Journalism & Democracy

Journalism, the fabled Fourth Estate, was once guided by the dictum: Comfort the Afflicted and Afflict the Comfortable. Today, millionaire anchors, caked in makeup and competing for the best hair on the air are bored readers of teleprompters. As newspapers, TV and radio are gobbled up by huge conglomerates fixated on maximizing profits, investigative journalism, digging for stories, recedes into memory. If information is key to the healthy functioning of democracy then what happens when the focus is on Scott Peterson and Martha Stewart? And when White House and Pentagon press releases are accepted as fact? A textbook case of journalism’s decline is Iraq. Reporters were a conveyor belt for administration fabrications. Many of them went a step further, they became embedded.