The Death of Journalism According to P.J. O'Rourke

The topic for P.J. O'Rourke's lecture tonight was "The Government vs. The Citizenry: Which is Worse?" After a lengthy introduction by the dean of the Journalism School, he got up to the podium and said, "Actually, I'm not gonna talk about that." He explained that he thought that was a pretty self-explanatory topic, and being at a journalism school, he elected to talk about journalism instead.

O'Rourke immediately informed the audience of some news that was probably not a big shock to them, given the setting: "The Internet is killing Journalism." The free content nature of cyberspace is ruining what was once a business. Journalists are now content-providers, and people don't pay for content. He says that when it comes down to it, journalism is about communicating, which is something the Internet excels at. He lists three reasons to communicate: to inform, to educate, to entertain. Journalists no longer get to inform people about what happened because they already know after surfing the Internet. The Internet also entertains much better than any journalist could, so the only thing that is left for them is to explain why. The problem there is that today's journalists are not good at explaining and generally refrain from doing so altogether.

The truth, according to O'Rourke is that journalism died long before the advent of the Internet. He's been in the business long enough that he remembers what it is was like to be a "paid rubberneck," a "licensed busybody." News reporters used to be told where to go, figure out what happened there, and then come back and tell people what happened. Journalism died when people stopped being reporters and started becoming professionals. O'Rourke blames the movie All the President's Men for dramatizing coverage of one of the most incompetent attempts at conspiracy ever conceived and thus inspiring a generation of young, idealistic college students to go to journalism school. This was a group of people who wanted to "speak truth to power" and become famous so that Robert Redford would play them in a movie too.

So why doesn't this generation of journalists explain the why when reporting news? O'Rourke says its because they don't have time. It's because a bunch of lofty moral standards take the place of why. He cites the coverage of the 2008-2009 financial crisis as one of the biggest examples of this failure. "Not only did the coverage of the financial crisis fail to provide explication, it sucked explication from our heads. I understood the whole thing even less after reading the Wall Street Journal," says O'Rourke. Coverage of the bailout and the health care reform bill was equally uninformative. He points out that the bill is 1190 pages long and that nobody, not the congressmen, not the president, and certainly not the people who are supposed to be covering it, have actually read it.

O'Rourke's solution is for all journalists to stop and look at the current events they are covering and think about how they actually need to explain them. He admits that if journalists move toward explication as their method of coverage, they may be required to be more objective. O'Rourke doesn't think this is a bad thing as long as journalists are honest and admit to their opinions instead of lying and trying to cover it up with a bunch of lofty, moral principles.

I found a lot of truth in what O'Rourke had to say. I'm someone who rarely watches the news because I don't feel like I get a lot out of it. I see the issues that are being covered, and they certainly sound important (sometimes), but I'm not given any explanation of why that is the case. I also payed close attention when he was talking about where journalism is going to go from here. He essentially admitted that he had no idea what we were going to do in this age, or rather that he had no idea how we would make a living off of the trade. Should I decide to continue pursuing a major in journalism, I am going to make sure I know exactly what I want to do and how I will be successful doing it.