The perversion of news

I must find my voice! No, I'm not sick and I haven't lost it in anyway, its just eluded me for the most part and now it is imperative that "it" and I get to know one another. As a wannabe journalist, it has been very trying having to mold and carve out some sort of persona being that I am still not all that comfortable or trusting of blogs or opinion writing. I love my own opinion and there's nothing I love more than listening to myself, but the format and direction this new medium is headed towards frightens me. Traditional opinion writers like Jon Diaz of the San Francisco Chronicle are not what scares me. His is the long established reporting intensive method that is slowly disappearing in the mainstream media now overrun by talking heads and party-line homers. What he was taught and what we are learning is a dying art. Unfortunately, newspapers are going the way of the dinosaur leaving only TV and the Internet as the main sources of news. With a blog (and apparently cable news!), people don't have to do any of the real reporting normally involved, leaving them to cannibalize someone else's work and spout their opinion however it best suites them. I'm not breaking any new ground with this argument, but when Mr. Diaz spoke to my opinion writing class Thursday it got me thinking of the many ironies of the Internet. Not only is it taking away dollar after dollar from the print industry, but it is perverting the very art of reporting the news. The thoughtful, responsible ideals that Mr. Diaz spoke of, such as honesty, responsibility, humility, and accountability (to yourself and the reader), are foreign words to most mainstream bloggers. I don't mean to vilify all who blog, but most popular sites have a motive, they have a voice and agenda. The op-ed pages of a newspaper might have a tone, but editor's op-eds aren't going out of their way to blast President Obama or the tea baggers/"activists" every other day fueled by malice. The search for my voice is obviously going to be a tricky one since I will have to walk this delicate tight-rope between responsibility and bull-headedness (which comes so naturally to me), and judging from my previous two posts, it isn't going well.