What happened to our formerly inquisitive press?

Maureen Dowd laments the decline in serious journalism. Commentary on this issue by VDH here:

I am afraid I no longer believe . . .

…That we have an inquisitive American media as we once knew it. There has emerged something as bad as state-sanctioned coercion—which we could at least identify, and thus struggle against.

Now comes a more insidious, brave new self-imposed censorship of the Orwellian mode. It is not just the perennial embarrassment Chris Matthews describing his Obama ecstasy on camera, or even Newsweek’s Evan Thomas comparing his President to God, or even CNN execs being exposed trashing the US abroad at Davos, or whitewashing Saddam, but rather a more incremental new groupspeak in which basic words and ideas—from terrorism to war itself—have been reformulated according to political dictates.

He then gives several examples of the incremental new groupspeak in which basic words and ideas . . . have been reformulated according to political dictates.

Read the whole thing. See if you can think of other examples of group-think and reformulation of basic words and ideas according to political dictates within the major media. There is a recent example which struck me. Try to imagine a story in the LA Times on "funemployment" if a Republican were in the White House during this recession. Can't do it, can you?

I believe that changes in education are one reason reporters now seem to automatically fall into line so completely with the intended message coming out of Washington. A few decades ago, schools of journalism started teaching aspiring young reporters that it was their job to "make a difference" or "change the world" rather than to "report the news". During an administration whose watch cry is "change", it makes sense that reporters would want to participate in "changing the world" by cooperating, intentionally or unintentionally, with the message coming from the administration and/or the Left. They start to believe that by molding their language and their stories with a goal of changing the world, they are doing a favor to the less enlightened masses.

Commentators are expected to place their opinions front and center in analyzing events in the news. They should have some leeway in creative use of words and in "self-censoring". They are subject to rebuttal. When reporters go too far in these same activities, what they write or say often becomes a form of lying. The unelightened masses can tell that they are being lied too. They stop reading newspapers, and Maureen Dowd's job is in jeopardy, even though she's a commentator. She's made her own signature contribution to distrust of the media, however: Her famous ellipsed quotes which totally misrepresent what the person she is quoting actually said.