Why we need the press

A nice column by Eric Newton of the Cincinnati Post:

Perhaps surprisingly in this day of write-it-yourself Web sites, there dwell in America some 125,000 human beings known as "general news journalists."

Hardly anyone likes them. The bloggers call them "mainstream media." Liberals call them "corporate media." Conservatives call them "liberal media." Everyone else just dismisses them as "THE MEDIA."

Truth is, it's easy to bash journalists. Hollywood paints them as a yammering, amoral horde. That's entertaining, but wrong. The boring reality is that most professional journalists actually have ethics. They're good people. They try to dig out facts and stick to them. They hope to keep their corner of the world a little more honest. We watch or read or listen to their work because we need news -- especially bad news -- to properly run our countries and our lives.

... Why should you know that journalists do honest work? Because journalists need you. When you read about a guy whose idea of public service is to hold down three tax-supported jobs at once (or about a $1 million helicopter bought with tax money to battle a gypsy moth problem that doesn't exist, or about 10-hour waits in emergency rooms), journalists need you. They need you to think about what you've learned, and, if warranted, to direct your elected representatives to fix it.

So journalists need you. But you need them, too. If journalists don't tell you about this stuff, who will? The system won't tell you, not even in America. That's why all successful democracies have had a free and independent media.

To learn more about the value of journalists, click on the headline to read the full column.