…of lefty “media criticism.”

You’ll notice there’s no actual mention of anything any newspaper published, just a list of topics critique author Alan Miller Kunerth believes are important but hasn’t seen in the papers. Kunerth doesn’t bother to report these stories himself; he merely complains that nobody else has.

(Kunerth’s title, “The Decline of Newspaper Journalism,” implies there’d been some past Golden Age when the regular news sections of big-city dailies gave the kind of analytical, conclusion-drawing, progressive-minded work Kunerth doesn’t see there today. I’m not so sure most big US papers ever did a whole lot of that.)

While Kunerth’s piece was posted at commondreams.org, it’s of the same shtick as that perfected by Fairness And Accuracy in Reporting: Tease your readers with the hint that you know about some Really Big Shit the bigtime papers won’t tell you about, then rant on and on about why the bigtime papers won’t tell it, but never get around to yourself actually telling your readers just what this Really Big Shit is.

When I said a few weeks ago that this country really didn’t have a “liberal media” and could use one, this was part of what I meant. We need a more empowered, more proactive, less defeatist shtick than this. We need writers (on websites, in ground-level zines, and elsewhere) who are willing to tell what they believe the Really Big Shit to be; to go beyond the whine and actually make the kind of media they want to exist.