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1. To be a journalist is to practice an art form alternately active and passive; one must engage and delight a subject or source, desperately gleaning every grain of information possible, and then must reverse and turn around and be a passive channel by which knowledge flows from the source to the reader. If the journalist is remiss, either too passive or too active, he gains little but criticism. We walk a fine line in the media between the two, between the activity of the interview and the passivity of the transcription.
2. Yet the most essential aspect of the media is of course its ubiquity, unparalleled in any prior age of world history. That is what fascinates me most: until the newspaper, news traveled by mouth, and until the radio and the television traveled only as fast as it could be carried in newspaper form. In the past century, since the famous publication wars of William Randolph Hearst and Josef Pulitzer, the news has been honed and fine-tuned; but some measure of optimism with regard to the public good has been lost, with the passage of time. No longer is the news a valuable commodity to the public, a lesson we learned from the tumultuous time of the Spanish-American War—which I mentioned above—but instead a polished good to be sold to them. That is an unfortunate downside to living in a culture where the news is ubiquitous.
3. I love news. I love everything about the news itself. It is the presentation that often disturbs or provokes me into a diatribe of epic proportion at the breakfast-table with family or friends; I am a critic not of the news itself so much as the way we display it. It is the newspaper and the television that has made Americans close to their presidents in a way that no president before John F. Kennedy could ever have claimed; but it is the newspaper and the television that has turned them from optimists to pessimists, from friendly participants in government to desperate adversaries. I have the utmost respect for government, and I suspect that the media—not the news, of course—are to blame.
Each of these are ruminations on the role of the media and of journalists, and the basis for essays I have written in the past for my own consumption or the consumption or others. Some of them will eventually make their way here; others will be housed elsewhere. Eventually, though, all good things must come.
This section will grow, over time, to contain articles I've written and essays I've published. For the moment, suffice it to say that this section is perhaps the core of this site, the pit at the center of the peach or the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Roll Pop. Where would I be if not for my love of the news and the media? Certainly not at Northwestern, at Medill... and this site might not be purple and white!
Go ahead, try it. Read them!
(mwm223), Webmaster, 2002