Back in 2005, as the post said, there were 365,000 people working at newspapers. I was one of them. When newspapers were sufficiently staffed, you had reporters, a lot of them veteran reporters, who knew how to write and report and editors who knew how to follow through on editing, writing headlines and managing content. Since then, with the numbers down so far (the story says only 29 percent of journalists (many of them inexperienced) are at papers today), newspapers are woefully short staffed. The aggressive reporting has shriveled.
Much of the criticism directed at the media today is because of the inexperience. Though some papers still do the time-honored journalism practices, many falter. Many so-called "pundits" are nothing more than clickbaiters who steal the stories of others and rewrite them without giving credit.
But some of the criticism is just bickering at the media because it seems the thing to do. And to top it off, you now have a president (lower case for that idiot) who hates the media and loves nothing more than spreading that distrust in hopes that those not familiar with the workings of the media will join the rabble rousers.
If the media today was as good as it was 30 years ago, you'd have more reporters digging for the corruption of this administration. A lot of people point to reporting veterans like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather (who's still with us) as the type of reporting they'd like to see now. So would I. And there are good reporters out there. The NY Times reporting staff does a good job, for one. As do Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell and Ali Velshi on MSNBC. And there are more.
The best thing we as individuals can do is support your local papers. It's there that big things start. Democracy dies in darkness isn't just an empty meme.
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