Macrame journalism

I was born in 1943, just in time to enjoy town squares, in the small rural towns. By the 1950s, and the arrival of better highways and more comfortable cars, residents of those towns had started to drive to larger regional cities to shop, eat, and see a movie. Around the town square, businesses closed, leaving darkened brick shells through which dry goods, sundries, hardware, groceries, movie stars and fountain Cokes had flowed.

In these empty storefront windows in the 1970s started to appear signs of business activity unrelated to the prosperity of the town. The most telling of these signs was this one: "Macrame." It proclaimed, loudest of all, that the square, once the center of commercial and civic activity for a proud people, was dead, and the old, sad, deserted buildings were now hosting splinter arts and crafts groups learning to knot yarn in a certain way.

Journalism is on that same path today. Since the Zenger decision in 1734 established its purpose and power in America, journalism has served a proud people continuously for almost 300 years. Now it is being gutted, its professionals bought out or laid off, its buildings closing, its customers and its business fleeing on a new superspeed highway to a new region that no one yet understands.

Where journalism was, in the pre-Internet world, Americans now find macramé journalism, a hobby practiced by a huge number of Americans on the Internet and in the blogosphere. This new, fun way of knotting information has done what the founding Americans hoped could never be done. Macrame journalism has a loop around the feet of the First Amendment, which is struggling, as calves do against the ropes, but will soon go over on its side.

Journalism is not Cowboys and Indians in the back yard. The term "citizen journalist" is an oxymoron. Many citizens now publishing on the Internet write very well, and argue convincingly, but without working knowledge of journalism definitions, values, and principles, and commitment to those principles, they are not journalists. Do you realize that the rate of media illiteracy in America is 90 percent? Not their fault; all media, including journalism, is based on a set of definitions and values that are not taught to American schoolchildren. They should be, just like algebra, but they are not.

The First Amendment, as it applies to journalism: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press." Do you realize what an amazing statement that is? It tells us that the framers of the Constitution in 1787 knew that freedom of the press already existed, like one of the self-evident truths, or an unalienable right. That kind of power, practically absolute, created by the recognition of truth as a right to publish, deserved great respect in its handling. It is scary now, witnessing hordes of amateurs calling themselves citizen journalists, and taking their work seriously, and even scarier that traditional publishers go along with it. Scary not because of an abuse of press power, that the First Amendment has managed to protect for more than 200 years, but of a draining of it. Without that power, democracy starts to die, too.

This is not a defense of journalism; it is a definition of it. You macramé journalists, go ahead and keep writing. It is your First Amendment guarantee of free speech. But to a journalist today, cruising the town square of journalism, it looks dead, and feels sad. It feels like the First Amendment is being looted.