Watchdogs or Yap Dogs?

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Yapping Heads

“If newspapers become mostly infotainment websites—if the number of well-trained investigative journalists dwindles still further—and if we’re soon left with nothing but the yapping heads who dominate cable ‘news’ and talk radio, how will we recognize, or hope to forestall, impending national and global crises? How will we know if government officials have made terrible mistakes, as even the best will sometimes do? How will we know if government officials have told us terrible lies, as the worst have sometimes done? A decimated, demoralized and under-resourced press corps hardly questioned the Bush administration's flimsy case for war in Iraq—and the price for that failure will be paid for generations.”

—Rosa Brooks, now former columnist, Los Angeles Times, 2009

Click here for full column.

Editorial Comment: Can’t somebody shut that watchdog up?

Of Interest: Aging dinosaurs bloviate on the future of “The American Newspaper,” on KUED-TV’s “Utah Now.”

News Update: American journalists held in Korea, Iran. Euna Lee and Laura Ling, two journalists for Al Gore's TV network, have been held as spies for eight weeks in North Korea. Meanwhile, Roxana Saberi remains jailed and charged as a spy in Teheran, despite calls for her release from President Obama.

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