Craig DeVrieze

Is it time yet to revisit all the early heralding of the internet's pure democracy, of the idea of "citizen journalists," of each and every voice being able to be heard being a good thing for our ability to find truth and govern ourselves? Because having spent a previous career in newsrooms, as part of the cold, organized monolith that was our gatekeeping mainstream media, I know that we were often too herd-like and centrist, sometimes misled and sometimes capable of publishing horseshit on incomplete or contradictory data. Sometimes we got it dead wrong. But every day, I remember that the editors read the copy and tried to verify what they could and avoid what they could not. And no one could pay us a fucking dime to say what we didn't think was the story we thought we had. Fact is, I once tried to sneak a piece of celery through some ranch dip at some politician's fundraiser because the guy was late showing up to make a speech and I was starving. Another reporter smacked it out of my hand: "That's Harry McGuirk's celery." We had an ethic. We believed in our role, however flawed and vulnerable to error our work product might at times be. So fuck the influencers, fuck the pimps who bought them, fuck their rancid whoredom, and fuck a media culture that has bypassed the gatekeepers at least trying to hold to a core ethos. The marginalization and eventual death of old-fashioned journalism and what has ensued is going to be what ends our republic. And everyone who championed some purist vision of a post-mainstream media future is now and forever, officially, a rube.