Longtime columnist vents about the way some news is presented today

The conservative broadcast cable news network seemed so blatantly biased to me, I first thought it a joke; a clever satire along the lines of Saturday Night Live or The National Enquirer. When I realized Fox News was the real deal, and noted that even the politely left-leaning CNN was succumbing to sensationalistic news speak, it was a sobering, even humbling, moment for me. Any lingering vestige of my journalistic arrogance drained away when the receptionist in my doctor’s office politely refused to switch the TV channel in the waiting room to the HGTV Network.

Like many of you, I am bored with big news in print and broadcast. By “big news” I mean today’s breaking news, fake news, screaming headlines, hourly press briefings and relentless talk of news cycles, unnamed sources, press conferences and the like.

My first job as a newspaper columnist was at a small town paper in the Greenbrier Valley of West Virginia. The paper was hard up for writers. I was 18 and had not yet experienced anything particularly profound to report, so I submitted wincingly bad material in the style of the late comic writer Erma Bombeck. When I moved to Macon, I took a night job at the Macon Telegraph and News proofreading long, slick sheets of newly typeset pages. All this pre-digital redlining took place in a tiny space back of the composition and press rooms in the basement of the former Telegraph building. I can still smell the ink.

I continued to write and read. In college, I took as many journalism classes as allowed a lowly communication major. I interned at The Telegraph, served briefly as the entertainment news person and then as a feature writer. Feature writing was rewarding, but I knew hard news stories for the front page and the local section were the gold standard of journalism — objective, unvarnished and devoid of editorial opinion. Standards were high and the truth, inviolable. At the very least, real news was without an agenda of its own.

As the decades passed, people let lapse their subscriptions to newsprint and magazines, preferring to grab the latest juicy bits from cable TV, Twitter and Facebook, whose influence increases with each new generation. As a traditional, old-style journalist, it’s hard to bear witness to some of the news coverage of today. Running amok on a daily basis, false news upends a once credible and revered industry that stands for objectivity, truth and a bunch of other noble ideas we can’t live well without. Fake news in any form denigrates and devalues readers, reporters and, yes, even Siberian internet hackers, who, after all, have to make a buck somehow.

Thankfully, the hometown paper featuring localized news, event notices, print ads from shops down the street and photos of people you actually know has made a rebound or two along the way. Local print and broadcast outlets play a valuable and irreplaceable role in sorting out our daily lives and affirming our place in the universe. That’s just my opinion, but this is a column and I’m allowed.

This story was originally published May 30, 2017 at 1:43 PM with the headline "Longtime columnist vents about the way some news is presented today."