Pruden: Big media’s sad and extremely horrible week

Newspapermen were rarely whiners. Whining became fashionable only after “journalists” overran newsrooms. The best newspapermen, so the folk wisdom went, were Southerners, Jews and the Irish.

Southerners loved the words and the occasions to tell stories, the Jews for the opportunity to do public good, and the Irish for the bottle frequently slipped into the bottom desk drawer by boosters, lobbyists, public-relations flacks and others up to no particular good.

Such an irreverent formulation was enough to offend everybody, but in the old days no one took offense because everybody knew that nobody would particularly care if anybody did. What a hard, cruel, cold life we all led, with welcome irreverence an only consolation. It was pounded into the heads of every reporter, by an editor highly trained in head-pounding, to be skeptical of everything anyone (especially a lawyer) told them — in the famous instructions to reporters in Chicago newsrooms: “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.”

But times change, and only occasionally for the better. The Columbia Journalism Review, published in that citadel of journalists educated to be house-broken, correct in politics and steeped in the grand mission of “improving” readers, relieved itself this week of the sad story of “journalism’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.” The recital was enough to break the hardest heart.

The Review set out a refresher of everything that went wrong, and it was quite a list: