Conventional wisdom has it that journalism’s dying. Or at least it’s feeling awfully sick these days.
Newspapers are just about gone. TV news is a sports-like battle of teams, my side versus yours. And the internet, including YouTube, X, and other social media, together comprise a cesspool of shit.
Me? I depend on the likes of NPR News, the New York Times, CNN (only to learn if there’s been a plane crash, a tsunami, or some such thing), the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Sun-Times, al Jazeera, and a handful of essayists like Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich, and Jeff Tiedrich as well as, for laughs, the Onion and Wonkette.
I view all my go-to news sources with a suspicious eye. The truth is, everybody’s biased. That’s just human nature. As long as I — and you — recognize the inherent slant in any reporting, I — and you — will likely form a reasonable and accurate(ish) perception of the world as it is.
Problem is, most people refuse to accept that their team’s news source(s) are biased. The Fox News opinionators speak only the truth. The CNN squawkers traffic only in facts. Your X contacts really know what’s going on. And everything I need to know I can learn by watching a three-minute YouTube video.
It’s enough to make a journalism geek want to cry.
There is hope, though. Indiana University’s IDS (originally, the Indiana Daily Student) continues to train hard-hitting reporters and print (or post) good, strong investigative stories. To wit, its long story about the goings-on at the Comedy Attic the other day.
I’d heard there was strife in the Thompson household months ago. I felt terrible about it because I like both parties. Jared Thompson is about as huge a Cubs fan as I am and Dayna Thompson is a talented, hard-working, ambitious person. I’ve had them both, at different times, on my Big Talk WFHB radio interview program; Jared to talk about the Comedy Attic and Dayna to discuss her then-pending purchase of Caveat Emptor book shop.
That domestic strife, though, according to sources cited by IDS reporters Abby Turner and Eva Remijan-Toba, was merely the scab covering a deeper infection, one that threatens the overall health of the Thompsons’ local business empire.
Jared, erstwhile boss of the Comedy Attic and the Limestone Comedy Festival, has been accused of sexual improprieties. It’s all tawdry and itch-inducing. And it’s a goddamned shame because the Comedy Attic and the Festival had become treasured Bloomington institutions.
Regardless of the truthfulness of the accusations, the whole thing stinks and has cast a fetid pall over two people and their businesses that heretofore boasted sterling reputations.
The story is important not as a salacious bit of gossip but as part of the ongoing revelations about sexual harassment and asymmetrical power dynamics in the workplace.
Who’s doing good, solid reporting these days in our neck of the woods now that the Herald-Times is a shadow of its former self? Well, the Limestone Post along with its Deep Dive news partner, WFHB, are doing it. So is Dave Askins at the B Square Bulletin (after his recent, short-lived retirement from reporting). Jeremy Hogan’s Bloomingtonian, too, albeit in a more visually-oriented manner. And the IDS is doing it.
The kids at the IDS are bulldogs. For a brief, shining moment in their late teens and early 20s, as they slog toward their journalism degrees, the IDS reporters emulate the great investigative reporters of the past. They uphold the mantle of Seymour Hersh, David Halberstam, Carl Bernstein, and even Upton Sinclair. I can only hope they’re aware of and hope to follow in the footsteps of Ida Tarbell, the muckraking journalist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who, all by herself, took on as titanic a target as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil trust, then the biggest business entity in the United States. Her investigations into the company led to its eventual dissolution following a landmark US Supreme Court ruling in 1911 (Standard Oil of New Jersey vs. the United States).
Not enough people know this but Tarbell essentially invented investigative journalism. Carl Bernstein could be immortalized in a movie but no Hollywood actress thus far has been cast to play Tarbell in any biopic of her. Too bad. Any script about a 1904 woman taking on the most powerful plutocrat in this holy land ought to make a fascinating movie.
Ida M. Tarbell
The kids at the IDS, likely, are idealistic right now. Once they graduate, they’ll find scarce opportunities to earn a living in their chosen field. Like many J-school grads, they’ll find jobs in public relations or corporate communications. Or, worse, TV.
But they’re at it right now, doing noble work as journalists. Let’s enjoy them at this moment before they have to go to work painting pretty pictures of unsightly corporations.
PS: Here’s a good book on Ida Tarbell and her career-defining peek into America’s biggest monopoly at the time: Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller.
