Tomorrow’s Journalists
by Felipe De La Hoz
With a new semester getting underway, I am once again driven to examine what I’m doing and why from my perch at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, where I teach undergrads. I have for some time now made the joke that training journalism students can feel a little bit like training the crew of the Titanic. The quip is lately beginning to lose its luster, not because it is not true but because I’m less sure than ever of the lifeboats.
Last week, I saw that CBS News plans to stop editing Face the Nation interviews and to broadcast only live or live-to-tape interviews in direct response to pressure from noted puppy killer Kristi Noem, the current secretary of Homeland Security, who had accused the network of deceptive editing. By that she meant that some of her own propagandistic lies had been removed from an interview on the show; these lies concerned Kilmar Abrego García, a man whom I’ve noted elsewhere has been converted into the test case for what happens when the government brands someone an enemy and tries to bring the full weight of its power down upon them.
That came on the heels of news that billionaire David Ellison, whose company Skydance recently bought Paramount, was considering handing editorial control of the storied CBS News network to Bari Weiss, the Platonic ideal of a vapid and petulant right-wing media grifter. The idea of Weiss—the longtime beneficiary of a lucrative career built on failing upward—being handed control of CBS almost seems like a sick joke, but it is a perfect punchline to our contemporary moment of media. Most of our premier outlets now seem to find themselves economically battered, rudderless, and dumbfounded by our authoritarian lurch, unable either to grasp or to convey its magnitude and implications for U.S. journalism.
Keep us breathing fire!
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