US: Pulitzer winner resigns with harsh criticism of the American press

In leaving her post at the New York paper, Newsday, Pulitzer Prize winner Laurie Garrett left a scathing memo about the state of journalism in the United States, reports Editor & Publisher. The root of the problem, according to Garrett, began about ten years ago when profits became the main concern of newspapers; "The leaders of Times Mirror and Tribune have proven to be mirrors of a general trend in the media world: They serve their stockholders first, Wall St. second and somewhere far down the list comes service to newspaper readerships." She continues with a brief history of the decline of investigative journalism forced on the press by "massive corporations," and relates her own experiences to this view with anecdotes of "whiskey-swilling" editors and reporters of "blue collar backgrounds" that "would have been cops or firefighters" had they not taken up journalism. Garrett declares the boardroom takeover of the press as "terrible for democracy" and "attest(s) to the horrible impact the deterioration of journalism has had on the national psyche." She ends the memo on a hopeful note, saying that there still remains the opportunity to save quality journalism, but that it's going to take effort by reporters "to tell the stories, dig the dirt and bring (the readers) the news." Let's hope that Ms. Garrett's memo has the effect that it was meant to have; persuading board members concerned with money that the way to a profitable paper lies in quality investigating and reporting; persuading editors not to succumb to greedy boards, allowing their reporters to search for the truth; and persuading journalists to forget about the "scandal-for-the sake of scandal crap that sells," returning to the "honesty and tenacity" that journalism is all about.

Source: Editor and Publisher