Is it me, or has the media in the country gone to mush? What prompted this question is mainly reading the Houston Chronicle (and a specific editorial cartoon which I will discuss further in this blog), but also seeing other written and visual reports from various outlets.
I am not a news junkie like I was back in my thirties and forties, so my sampling is certainly not extensive, but I find that I am reading and seeing what amounts to news reporting pabulum. This is true whether we are talking the equivalent of front-page news, be it world or local, business, and, even, sports. I cannot figure out if it is apathy or ignorance driving this poor reporting.
I once read that most articles are written at the fifth grade level, but that does not explain the drop in coherent content. When a larger national school bought the graduate school where I was pursuing my doctorate, I was required to retake my third year due to graduation requirements; this entailed taking three on-line courses that were at the Master level.
For those that have not ever taken on-line courses, the students not only posts their own work, but also must read and comment on several other classmate’s work. I was appalled! Maybe that is a bit of an overstatement, but not much. It was not the technical aspects of writing a graduate level paper; many had just entered graduate school (I am sometimes ashamed when re-reading some of my early papers!). Unfortunately, the content, cohesiveness of making a logical argument, and even the grammar would have gotten me an “F” in my undergraduate classes back in the early 70s.
I find these same flaws in most of the articles I read in the Chronicle, and they employ editors to supposedly oversee their reporter’s writing! However, an even worse problem for me is trying to create a problem out of normal practices, which brings us to the editorial cartoon by Walt Handelsman I saw on Friday, 26 February.
The cartoon was titled, “Pick The Most Accurate Portrait of Governor Jindal…” and showed a framed picture of what appeared to be a young Jindal, a second framed picture from a few years ago, and then a third with just the frame, no photograph, and a note saying “Away at campaign event… Good luck at home! –Bobby.” For those of you that may not know, Bobby Jindal is the Republican governor of Louisiana.
Oh, the shock of it all!!! Really, I have never, never I tell you, seen a current governor, national senator or congressional representative spend time away from their job attending presidential campaign events! I cannot even believe that Mr. Handelsman thinks this is news.
And why is this cartoon even in the Houston paper? How does the campaigning of a neighboring state’s governor even have relevance? Further, in researching Mr. Handelsman, I found this cartoon appeared in the New Orleans’s paper on the sixth of February and the Chronicle thought it so funny and so significant that is waited three weeks to run it?
It is bad enough that those of us that still read newspapers have to put up with nothing news, but we also have to stomach these cartoonist’s, reporter’s, and editor’s sophomoric hypocrisy. While I could not find anything from so far back, I wonder if Mr. Handelsman considered a similar cartoon on Massachusetts’s governor Michael Dukakis and New Mexico’s governor Bill Richardson when they ran for president in 1988 and 2008? Granted, neither was from Louisiana, but I wonder if it is just because Mr. Jindal is Republican?
Worst, from seeing a collection of Mr. Handelsman’s cartoon on Mr. Jindal, his hypocrisy is even more flagrant in that he should be happy that Gov. Jindal is out of state where, in Mr. Handelsman’s political universe, Mr. Jindal cannot do any harm to his fellow Louisianans! Oh, the scintillating arguments from Democrats that President Bush spent too many vacations at his ranch and from Republicans that President Obama plays too much golf! Give me a break. Please!