Frank Rich - So Much for 'The Front Page'

[realFedUp]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/arts/02RICH.html?pagewanted=print&position=

November 2, 2003
FRANK RICH
So Much for 'The Front Page'

PITY, though not too deeply, the American press. Once the wisecracking truth seekers of "The Front Page" and the brave gumshoes of "All the President's Men," the fourth estate has fallen into such cultural disfavor that it risks being renamed the fifth estate, if not the sixth. Hollywood no longer depicts reporters in ruthless pursuit of criminals, high and low. Now they are the criminals.

snip

"You guys are rising to the top of America's most despised list," says Detective Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) to a Sentinel hack. Hey, Lennie — we're already there! For further confirmation, there is "Shattered Glass," this weekend's new movie about The New Republic's own Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, who wrote dozens of fictionalized stories before being exposed. Anyone searching for an altruistic reporter on a movie screen had better run instead to "Veronica Guerin," a Hollywood project that had to go to Ireland to find a journalist to root for, and posthumously at that. But run fast. Though the movie's producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, has a shrewd eye for mass taste, this one proved dead on arrival at the box office. These days a film about a truth-seeking newshound strikes audiences as more ridiculous than "Gigli."

snip

The likes of a Glass and a Blair are true embarrassments to their peers. But the larger culture in which they thrived has done more longterm damage to the press than these individual transgressors, however notorious. "The standard for journalism used to be, `What's the best obtainable version of the truth?' " Carl Bernstein said when I asked him how the profession has changed since the Watergate era. "Now we're living in a celebrity culture that no longer values truth more than hype. You have to go back to what was great about the movie of `All the President's Men.' It was not about the characters of Bob and me. There's not a woman in our lives in it; it's not about us at all. It's about the process of good journalism: methodical, empirical, not very glamorous, hard-slogging reporting. Now journalism is as infected by the celebrity culture as every other institution."

snip

The public, like Lennie Briscoe on "Law and Order," gets the drift. It sees too many reporters showboating Geraldo-style on camera, whether on "K Street" or in the middle of hurricanes, catastrophic fires and wars. They see a famous columnist reveal the name of a C.I.A. agent and never say he's sorry. They see news media less preoccupied with the news than with boosting their own status in the entertainment firmament that now literally owns most of them.

continued

[The Zanti Regent]

1. Rich is one of the BIGGEST Presstitutes

Once upon a time, the SCREW YORK TIMES motto was "All the News that's Fit To Print"

Thanks to lying press whores like Rich, Maslin, Brooks, Friedman, Herbert, Berke the Jerk, and everyone else at the Screw York Times (except Krugman), the motto should read "This is what our Nazi Leaders told us to write"

[realFedUp]

2. I never got that impression of Rich

He's kind of in the same respect column as Krugman for me.
Was there a specific time you felt he pandered?

[Myra]

4. I second that

I think Rich is one of the better columnists.

[bpilgrim]

3. thank GORE he 'INVENTED' the INTERNET ;-)

lots of 'old-school' journalism abounds :bounce:

peace

[KoKo]

5. A Great Read, and thanks for posting it. N/T

N/T