First entry
Welcome to my blog. I'm a freelance writer and former journalist who will write and comment on a wide variety of subjects most of them in the news.

Since I'm a former journalist, I'll comment on the current scandal at the New York Times. Basically a young reporter at the nation's premier newspaper in the nation's number one city faked 36 stories and got away with it.

Naturally the conservative media is having a field day about this one. They're claiming that since the bad reporter happens to be black affirmative action must be to blame.

That's nonsense, a reporter of any color could have gotten away with that garbage at a big metro daily. The reason this happened had little to do with color and everything to do with the way reporters are hired today.

Until twenty or thirty years ago if you wanted to be a reporter at a big metro daily you needed to put in your dues. You went to work there sometimes in high school, and worked as a copy boy for three or four years. Then they let you write basic stories like the police beat. After ten or twelve years you'd get to be a real reporter. Or you started out at some small newspaper in a smaller city and worked your way up. What this meant was that the people who got to be reporters had a lot of experience.

Today you get to be a reporter at a big newspaper by going to the right journalism school and getting the right professor to write a letter of recommendation to the editor for you. That way you can get a six month internship leading to a reporter's job.

This means that most of the reporters at the nation's major newspapers have little or no experience beyond working there. The reporters have their jobs because they went to the right school. Is it any wonder these people buy any left wing propaganda?

To make matters worse these people work almost completely unsupervised. Decades ago they had dozens of editors and rewrite men at the major papers. There were dozens of experienced hardened old time journalists looking over young reporters shoulders and making sure they did their job.

Today, the editor is three or four years older than the reporter and less experienced than the reporter. Worse the paper is understaffed so the editors don't have the time to supervise the reporters or edit their stories if they want to. The budget cutting media executives got rid of all the copy editors.

The sad thing of course is this garbage at the NY Times is only the tip of the iceberg it's going on at the media.

The only good thing is we're hearing about the mess. Twenty years ago if this went on it would have been quietly covered up, the reporter would have been paid off and we wouldn't have heard of it. This reporter would have went on and worked at a dozen other papers and did the same thing. Today the Times came right out and admitted what had happened because they were scared that some web site would out them and embarass them.

The question we have to ask is: will the big media learn from this or not? I don't know. Hopefully they will.