Amy Mitchell from the Project for Excellence in Journalism went on Washingtonpost.com today to discuss PEJ’s “State of the News Media 2006” report. I know this question from “Oklahoma City, Okla.” will receive nods of support from a lot of this blog’s readers, who have written me many e-mails over the past year expressing the same sentiment:

Oklahoma City, Okla.: I spent more than a decade as a daily newspaper reporter, and have worked in and around the media for four decades. Frankly, I’d have a hard time feeling good about being part of the working press today. Since Watergate, the adversarial approach has become the norm; everyone wants to be the next Woodtstein. Stories are often overhyped (in print less so than on TV, but it’s still there.) The bulk of the media outlets are increasingly and relentlessly liberal (CBS documents, on and on) and no one seems to realize that a big part of the job of a reporter is simply to tell people what happened — the school board met and decided A, etc. Weren’t things better when most journalists wanted to be good reporters, rather than celebrities?
Amy Mitchell: Certainly one of the circumstances we are seeing today is fewer people coming into the field who have been schooled in the traditional principles and purpose of journalism in our society. Many are entering the field with little or no grounding and there is also much less mentoring that occurs inside the newsroom between the young and the seasoned journalists. Also, today’s owners many times do not have a background in journalism either. This is especially true in the newest ventures online such as Google and Yahoo which were begun from the start as businesses rather than journalistic endeavors.

I think Mitchell dodges the essence of the question, which is that ever since Watergate, the ultimate standard of achievement in journalism has become bringing down a president. Thus the press tries to turn every incident, no matter how minor, into a major scandal (see: hunting accident, Cheney’s).