Closing the Newsroom

I am a big fan of the HBO show "The Newsroom," which is ending with a six-episode third season. Two episodes are left, and then this high-end production of quality and intelligent writing will be gone.

The show makes me cry frequently. Not with every episode, but with many of them. Last night's show made me so tense that every nerve in my body hurt.

This season the show has covered many things, but at its heart it is exploring the loss of true journalistic integrity, lack of ethics, and the rise of the "citizen journalist," wherein the audience becomes the writers and the content providers, for no pay, of course, with the news media winning by becoming profitable through advertising because it has a big audience of morons.

The real losers? Everybody. Everyone who values truth and morality, who doesn't believe that what the majority thinks is always right, and those who think that opinion is not the same thing as reality. Which should be every thinking person on the planet.

The losers are people who live outside of the bubbles, those who seek authenticity, not fairy tales, and those who desire genuine facts and not mob rule. If you're just along for the ride, trying to get your piece of gold so you can hoard it along with your guns, then you're not watching this show or paying attention to reality, anyway. You may as well move along.

Unfortunately, this is what happens when money becomes king and god, which is where we are today. We are here because the bean counters took over and news media became a fountain of dollars instead of seedbeds of ethical journalism, as they should have been.

Of course the media has always been tainted. Yellow journalism has been around for centuries. But at one time - maybe about the time Bob Woodward ratted out Nixon - it seemed like journalism was about justice and reality. There was some honor in the title of journalist.
`
I have watched in horror as the media has sold out to the money gods, one by one, all the way down to the smallest newspaper. I have watched in terror as the governments, all the way to the local school board and the smallest town council, have taken advantage of the lack of media oversight to move forward with projects about which their citizens are and forever will remain clueless. And generally, so long as their taxes don't increase, the citizens don't care.

It's a free-for-all time for those in power. They must clink their wine glasses nightly, saluting their great victory, as the masses stare dumbly at their cell phones, twittering away about the things of which they know nothing.

The papers that still exist, what few there are, no longer are part of the conversation. They have made themselves irrelevant. Governments are no longer scared of local newspapers because they know no one reads them. Or at least, not anyone who counts in their eyes. And the people who count are the corporate owners, not the citizens who elected the government officials in the first place.

Television media coverage may be seen by more people, but it is done in three-minute sound-bytes. Who can do in-depth reporting for a three-minute segment? Shows like 60 Minutes lost their relevancy a decade ago; I don't even know why it is still on. We are so inundated with crap from the internet, with BS streaming across our phones, that we have no way of differentiating real news from fake, which is why ironic articles from The Onion and other fake stories frequently find their way into the national conversation.

So I mourn the closing of the newsroom. I mourn the loss of true journalism, the death of the Fourth Estate, and ultimately the demise of democracy. As the plutocracy and the oligarchy complete their take over, one day people will look back and say, wasn't there a time when we had truth? Wasn't there a time when I, as a citizen of this country - of this world - actually mattered? Wasn't there a time when I as a human being was more important than some trinket on a shelf?

We will look back, and we will lament. And we will move forward, crawling like Gollum in the darkness, sending ourselves half-naked into the world we have created, this miasma of lies and deceit, this cesspool of advertising and creeping classism and division, because ultimately, in the end, what else can we do?