How Many Deaths Is A Story Worth?

Jack Kelly, the Paragraph Farmer and Media Bistro all say this column by Raph Peters, Journalism's Moral Collapse, is a must-read. Actually, Kelly apparently called it the best media column ever written.

It's mighty good. Excerpts:

Three decades ago, two young reporters became the story and crippled American journalism.

Budding yuppies who avoided inconvenient service to the state needed heroes they could call their own. And they got them.

Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman played Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on-screen. It was as if Mike Bloomberg was portrayed by Brad Pitt. Overnight, journalism became an upwardly mobile profession — and our country is much the worse for it.

In place of the old healthy skepticism, we have arrogant cynicism. The highest echelons of the media and government became preserves for America's most-privileged. An Ivy League degree was the ticket to a reporting job on a major daily. And incest produced the usual ugly results.

"Mainstream" newspapers lost touch with American workers because the new breed of journalists didn't know any workers. ...

The editors would insist that "the public has a right to know." That tired mantra needs scrutiny: It would have justified revealing secrets such as Ultra, the Manhattan Project or the timing of D-Day in the Second World War.

Our country is at war with implacable enemies. If the media disdain supporting our efforts at self-defense, they should at least refrain from undercutting our security. How many deaths is a story worth? (And imagine if we had published daily casualty reports from World War II battlefields. Would "journalistic integrity" have justified aiding Hitler)?

But for the grace of God, this could have been me. Enamored by Woodward & Berstein (and Hunter Thompson), I got a journalism degree and set out to wreak some havok with the establishment. Thankfully, for a lot of reasons I became the establishment , but I remember what I was ... and it was frightening.