Newspaper people have enormous egos, if you get my drift, and don't mind massaging the big hairy things in public. Yet the press is hardly the sentry and bulwark of society that reporters imagine it to be. I don't mean to disparage reporters who put their lives on the line to file from Iraq, nor the sleuths who sift through databases to uncover wrongdoing by pharmaceutical companies, or any other enterprising reporter. But too many journalists who wave the investigative banner merely act as the conduit for other people's probing, as George Washington University professor and former investigative journalist Mark Feldstein suggests in a paper-in-progress titled 'Ventriloquist or Dummy?'Turns out those investigative reporters are massaging government investigations and reports while simultaneously painting themselves as truth crusading investigative journalists and inferring that they are looking where the government isn't.
And downsizing at newspapers only confirms what those who run and own newspapers think of the originality of that investigative report that -- isn't.
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