand of the I.D.-10T virus; then CBS would likely be telling the same story. If they chose not to report on the new virus then they might lose viewers who would go to one of the other channels to hear about this breaking story. All of these pressures amount to the media giving a very vanilla set of news stories. These reports are without controversy or specific detail of events; rather than investigating and hunting for the truth the reporters are content with the hand-fed information from political handlers (Bennett p. 173).
To offset this current trend of soft news and info snacking. There needs to be a paper that is willing to let a reporter get angry about local issues, and governmental issues. This sort of angry reporter would be out to expose the truth about politicians and local government no matter the cost. Warren Ellis's comic series Transmetropolitan is about one such journalist: Spider Jerusalem. Spider writes a popular column called "I Hate it Here" in a paper called The Word. He takes a stance to expose corruption in a future where people care more about stimulants and body modification than the blatant delinquency in the political system (Ellis, 2000, 2001). Jerusalem uses unorthodox methods to gain his information and will often resort to blackmail, but he wants to inform the public and show them the error in their system. He is in a constant state of agitation at the public's apathy (Ellis, 2000 p. 37).
A journalist like Spider could change the public's view of the media. Spider forces people to take a hard look at their current political climate, and they love him for it (Ellis, 2001). The blogosphere seems to be an answer to the pack journalism for some people. While blogs are becoming increasingly more credible with the backing of newspapers and other media groups. There are still a large number of them that are just angry and misinformed people that have heard something on the local news and want to rant. People need someone that wants to tell them the truth, and isn't afraid to enrage the majority of the government and other people in positions of power. The need for some one to break free from the chains of the media formula is increasing with the growing dissatisfaction of much of the public with the sort of news they are getting from most major media sources.

References:
Bennett, W. L. (2007). News: The Politics of Illusion (7th Ed.). New York: Pearson Education.
Ellis, W. (2000). Transmetropolitan: The New Scum. New York: DC Comics.
Ellis, W. (2001). Transmetropolitan: Lonely City. New York: DC Comics.


Note:
I had only read the first two volumes of Transmet at the time and I now realize that this paper is severely lacking in my analysis of the works of Mr. Ellis. Too bad. Alas this is the paper as I handed it in.