Oh yea, THAT’s why we have journalists . . .

I was really reminded of the reason why we depend on journalists when I read Dan Gillmor’s We the Media (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/index.csp). Dan, a journalist himself, reveals that one of his role models in the field was I.F. Stone who was best known for his self-published I.F. Stone's Weekly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.F._Stone). As Gillmor describes, Stone’s investigative journalistic method was to “scour and devour public documents, bury himself in The Congressional Record, study obscure Congressional committee hearings, debates and reports, all the time prospecting for news nuggets. . .”

Living in Washington, DC for the last 5 years has demonstrated to me that, to some politicians and government officials, the “the less the public knows, the better”, hence the uber-secretive attempts at slipping in obscure questionable line items in budgets or making announcements about key government decisions late on a Friday afternoon in July. I believe journalists are most useful to society when they expose and reveal what may otherwise go unnoticed by the general public. In Stone’s case, he was the first and only journalist to question the authenticity of the official accounts of the Gulf of Tonkin events. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Incident) The internet definitely facilitates the ability of journalists (and ordinary citizens) to really seek out events that should be news or, at a minimum, should be known by the general public. (After all, you no longer have to travel to the county clerk’s office in NC to search for a record because, chances are, the records are online.)

Today, I believe that too many journalists have changed their focus from finding the news for me to interpreting/analyzing/explaining events to me. I would prefer that journalists stick to the kind of fact-finding that Stone dedicated his life to (and influenced many, including Dan Gillmor) and leave the analysis and commentary to editorialists and, hopefully, a vibrant and responsive public opinion, which may include me, if I am so inclined on a particular issue.

One note: Some see such diligent “Stone-esque”searching as a vendetta or a witch hunt (read Sen. Larry Craig and the cracker-jack staff of the Idaho Statesman) but so what? If you go looking for dirt, and you find dirt . . . you’ve still found dirt.