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The Rise And Fall Of The TV Journalist

This is a short, and possibly unfair story of the rise and fall of the TV Journalist as a hero...

If you go back 50 years ago, television journalists were creeps. Above all, to politicians.

They followed the rule of their boss, Lord Reith: The BBC has said it is for The People; the government is for The People, so it follows that the BBC must be for the government.

With the questioning of authority in the 1960s, this began to change - but it was Watergate that transformed everything. Two journalists, Woodard and Bernstein exposed corruption at the highest levels of government, and suddenly, TV journalists realised what they had been born to do - to expose the dark heart of government, big business and bureaucracy. 

It was the start of a heroic age, in which TV journalists revealed the sinister forces that WE couldn't see that those in power wanted to hide from us.

Out of it came much great journalism; but then, an event happened that proved that despite their great confidence, the journalists didn't know everything - the Berlin Wall sudden collapsed, which was one of the biggest events of the twentieth century - and NONE of them had seen it coming....

With the end of the Cold War, the journalists were thrown into a new and terrifying world - where all the old certainties of good and bad, right and left began to blur.... in an unnerving way.

It destroyed their ability yo tell us their simple, moral fables.

So as a way out, they came up with a new theory:- they had actually been patronising and elitist when they had lectured us about corruption in high places; instead, all stories in future should reflect OUR experience.

And attempts to explain WHY things happen were abandoned.

A classic example was anew kind of investigative journalist, Donal Macintyre.

He set out to show what it was like to get mugged.

He took his mobile phone out onto the streets of Brixton; for three nights, he desperately tried to get it snatched, until finally, someone gave him his story.

And as Donal cried, we knew that he was sharing OUR pain.

But there was one final step in this transformation of journalism. We cut out the middile man: - The Jorunalist.

Now, our presenters plead with us to send in our photos and videos. They proudly present it as a new kind of open democracy. 

But in reality, it's something very different.

Because the journalists don't understand what is going on in today's complex, chaotic world, they have had to revert to their old habit of finding someone in authority who will tell them.

But this time, it's not the politicians, it's US, the audience, who they have turned to.

The only problem is that we don't have a clue what's going on; particularly as the journalists have given up on THEIR job of explaining the world to US.