Problems of Journalism: Proceedings of the 1967 Convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors was the title of this volume whose pages were bound in a dark green cover. Why is it a favorite with me? First, several noteworthy speakers were involved, not the least being the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and for me the inclusion of a multi-speaker session regarding the subject of UFOs as the convention steered toward its conclusion seemed incredible. A presentation by the late scientist Dr. James E. McDonald, basically informing newspaper editors that UFOs were a serious subject backed up by scientific evidence was, in my opinion, something of an eye-opener for many editors who often needed to decide whether UFO reports in their areas should be taken seriously.
However, Problems of Journalism also heralded the approaching end of news reportage as we knew it back then. Even as most newspaper editors remained chained to their manual typewriters and smoke-filled newsrooms churned by and buzzing with reporters and printers racing to get the next local morning or evening newspaper edition "to bed" on time, the Vietnam conflict was giving birth to another kind of reporting, something eventually known among college and university journalism classes as the "new journalism." Bolder, riskier, more profane and often almost hopelessly poetic, this version of journalism would no longer strive for some aura of assumed purity or the hardcore integrity usually associated with hard news reporting. As newspapers embraced this form of writing, so, too, did major magazines, and all manner of expressive prose spewed forth by the time America encountered the 1970s.
So, without going on and on as I often do, my old green-covered relic from an era gone by reminds me of where we were and how we got to where we are today. Today? Newspapers continue a sad decline as newspaper reporters, long admired for truly in-depth reporting, disappear along with their parenting editors, and modern young people instead consult often questionable Internet sources for "news." And still others rely upon TV networks for daily "truth" in news reporting which, as seldom before, is now enveloped in political agendas of a corporate or personal nature.
Which brings me to ABC-TV's now former reporter Terry Moran, just fired (IF that is the proper term) after getting down and personal in referencing Donald Trump and Stephen Miller as "haters." Maybe he didn't mean to post his thoughts on his company's affiliated online site, or perhaps he did, but the damage was done. Just weeks ago, Moran conducted an interview with Trump. Being in a journalist's position is tough because a fine line must be walked, and if your company hires you to at least pretend to report news objectively, that's the sword upon which you fall in the corporation's name.
As others before him easily discovered, publicly attacking Trump can be as effective as a campaign speech FOR his presidency. Why? Because every barb directed toward Trump arrives with a little reminder tucked in a notch that the media in all of its forms failed Big Time to tell the truth about Biden and an administration built upon lie after lie. If the TV folk believe that the people will just forget about the past four years of Joe Biden and instead take up pitchforks and torches against Donald Trump, they are and remain pathetically out of tune with viewers.
That Terry Moran was out there badmouthing Trump online whilst we have people such as the absurd Newsom, the liar Schiff and NY's radical Jeffries radiating utter verbal stupidity just adds to a mountain of utter bilge. Confronted by a population quickly catching on to the dangerously activist organ the Democratic Party has become, the old alarmist chestnuts in the leftist bag of tricks just don't work anymore.
Though the 1967 conference highlighted "problems of journalism," those problems were nothing compared to the cascading river of meaningless, ridiculous or flat-out erroneous sound bites and blurbs confronting the profession of TV journalism today, as both it and the Internet supplant the newspaper industry's invisibility. The only thing worse than the state of such reporting would be for the government attempting to control free speech -- which, sadly, is not precisely rumor among either the USA or contemporary societies in Western Europe.
A word about the Wall Street Journal and UFOs: The WSJ printed an article last week pretty much claiming that for decades many well-regarded UFO sightings and encounters were instead caused by super-secret U.S. air technology. Other UFO writers have addressed this issue expertly, but I'll just add: Bullshit. You want to talk about Area 51, fine -- who would doubt that some spooky things go on there, sometimes extending to other areas? But be warned: We have seen these debunking articles frequently over the years and we're sick to death of writers with credentials and all the answers emerging to tell us there's little to see here, or there, or somewhere. If the sixties' Colorado UFO study was an embarrassment to science itself, the whack-a-mole pop-ups of enlightened writers and hack writers and writers with nothing else to write about, explaining away all the monsters under the bed, simply continues a certain segment of the population's need to make everything as normal as a warm puppy.
