Media's Slain Children

You may remember me from an old stint as a budding Daily Cal columnist. I hope to pleasure and titillate you with the same kind of controversy that led to so much delightful hate mail (and X-rated love mail), not to speak of the very flattering bloggers who sacrificed their time to flesh out my complex character flaws. It's sad getting older and losing hair and pretending it's because of virility. Now that I'm a fourth-year, all I can really do is yell my wisdom at whippersnapping freshmen and hope they stop by to play some bridge.

This past summer I interned at a large news magazine that shall remain unnamed. I gained some precious and necessary experience, but also took issue with many problematic phenomena. Luncheon after lavish luncheon, we interns sat at a round table with decorated professionals, the pride and prejudice of the magazine, hoping to garner some career knowledge, or maybe make an aside leading to an editorial chuckle and promotion.

We had the opportunity to ask difficult questions, to take a risk and demonstrate some personal integrity in the face of consensus and an occasionally out-of-touch staff, but we seldom troubled their reductive world views. One boisterous female intern, slightly older than the rest of us and wiser for it, took exception to the ass-licking smiles and decided to speak truth to power.

In her thick and accusatory Argentinian accent, she demanded to know where journalists got their facts, if they knew of the actual number of dead Iraqis, what the difference is between terrorists and insurgents, how the magazine could run "entertainment" covers when something momentous had happened politically, and why they did not beat the administration to the truth on weapons of mass destruction instead of reiterating the stale, lazy and criminally passive: "We were misled."

In its struggle to locate the most generic line and relate it to a falsely conceived generic public, the magazine failed to meet the responsibility of reporting the news in its sometimes indigestible complexity. All the staff's talk of being both a "mirror and maker" of the news turned out unsubstantiated in the end.

Part of our role as interns was to rejuvenate the magazine, a critical task for an enterprise whose average readership consistently placed in the late 40s age range. We were commissioned to bring an elusive hipness to a parents' publication. The management's initial solution involved emphasizing the popular culture angle, adjusting language to suit our jaded vernacular and creating a consumer's section. Most of the interns, however, admitted that our apathy stemmed from a lack of that kind of provocative depth which could be found at more "serious" news sources. This was not the jive they wanted to hear from our generation.

Despite these flaws, many positives emerged from the experience. A couple of high-level journalists rescued my hopes by showing me they had a restless ethical conscience. Their work grew more difficult as a result but also more bearable. They made a point of departing from the established editorial line and often pressed at the seams of office unity.

I tried to learn by osmosis the information savviness of my boss, who seemed to know every politician and surrounding trivia like the back of his hand. People of his type possess a hard-to-grasp ability to determine what other people will think is momentous at some unspecified point in the future. I got to know some reporters of the classic mold, those purely investigative souls addicted-in spite of their failing health and sanity-to the uncovering process. They are largely underappreciated, their verbal exuberance tragically tamed. Most will never become editors, though they make up the substance of the magazine.

Maybe the biggest thrill is generating a personal idea, pitching it to the editors, getting it published and watching as it gets picked up by other media outlets. I learned, through speaking to the worried mother of a U.S. soldier, that the journalist's moment of greatest agency is when he reduces himself to a mouthpiece for his subject. In rare cases, the most rewarding outcome occurs and a government or institution responds concretely to words on a page. It is then that you realize you actually wield some kind of omnipotence, even from the prison of your cubicle.

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