A Return to “The News” being “The News”

            As everyone knows, the Qatar-based media outlet, Al Jezeera, has bought the infant cable TV network called “Current TV” and is making its entry into the U. S. cable TV market with a full-blown English-speaking network.  Huffington Post and others recently reported that Al Jezeera has made a big splash in the realm of U. S. journalism by posting over 100 notices of available journalism jobs, quoting New York Times media reporter Brian Stetler as saying: “Al Jazeera . . . [has] decided . . . to hire a lot of [American] journalists and prove to the country that they are here to do journalism, not to do some kind of propaganda."  (emphasis mine). 

            I was just reading the Huffington Post report on the subject, which brought into stark contrast the very hopeful possibility that Al Jezeera may force a return of U. S. journalism to just that – journalism – instead of giving us Fox News and other non-journalistic television productions that are nothing more than entertainment shows masquerading as “news programs”.  That hopeful possibility was most startlingly evidenced by a perhaps unwitting comment by a guy named Tom Gura, who is the editor of a blog called “Corporate Intelligence” for the Wall Street Journal.  Gura said, “It’s going to shake the industry up in a lot of ways. . . .  I mean, you've basically got a not-for-profit, 24-hour news network launching here. This is a company that does not do things based on a financial or economic rationale." 

            How refreshing is that ? ! ! !  I remember the time when Walter Cronkite and CBS News came before the American people every evening and told the country “the way it is” – without worrying about whether a truthful report of the news of the day would help or hurt its ratings.  Let us all hope that Al Jezeera will be exactly the journalistic entity that Gura described – a company that does not do things based on a financial or economic rationale.  How ironic it is that an Arab-government-owned cable TV network would be the entity most responsible for returning the honest and truthful reporting of the news to American airwaves !

 

            Just MHO, of course.