Fifty years in Media: Changes in Journalism

David Burnham, again:

“Watch what we do, not what we say,” said John Mitchell, former Attorney General for the Nixon administration, while responding to reporter’s questions on the administration’s civil rights record. Mitchell’s “wonderfully sage advice”, Mr. Burnham argues, has been routinely ignored by most reporters. “Most reporters don’t report what the government has been doing but report what the people in government and people in corporations and people at Harvard University are saying,” Mr. Burnham says. The result has been the lack of concrete reporting about current events and while these trends have been bad for print media, they have been disastrous for TV news.

100% agreed here. I much prefer reading real investigative journalism!