I’ve been in and out of the journalism business for 50 years. Not full time or all the time but long enough that I am a believer that Thomas Jefferson was right, better newspapers without government than government without newspapers. We live in a world of science fiction come true; a small device in the palm of our hand can access almost everything known and published.
That is, of course, the problem: We drown in an unfiltered firehosing of data that almost is impossible to drink in. Paid experts are always pushing one theory or another, some paid to play a siren song that we want to hear (cigarettes are safe, climate change is a hoax, the world is flat). Others, sometimes shouted down by the paid experts, add to the tide of data hoping we will sort it all out.
But we can’t. Few of us have the time to “do our own research,” and fewer still have the skills to sort everything out even if we gather all or a big sample of the available data sprayed on us from internet, television, radio and mailboxes (electronic and snail). Journalism has been called “the first rough draft of history.
” Though there is uncertainty around who first described journalism exactly that way, the phrase rings true. Historians have the last word, of course, but they too keep rewriting their drafts. Even so, we need help to make sense of the world and that’s what journalists try to do even if they don’t get it all right all the time.
Who can keep up? Without a framework, without help organ.