LETTER: National media poor examples
Editor,
I complement the journalism department for having Roger Plothow from the Idaho Falls Post Register speak on-campus. I would like to have attended, but not being associated with that department, relied upon Lindsay Kite’s nice job of reporting on the talk.
I began my young adult life looking at journalism as a career and worked my way through high school and a couple of years of college working on several newspapers (The Post Register being one) and in television and radio news. Sadly, I became jaded working among “professional journalists.” The cause of my cooling on this career was the loose talk among those “professionals,” in the various newsrooms, about the simple mindedness of the masses who relied upon them to “correctly interpret” the events they were covering. It became crystal clear to me over a four-year period in those varying newsy environments that without exception, those journalists viewed news as a commodity that should be aged, repainted and adjusted to meet the market. It was not often about truth, but about careers, sales and agendas.
A direct and personal confrontation with Dan Rather during a Nixon visit to Idaho Falls, (Yes, I’m an old guy), sealed my convictions and sent me off in the direction of a career in engineering. Dan was not interested in the news, but in his career and in his opinion of what the news should be and who should be representing that view. Mr. Plothow rightly stated “a broad base of knowledge, having a wide variety of experiences and doing good research” were among the critical tools of good journalism. Lindsay didn’t report it, but I hope he added that the single most important tool was to report only the truth.
Our national media has been a poor example over the years of excellence in truth in journalism. I encourage eager young journalists to look elsewhere for role models. I can’t tell you where to find them, perhaps among your professors. I hope for the sake of my grandchildren they are out there somewhere.
Harry Ames