Speaking to a crowd of about 200 at Tampa Bay, Florida’s Wyndham Westshore, legendary Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein told the gathering that the media today is more trash than news.
Bernstein, the journalist who, along with fellow reporter Bob Woodward, unearthed the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, said much of today’s news has deteriorated into gossip, sensationalism and manufactured controversy.
“That type of news panders to the public and insults their intelligence, ignoring the context of real life,” he said. “Good journalism should challenge people, not just mindlessly amuse them.”
He said the modern press lacks true leadership, citing such examples as AOL Time Warner and mogul Rupert Murdoch as media owners that have increasingly abandoned the principles of meaningful reporting.
“Their interest in truth is secondary to their interest in huge profits,” Bernstein said.
Still, he said people can change that trend by exploring the Internet and piecing together from reputable sources their own news about important world matters. He offered another solution to avoiding the trash that fills the airwaves: “Change the damn channel. Simple.”
Bernstein also also turned his attention to the coming election in the U.S., calling President Bush “the most radical President of my lifetime and perhaps in the century,” saying Bush “is radical in every degree,” from a favouritism of the wealthy to a pre-emptive foreign policy to a lack of concern for civil rights.
Bernstein ended his address by saying that he hopes a genuine debate can take place this year about the future of the United States, rather than the petty quarrels and meaningless accusations that so often dominate campaign coverage.
“Let’s move beyond the absurd name-calling and sound bite journalism,” he said. “It is our job … to force a real debate.”

According to an article published in USA Today, quoting from a 500-page Project for Excellence in Journalism report, titled “The State of the News Media in 2004” …
The news business is “in the middle of an epochal transformation, as momentous probably as the invention of the telegraph or television,” say the report writers. “Journalism is not becoming irrelevant. It is becoming more complex.”
The report suggests things don’t look good for newspapers and network television, and only three out of eight media sectors (ethnic, alternative and online media) are seeing audience growth.

R. Foster Winans — who did time for misdeeds while an employee at The Wall Street Journal — advises Martha Stewart not to pay someone else to do her prison tasks. “Immerse yourself in humility. It’s good for the soul.”
Additional advice: “Offer to host or appear on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ Your situation, in the context of all the horrible things that can happen to people, is a tempest in a teaspoon. Poke fun at yourself.”

Titling their article “Unembedded, unintimidated”, Salon today announced the appointment of veteran journalist and ex-Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal to their new Washington D.C. bureau. “The country wants and needs unintimidated news,” says Blumenthal. “The Bush administration has put enormous political pressure on the press not to probe its radical policies and their consequences. Salon intends to be fearless.”
Former New York, and Spy, magazine editor-in-chief Kurt Andersen — whose work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Architectural Record, among other publications, and who was also co-founder of the lost and lamented Inside.com — will return to New York magazine as a regular contributor, explaining his decision thusly: “I wrote occasionally at the The New York Times magazine for Adam Moss [who now edits New York magazine], and that was always a very pleasant experience. He called me last week and had this good idea and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to have you in my first issue?’, and I agreed.”